Monthly Archives: April 2020

A Postilion Post

Posted on by

If I’m at home by myself in Israel, and there is a knock at the door, my heart sinks. ‘Oh no!’ I think. ‘Now I’m going to have to answer the door and talk to someone.’ (For those of you who don’t know, I am, much of the time, one of those people for whom lockdown has legitimised the habits developed over decades.) On the other hand, if I am at home by myself in Portugal, and there is a knock at the door, it is a completely different experience. ‘Oh no!’ I think. ‘Now I’m going to have to answer the door and be completely unable to talk to someone.’

Last November, when Bernice and I were in Portugal, one afternoon, when the kids were both out, having taken Tao (and Shir, their business partner) with them, there was a knock at the door. I contemplated hiding under the table, but the salon window is right next to the front door, and I might have already been spotted, in which case my embarrassment would have been even harder to endure than my humiliation at being unable to speak a word of Portuguese beyond ‘Hola!’ and ‘Bom dia’. (It strikes me that it is less than efficient, if you are able to express only two ideas in a language, that they should turn out to be by and large the same idea!) So, I opened the door, gave an inviting smile and a welcoming ‘Hola!’, which in my anxiety was possibly just a tad louder than necessary, and waited to be plunged into total incomprehension.

The youngish man on the other side of the doorstep was not wearing any uniform or other clothing that might give a clue as to the nature of his visit; he was not standing next to a horse pulling a milkcart, or a van with a helpful picture of a household appliance or farm produce on it. He was not dressed in an over-bright rustic shirt and carrying a wicker basket of clothes pegs. He didn’t even have a wart on his nose and a large, shiny, red and green apple in his hand. In short, he was carrying no clues beyond a glossy, multi-coloured cardboard folder. I politely waited for him to finish his first sentence, then inquired ‘English?’, with what I planned to be an apologetic wry smile, but probably looked more like a simpering grimace. Wonder of wonders! Our visitor spoke enough English for me to understand that his visit was not unconnected to electricity supply. However, he seemed to be denying that he was a representative of EDP, our electricity supplier, and, when I invited him in to read the meter, he made it clear that that was not the purpose of his visit. (This was, of course, before I knew that, in Portugal, meters are not read by the supplier at the point of consumption.) He seemed to want to offer us a deal, but I could understand no more than that.

At this point, thankfully, Shir returned. Having spent some time in South America, Shir’s Spanish is not at all bad. When he suggested ‘Espagnol?’, our visitor happily graduated to a language he was more comfortable with. Over the next few minutes, Shir was able to understand that our polyglot friend was a representative of a rival supplier, and was indeed offering us a special deal, the details of which failed to leap across the linguistic gap between his and Shir’s Spanish.

At this point, doubly thankfully, Micha’el returned, and, with his Portuguese, was able to get almost the full story, which need not concern us here. My takeaways from this experience were three.

First: Micha’el’s knowledge of Spanish (from a few months in Ecuador), combined with the Portuguese he had by then acquired (2 months after arriving in Portugal), and enhanced by his ease and confidence and complete lack of concern over the possibility of making a fool of himself, all added up to him punching way above his weight in the spoken Portuguese ring.

Second: How many door-to-door electricity salesmen in Britain, I wonder, can make themselves even partially understood in two languages other than English? Perhaps things have changed in the 33 years since we left Britain, but I bet they are still pretty thin on the ground.

Third: Unless I am happy to continue to be humiliated over my inability to hold even a fragment of a conversation in Portuguese, I really must do something about learning the language.

And did I? Well, yes and no….but on the whole: Did I heck as like! (which translates roughly as ‘No’).

I did actually start (both Bernice and I did) an online Portuguese ‘course’. However, it soon became apparent that this was little more than sets of vocabulary lists, and was not what we needed. Bernice, of course, saw this more quickly than I did, and she dropped out a week or two before I finally saw the wisdom of her ways. My only gain from this experience was that I now know the names of the days of the week, which are actually very easy for a Hebrew-speaker to grasp, but, I imagine, as confusing for others as the Hebrew days were for us when we first came on aliya. Saturday and Sunday are Sábado (from shabbat) and Domingo (the Lord’s day). However, uncharacteristically for Christian countries, Domingo, Sunday, is regarded as the first day of week, and Monday to Friday are known by the ordinal numbers 2nd to 6th. (These ordinals refer to market fairs throughout the week, and, formally, the weekdays are Segunda-feira (2nd fair) through to Sexta-feira.) So, Monday is Segunda or 2a and Friday is Sexta or 6 a, just as in Hebrew. Depressingly, I have so far found this the only easy aspect of learning Portuguese.

Having tried the online course with little success, I found myself thinking about phrasebooks, and, in particular, the Portuguese phrasebook I remembered reading about in my youth, the one that opened with the sentence My postilion has been struck by lightning. Incidentally, if, like me, you have never been quite sure how a postilion differs from a coachman, a postilion ‘drives’ the carriage by sitting on the horse, or, if there is a team of horses, the front nearside horse. The post part of his title is a reference to the fact that he drives a post horse, so-called because it is one of the horses kept at the staging posts on post-roads, to be used by stage-coaches, which exchange their horses at these staging-posts, so as to always have a fresh team. (Incidentally, did you know that the Finnish have a word – poronkusema – for the distance that a reindeer can travel before requiring a bathroom break. What I do not know is whether this is a term used generically to indicate a rough distance, in the same way as a day’s ride from here is based on an estimated average, or it is a term used in comparative tests carried out by the monthly magazine What Reindeer: Dasher achieved a 40-km poronkusema on the open road, but Rudolf could only average 32.)

My postilion has been struck by lightning. Oh, how we laughed at the absurdity of this appearing as the very first example in an English-Portuguese phrase-book! Googling this book, in the last couple of days, I have discovered that our laughter may have been hasty.

First of all, what I always understood to be a Portuguese phrase-book is, variously, cited as Hungarian, Russian, French and Dutch, an indication, at the very least, that social media have always half-borrowed, adapted and distorted, whether wilfully or carelessly. The references to this phrase begin around 1916, and appear in the magazines Punch and New Yorker (the latter example penned by James Thurber). In addition, James Michener refers to it, Dirk Bogarde adapted it for the title of his autobiography, and the poet Patricia Beer wrote a two-stanza poem inspired by it, which you can read at the bottom of this post.

The reason for all of this interest, I am sure, is that the phrase sounds to our ears completely removed from real life. Under what circumstances, we ask ourselves, would anyone ever need to use this phrase? Indeed, Linguistics Professor David Crystal coined the term postilion sentence for language which, although grammatically correct, has little or no chance of ever being useful in real life. it conveys a structural meaning, and a lexical content, but that is all.

Just a little more research, however, reveals that our amusement may well be misplaced. First of all, for the English lady or gentleman undertaking a 19th Century European grand tour, the post-coach would have been the usual means of travel, and the postilion would have been a common element of the journey. Indeed, the post-coach and its positilion might have been among the first elements of foreign life that the traveller encountered abroad.

‘All very well’, I hear you protest, ‘but how likely is it that the poor postilion would be struck by lightning?’ Well, remember that, on his horse, the postilion would have been the highest point of the party – a perfect lightning rod. Indeed, travelling across open, flat country, he might have been the highest point for miles around.

My only question is: Who are we to imagine the traveller addressing the sentence to? A coach with a postilion does not normally have a coachman as well. The postilion himself is, if not dead, then at least unlikely to be in a mood for conversation. Perhaps our traveller is sharing a coach with strangers.

Before I finish, here are two other postilion sentences, both from genuine phrasebooks:
Czech: Who is this man/woman in my bed? (Who do you imagine you would address this to?)
Spanish: My tailor is rich. (I defy you to construct a conversation where this is the next sentence you want to say.)

And finally, as promised, here is Patricia Beer’s poem:

The Postilion Has Been Struck by Lightning

He was the best postilion
I ever had. That summer in Europe
Came and went
In striding thunder-rain.
His tasselled shoulders bore up
More bad days than he could count
Till he entered his last storm in the mountains.

You to whom a postilion
Means only a cocked hat in a museum
Or a light
Anecdote, pity this one
Burnt at milord’s expense far from home
Having seen every sight
But never anyone struck by lightning.

Of Janus and Yossarian

Posted on by

We start this week with a little housekeeping. A few people mistakenly believe that it was Churchill who described England and America as ‘two countries separated by a common language’. However, most of us know that it was in fact said by George Bernard Shaw. Except, as I discovered not long ago, it wasn’t…or, rather, it does not appear in any of his writings, and there is no contemporary record of his having said it. Of course, he could easily have said it. It is an astute observation about language, wittily and pithily expressed.

Anyway, whoever shaped this aphorism, I was reminded of it last week, when one of my readers – thank you, Norma – pointed out that the word nonplussed, which I used in my blog, has two possible meanings. The first is, as I intended, surprised and confused and therefore uncertain how to react. The second (informal, North American) is not disconcerted, unperturbed. I therefore apologise to any North American readers who were Britishly nonplussed by my British use of the word.

I was excited to learn about this, because it makes nonplussed a member of a quite exclusive club that I am very fond of, all of whose members are Janus words: words that have two opposite meanings. Among my favourites are cleave – to cut apart or, conversely, to adhere; let – to permit or to forbid (as in let or hindrance); fast – moving quickly or not moving at all. And then there is that group of verbs that can mean add to or remove from: for example, dusting a bookshelf is different from dusting a cake with icing sugar; similarly, can you say definitively whether a shelled nut or a seeded grape is one with or without its shell or seed?

Enough of this! None of it has anything to do with this week’s subject, which came to me in the small hours between Friday night and Saturday morning, If you read last week’s post, you may be able to work out what comes next. Because of the restrictions of the Jewish laws of shabbat, I was unable to reach for my phone and make a note of what had come into my mind….and, sure enough, when I awoke on shabbat morning, I remembered very clearly that I had thought of something to write about, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what it was. So, here we are, waiting for it to come to back to me and, meanwhile, vamping till ready.

While we’re waiting, let me tell you about the adventure Bernice and I had when we went to the bank in Castelo Branco in November to activate the advanced features of our Portuguese debit cards, to enable online purchases. This proved to be a surprisingly complex process, involving a level of security that we weren’t really used to.

To start with, when I first opened the account, and then, on our first trip together, when Bernice became a signatory, the charming bank official, having examined and scanned our passports, explained that we had to wait for a short time, while our details were sent to Police headquarters in Lisbon, to verify our identity. While we were waiting, the official told us that this was just a formality….usually. However, he said, just recently he had submitted details, and received a phone call five minutes later instructing him to keep the customer talking and on no account to allow her to leave the bank; the police would be there in a few minutes. This woman was apparently the prime suspect in a major international fraud investigation, and police had been trying to locate her in order to arrest her. For the rest of our time at the bank, we certainly took great pains to appear as little like international master-criminals as we could, and it apparently worked. 

The next stage in this process was for us to access our account online. To do this, we used the bank official’s computer, since we needed an internet connection, data roaming on our Israeli phones was out of the question, and the bank offers no public internet. This is in contrast to Britain. When we used to stay with my late mother-in-law, who did not have internet in Britain, we would have to wander down to the High Street and stand outside the local branch of Barclays Bank, freeloading on their powerful wifi, in order to access our email. I was always sure that we looked as if we were casing the joint!

Anyway, back in Castelo Branco, to access our account, we had to key in a 6-digit code that we had provided previously. The first time this happened, I had a few moments when I thought dementia had set in. The bank official pivoted his laptop to face me, and I could see a standard 10-key dialpad – an array of three rows of three digits each, with a tenth digit alone in the centre of the fourth row – for me to key in the code. I extended my index finger and tapped the 8 (Row 3, middle key). I was shocked to see that the digit displayed in the box was not 8, but 3. I deleted it, and was about to tap the same key again, when I looked more closely, and realized at the last moment that it was a 3. Feeling slightly giddy, I checked the other keys, and saw that they all contained the wrong digits. Sensing my confusion, the official explained that every time the keypad is displayed, it generates the digits in random order, so that the 6-digit code cannot be deduced from the position of the fingers on the screen. Fiendishly clever, but unbelievably disconcerting.

The final stage was for me to activate the advanced functionalities of the debit card by entering a second code that was sent in an SMS to my phone. As I mentioned earlier, at that time Bernice and I were using our Israeli phones – we did not yet have local (Portuguese) SIMs. The SMS was, of course, generated automatically by the bank’s computer system, and this led to a Catch-22 situation that I would have found amusing if it had been happening to someone else.

Time for another digression, I think. Joseph Heller didn’t intend the title of his book to be Catch 22. Throughout the writing process it had been Catch 18. Then, a few months before the scheduled publication of Catch 22, Leon Uris’s novel Mila 18 was published. Heller’s publisher wished to avoid any confusion between the two war novels, and so the number in the title was changed to the much catchier 22. (Personally, I think that anyone who confuses Mila 18 with Catch 22 has no business reading either of them….and especially not Catch 22!)

Be that as it may, the specific Catch 22 at the bank was as follows. I waited for the SMS to arrive. After a couple of minutes, I requested it to be resent. Nothing arrived. For some reason, while we were in Portugal, neither Bernice nor I could receive, on our Israeli phones, an SMS sent from Portugal. The bank official confirmed that he had encountered this problem with some other of his Israeli customers, but, subsequently, our Israeli mobile provider was unable to offer any explanation, and seemed completely unfamiliar with the problem. We thought, at one point, that it might have something to do with our being physically at the bank. The official explained that we could, in fact, activate the cards’ full functionality at any ATM, using the code sent to us by SMS. Needless to say, even when we were outside the bank, and back in Penamacor, we still didn’t receive the SMS. However, after our return to Israel, we received other SMSs that the bank sent. But, of course, when we are in Israel, and able to receive the code by SMS, we are a five-hour flight from the nearest Portuguese ATM, and the one-time code expires after ten minutes. So we can only use the code where we can’t receive it and we can only receive it where we can’t use it. To make this a perfect impasse, for security reasons the bank’s computer system does not support changing the telephone number that was associated with the account when it was first created.

When we are next in Portugal (how gloriously optimistic When and next sound, at the time of writing), we will need to discuss with the bank whether we can close our bank account and open a new one, and associate our Portuguese mobile numbers to it. Of course, that means that we will not be able to receive in Israel any SMSs sent by the bank. Not for the first time, I hear a weary voice whispering in my ear ‘First world problems’. I know, I know.

Before we close, let me share with you a picture of Tao and Tslil planting his first birthday present, an almond tree.

And finally (you see, we got through this post even without me having anything to write about), let me briefly acknowledge the elephant in all our rooms, and sincerely wish all of you and all of yours a safe and healthy week.

Stockpiling

Posted on by

Well, there’s a topical….topic, eh? But don’t worry: I’m not going to harangue you about toilet paper or eggs. The stockpiling I am talking about is considerably more metaphorical than that. When I started writing this blog, I very quickly discovered that a) many of my best ideas came to me in the small hours, when I was lying in bed trying unsuccessfully to persuade my bladder that it really didn’t need emptying and b) many of those best ideas would, by the morning, have melted away like the snows of yesteryear (What a clumsy phrase, with its harshly sibilant ‘s’ and ‘z’ in ‘snows’ and its ridiculously excessive indulgence of ‘y’ and ‘e’ in ‘yesteryear’; how much more appropriately evanescent are the softly nasal, liquid, ‘nei…’ and ‘an…’ of ‘neiges d’antan’.)

The solution, I soon discovered, was to jot down a note on my phone. Once I had started to do this, I found myself diligently adding to it, both in real time when we were in Portugal, and while recollecting in tranquility in Israel. In very little time, I had a list of 15 or so topics; armed with this stockpile, which I have occasionally added to even in the last few weeks, I have never been at a loss for what to write about in my next post.

However, this morning, in one of the fits of obsessive-compulsive spring-cleaning that the current unpleasantness has brought out in me, I got out the metaphorical stepladder and climbed up to go through the entire list with a critical eye, stretching to retrieve those packets stuck at the back of the cupboard that were well past their sell-by date, pulling out a couple of cartons that I’d already served up at least once, seizing one or two jars that I decided I couldn’t possibly serve to a mixed audience. All of these I binned, and discovered that my stockpile had dwindled down to the literary equivalent of two tins of baked bins, a packet of stale crackers and the following (I hope slightly more appetizing) snack.

In that spirit of virtual cultural tourism that we are all, I suspect, seized by these days (before we settle down to watch The Lego Movie), let me guide you round Penamacor’s municipal museum. This is something of an anomaly, being funded not by the EU, but rather by the municipality itself. The museum was founded by the local council in 1949, with the sole and very specific initial intention of preserving Penamacor’s charter (explanation later).

After a long period of stagnation, a new director was appointed in 1982 to reform the museum. This reform has included stocktaking (you see how I’m sticking closely to this week’s theme) and dusting off the exhibits, rehousing the museum in the old Military Headquarters and carrying out extensive renovation, and finally mounting an entirely new major exhibition. The result is a museum that is a surprisingly handsome asset for the village, and that does not charge an admission fee.

The new exhibition is the first that visitors encounter when they enter the museum. It is devoted to the development of man’s measurement of time. This is a more appropriate subject for the museum than you might first think, given that the villagescape of Penamacor is dominated by the castle bell tower, and that the silence of the village is punctuated every quarter hour by the chiming of the bells in the tower’s belfry, and, on the hour, by the striking of the hours from that belfry. However, rather undermining the general thrust of the exhibit, which celebrates the accuracy of human timekeeping, the chiming on the hour of the castle bells is followed an aggravating one-and-a-half minutes later by the striking of the same hours from the main church’s belfry. Mind you, this could be viewed as testament to the message of the exhibit, since the interval between the two chimings is always an undeviating 90 seconds.

When I visited, not knowing anything of the museum’s contents, I was a little nonplussed (now there’s a word I don’t get to use anywhere near often enough) to be confronted as I rounded the first corner by a splendid photo of Big Ben by night (or rather, as the explanatory text explains, ‘the bell tower of the Palace of Westminster, which is popularly known as Big Ben, whereas Big Ben is , in fact, the 14-tonne bell‘). Anyway, this sight made me feel anchored, and I enjoyed the rest of the exhibit, which explained clockwork mechanism and traced the restoration of Penamacor’s clock towers, overseen by a renowned local horologist.

This exhibit led to a second room, a large hall divided in two by a row of potted plants. The first half of the hall houses a number of displays, behind glass. These include the development of the sword and the musket through Portuguese military history, a collection of historical coins, and a range of historical scientific instruments. In the centre of the floor space are two rather splendid 19th-Century carriages. This room served to remind me that Portugal was not always one of the poorer backwaters of Europe, but indeed enjoyed what can be regarded as a glorious, or, conversely, ignominious, history as a naval imperial power. As I walked round, I found myself humming Rule Britannia.

Incidentally, I spent many years lustily singing that anthem without once thinking about the arrogance of the lyric. Listen with me (the emphasis is mine).

When Britain first, at Heav’n’s command
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land
And guardian angels sang this strain:

Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves
Britons never shall be slaves

The nations not so blest as thee
Must, in their turn, to tyrants fall.
……

You get the idea!

The second half of this large, airy room houses a collection of Christian statuary. I must confess that I gave this only a quick glance, because I had postponed my visit to the museum until a couple of days before we were coming back to Israel, and I only had 30 minutes before closing time.

Beyond the hall is a narrow vestibule, on the long walls of which hang what I imagine were the original exhibits: Penamacor’s charter and coat of arms, and a small exhibit devoted to Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, who, as the more attentive of you will remember, is Penamacor’s most famous son. Having devoted an entire post to Ribeiro Sanches, let me talk about the charter. The legality of any city, town or village in Portugal was established, in medieval times, by the granting of a royal charter, or foral. Penamacor’s foral was granted in 1209.

This included the institution of a rather splendid coat of arms for the city (as it was then), featuring the following symbols:

Crescent – marking the Moorish conquest

Scimitar – indicating that it is a military stronghold

Key – alluding to the castle being close to the border

Balled Cord – representing a single will in the defence of the national territory

Leading off this vestibule are two further rooms. One houses a collection of everyday household furniture and tools, including a splendid loom, and the other features examples of the taxidermist’s art, in the form of the most notable of the local fauna, arranged in dioramas. I hope the photograph captures the eerie lifelessness of the exhibits. What it does not capture is the darkess of the room, lit only by the light in the dioramas. I felt as though I had walked into the tunnel of a fairground ghost train, or onto the set of a zombie film. The most prominent creature here is the Iberian lynx, which, having died out in the wild in Portugal, has been bred in captivity and is being reintroduced in many areas of its natural habitat, including the Serra da Malcata, the range of hills east of Penamacor that form a national park and nature reserve.

That concludes our tour of the Penamacor Municipal Museum. Admission is, as I stated, free of charge, but, should you wish to tip your guide, you might care to visit the kids’ latest video on their youtube channel, which features some lovely close-ups of their land and their son (who also happens to be our grandson – did I mention that?)

On the Street Where We Live…Well, Sometimes

Posted on by

I’m not really keen on using a song title from My Fair Lady. I agree that the film looks ravishing, with its Cecil Beaton costumes; Rex Harrison and Wilfrid Hyde-White are beautifully matched as Higgins and Pickering; Audrey Hepburn as Eliza manages a cockney accent that is considerably better than Dick van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins (mind you, that isn’t setting the bar very high) and Stanley Holloway is magnificent as Doolittle. The music is always worth listening to, and, in addition, the plot, much of the dialogue, and even many of the song lyrics, are extremely faithful to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, on which the musical is closely based. “And yet” (to quote from Accustomed to Her Face), there is, for me, a moment when it all falls apart in an act of outrageous treason to the story it has told. Let me explain.

At the end of the last scene in the play Pygmalion, Eliza, exasperated by Higgins’ imperious treatment of her, tells him that she will never see him again. He then asks Eliza to “order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman’s. You can choose the color.” Eliza disdainfully tells him to buy them himself and sweeps out. In a typically didactic epilogue, Shaw explains that Eliza marries Freddy. He prefaces this explanation with the following comment:

The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories. 

Perhaps it would be kindest to assume that Alan Jay Lerner did not read this sentence, because his book and screenplay display exactly the enfeebled imagination that Shaw writes about. At about 6:30 minutes into this clip from My Fair Lady, Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza comes sheepishly back to Higgins’ home, and, at about 7:15, when Higgins reverts to domineering type, Eliza simperingly gazes at him, in a cinematic moment that never fails to gast my flabber.

Okay. That’s the end of a rant that has been building in me for about 40 years, and I feel much better for it.

Turning to our home in Portugal (not so much a segue; more a tectonic shift), Tao is very much an outdoors kind of guy, which is probably a good thing, considering what his parents have in store for him. If he is upset (which is very rare), he always calms down if he is taken outside, and regularly during the day, when taking the saucepans out of the cupboard and putting them back begins to pall, or when he tires of hiding blocks under the sofa, he will ask to be taken out, either to the backyard or to the street at the front of the house. If he wants the back, then this is usually a two-centre holiday. He will almost certainly want to climb the outside metal staircase to the balcony leading off the kid’s bedroom, a climb which he takes in his stride; nevertheless, even though Tao is remarkably careful in his climbing, the climb leaves me with my heart in my mouth, since this is a fairly open staircase; I have to stay right with him, ready to grab. Bernice refuses to let him climb with her; her heart can’t take it. Tao’s reward for making it safely to the top is that he gets to test the friability of the soil in the pots on the balcony.

The second activity in this excursion is a walking tour of the flower beds that line two sides of the patio. These beds are currently home to, in order, a handsome Portuguese laurel bush, a mature lemon tree, a fairly immature loquat (shesek) tree, an aloe vera, a couple of roses, some more modest ground-cover flowers and a clementina tree.

On his walking tour, Tao, who is a very tactile child, needs to rub the leaves and petals of each of these plants; fortunately, he already understands the need to be gentle with them, and there are very few accidents.

On the other side of the patio, along the ledge of what is, in fact, the outside wall of our neighbours’ covered swimming pool, is an array of sawn-off milk cartons with various vegetables and fruits being grown from seed by Tslil. These also require a proper inspection, ocular and digital, as did the plum sapling that was a gift to Micha’el and Tslil from Esther and Ma’ayan. This tree has now been transferred to the land, and – very exciting – already has a plum showing. After a 15-minute tour, Tao is usually happy to go inside again.

At the other end of the house is the front door, and, beyond that, the street. The sounds of passing traffic aroused Tao’s attention from a young age. This is not entirely surprising: since the street is cobbled and narrow, the tyre noise from passing cars is considerable, and is trapped by the houses. Indeed, when we first arrived last October, I initially wondered whether the house was on the flight path to Lisbon airport!

Once Tao realised that the sound meant a passing car, he did not want to miss any of the action, and would ‘ask’ to be taken out, or at least to the window, to see this traffic. (It has to be said that cars are a relative rarity: we don’t exactly live on a main road.) Every Wednesday, we have the excitement of the gradual approach of what sounds like a Mr Whippy ice cream van. The chimes are, in fact, those a mobile shop, selling meat, fish, fruit, veg, and we can hear them a few streets away, 10 or 15 minutes before they reach our street.

If Tao can persuade someone (usually Bernice) to take him out to the street, then, as in the backyard, he has his set points of interest that he needs to visit. These include ‘the doll’, a life-size but very stylised, almost cubist statue of a young girl that stands on our neighbours’ porch. Next in order, continuing to walk up the street, are some lovely flowering shrubs a few houses along. And finally, the highlight of the tour: seven or eight houses down from us live a family who have a dog. The dog sleeps in a tent-like kennel outside the house-front, dines alfresco in the street, and spends the day sunning himself, often in the middle of the road.

We are very fond of him, partly, no doubt, because he looks remarkably like our dog, who died about 12 years ago, and who was a similar long-haired dachshund mix. Those of you who remember our dog must agree the similarity is striking: so much so that we actually call our Portuguese neighbour Chocky. Like our own Chocky, he is very fond of people, and, if you stop to pet him, he will go up on his hind-legs and hook his forepaws around your thigh, desperately clinging on to you and begging you not to leave. Tao loves going to see him, and we are reminded how, in Micha’el’s early years, when he and Chocky were a similar age, they were inseparable.

One day in the middle of our last trip to Portugal, when Tao and I were in the living room, we heard a sound from the street that neither of us could identify. It sounded like a fairly small power tool. When we went out to investigate, we found a municipal maintenance worker mowing the pavement. Our street, like all of the sidestreets in Penamacor, is cobbled; the cobbles cover both the roadway and the pavement; indeed, the only way to tell where the road ends and the pavement begins is to notice the very slight dip at the side of the road and incline at the start of the pavement. Between the cobbles grass grows; apparently, this grass is mown regularly with a strimmer. Tao was interested in this, but I was fascinated. I’ve never lived on a street where they mow the pavement before.

At first sight, Rua Pereira de Macedo seems a rather sleepy sidestreet, but, as you can see, it is in fact bursting with life, if you know where to look, and if there is no other action, you can always sit on your doorstep and watch the grass grow.