Let me start by making myself very clear. Unfortunately, I have a couple of friends who have serious health issues, and I know that in comparison with the challenges they face, any health issues I have are trivial. So, I am well aware that what I’m writing here is very subjective, but, hell, this is my blog, and if I can’t indulge in a bit of angst here then what’s it all for?!

We moved to Ma’ale Adumim in 1996, and until around 2000 I had no idea what our family doctor looked like. Now, of course, we are old friends, and I have spent many long and mostly happy hours in his surgery reviewing my many, but, I stress, largely minor, ills.

Last week I made an appointment to see him, because I needed a number of referrals for regular check-ups with specialists, and I also had to review and renew my prescriptions. I hadn’t anticipated an 80-minute session, but that’s what it turned out to be, including a WhatsApp consultation with my cardiologist to discuss a change of medication.

A brief aside to say that we have what may well be the best family doctor in Israel, and I still find it amazing that when he sends an ECG printout by WhatsApp to my cardiologist, he gets a reply within ten minutes and the issue is resolved on the spot.

I was, understandably, feeling a little depressed that covering all of my various complaints and ailments had taken almost an hour and a half. However, it was heartening to hear my doctor jokingly expressing to me his disappointment that I had brought to his table nothing particularly interesting, and then assuring me that he would much rather be bored by my list than confronted by something more stimulating but also much more worrying.

Armed with multiple referrals, I made an appointment for the following day for the pharmacy in our local health fund clinic. Arriving 10 minutes before my appointment, I had enough time to trade in all of my referrals for the corresponding commitment-to-pay forms from the clinic secretary, before collecting my meds.

Depending on which pharmacist is on duty, and what the stock situation is in the pharmacy, I can sometimes persuade them to give me three months’ supply of my meds. This day I was lucky, and the pharmacist was happy to give me three packets of each of my meds. As I was about halfway through packing them into the plastic bag supplied, the pharmacist said: ‘Hold on! I’ll get you a bigger bag’ and returned with a medium size carrier bag.

Yes, folks, I have turned into the person I used to resent as I stood behind him in the queue at the pharmacist. To make matters worse, one of my medications is included in the basket of fully subsidised medications only for patients who score high enough on one of those nightmare-inducing scales to assess your likelihood of suffering a stroke. I am, of course, delighted that my score does not qualify me for full exemption; I have to pay half the cost of the medication, What this meant, on this occasion, was that, when the pharmacist confirmed that I wanted to pay by debiting my account, he wondered whether I wanted to split the payment over two months.

With perfect timing, as I was writing that last paragraph I received a call from a representative of the Health Ministry. It is just over a year since my second hip replacement, and she had a number of questions about the success of the operation and my general health. Having publicly declared that the operation was a total success, I am in no pain, and I am suffering from none of her long catalogue of illnesses, I feel much better, so let’s talk about something a bit more upbeat.

For you, the transition from the last paragraph to this was seamless. I, on the other hand, have spent twenty minutes trying to think what there is upbeat to write about. It’s by no means clear that the acrimonious dispute over teachers’ pay and conditions that is a regular feature of late August in Israel will be resolved in time to save the start of the school year; it appears that the disastrous so-called nuclear deal with Iran, on the other hand, will be signed; no end to the Russia-Ukraine war seems even on the horizon. Thank goodness for the cricket, is all I can say (and even that needs to be cherry-picked)!

I can at least recommend an astonishing novel to you: Claire North’s The Fist Fifteen Lives of Harry August. It is a science fiction novel, but in the same way that John le Carre’s novels are espionage novels: in other words, the author has chosen a science fiction premise as a framework for exploring serious questions about the human condition. Without giving too much away, the premise is that we all live our life over and over; every time we die, we are born again into exactly the same circumstances as exactly the same person, with no memory of our previous lives. However, certain people have perfect memory, and in each life they are able to build on the experience of their previous lives.

North brilliantly explores the possible consequences of that premise, for the individual, for the community of those who remember, and for humanity as a whole. Her novel is an exploration of human nature and character, a philosophical treatise on the nature and meaning of life, a chilling thriller, and an exploration of human relationships. It also features a central narrator in whose company it is a real pleasure to while away several hours. Bernice and I have reached the point where we are reading shorter and shorter sections every day, because we really want to relish every nuance.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going downstairs to administer today’s carefully measured dose of Harry August.

I’ll leave you with two phots from Portugal, taken just before we left a couple of weeks ago. From here on out, I’ll be relying on Micha’el to supply me with up-to-date photos.

On the last Thursday before we returned home from Penamacor, I took myself off for an hour or two and finally made it to a place I had been planning to visit since reading about it in Penamacor’s municipal quarterly magazine, at the end of our previous visit in March.

Two-and-a-half years ago, I devoted a post to Ribeiro Sanches, Penamacor’s most celebrated son, born to a couple of conversos at the very end of the 17^th Century, who went on to become a prominent physician and a genuine son of the Enlightenment. Fairly early in his career he felt uncomfortable in post-expulsion Portugal and subsequently travelled extensively through Europe and wrote on topics ranging from venereal disease to the theory of education and from the climatic effect of  the Lisbon earthquake to jurisprudence.

In a later post, I wrote about looking for the site of his childhood home in Penamacor. “However, when I arrived at the exact spot, I saw, rather than a centuries-old structure, what looked more like an airport warehouse. I walked all the way round it, and found only one door and no windows.

“As I was wondering whether I might have mistaken the location, I took a closer look at the door and noticed the unusual design of the very large doorknob. Clearly, there is an interesting story here, which I hope to find out more about on our next visit (whenever that turns out to be).”

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I revisited the site and started to get to the very bottom of that story.

Next to the ‘warehouse’ was another building, clearly recently renovated, which turned out to be (deep breath, and, ideally, a drumroll) Casa da Memória da Medicina Sefardita António Ribeiro Sanches (The António Ribeiro Sanches House Commemorating Sephardic Medicine). Built on the site of Ribeiro Sanches’ house, this museum, which opened last December, is devoted to both Portugal’s Sephardic medical heritage in general, and Ribeiro Sanches’ life in particular.

My visit to the museum started inauspiciously. I had expected to be the only visitor. However, as I walked through the village, I saw a number of groups of children, all wearing the same baseball caps; I soon realised that they were three different age groups of children attending a municipal summer day-camp program. As my walk progressed, I realised, with a sinking feeling, that they all seemed to be heading in the same direction as me. Sure enough, I arrived at the museum two minutes after 25 fairly well-behaved but still quite noisy children. Fortunately, after hearing a brief lecture and watching a short film, they all left, and I was able to continue my tour in blissful isolation.

The museum is purely expository, and includes no actual relics, other than a copy of Ribeiro Sanches’ most famous book. However, it contains an impressive body of information, displayed fairly drily but visually attractively. Interestingly, all of the texts are displayed in Portuguese and English (in a translation that is mostly fairly good but occasionally poor-to-average).

You may also notice the boy in a kippa just turning the corner. He is one of the sons of an Israeli family that have bought land outside Penamacor that they plan to farm and on which they are building a family home. Meanwhile, they are renting a house in the village.

This selection is introduced as ‘The Sephardi Diaspora’ and a feature wall offers the quote “To the Portuguese Jews, who had nothing left but the exile.”

A plaque opposite the wall of names that I mentioned earlier draws attention to the large number of “doctors, physicians, surgeons and chemists of Moses Law that soon emerge from a society that is mainly Christian, where discrimination of minorities always existed and where intolerance assumed a growing burden, from segregation to persecution, culminating in prison, torture and death, ordered by the Holy Office.”

Here I found the answer to the question that had been intriguing me. I had been wondering how, if at all, a museum celebrating the Portuguese Jewish contribution to medicine would address the official persecution of Portuguese Jewry, the Inquisition and the Expulsion. Clearly, this would not be the central theme of the museum. At the same time, there is no question that Penamacor’s most famous son would not be as famous as he is were it not for the fact that he felt so unwelcome in his own country that he left it for a more tolerant greater Europe, in which he flourished.

Last week, I found a quotation that I have been unable to locate again. I believe it was attributed to the actor Wendell Pierce, but I am not certain.

Culture [is] that intersection between the events of life itself and how a people deals with it.

Part of the interest of this museum for me is the insight it offers into how the Portuguese are dealing with particular events of Portuguese history. Ana Mendes Godinho, Portugal’s secretary of state for tourism, has stated that: “Our history is completely bonded to Jewish history. Now is the moment to take down walls [of anti-Semitism built by the Inquisition]. Today we say ‘every Portuguese has a Jewish bone in their body’.”

Gabriel Steinhardt, president of Lisbon Jewish Community, has stated that visitors can feel safe wearing a kipa or a magen David in Lisbon, and that it is not uncommon to be approached on the street by a Portuguese citizen who says, for example, that his grandmother still lights candles on Friday nights. Unlike other European capitals, in Portugal, “you can walk in the street as a proud Jew.”

A plaque at the entrance to the museum gives further insight into the possible motivation behind the museum. It states that the museum, funded with the support of a European Economic Association (EEA) grant, is part of the Portuguese Network of Jewish Quarters. According to an official European culture website “Established in 2011, this is the public association gathering places of historic and current Jewish communities in Portugal. It aims to act jointly to defend urban, architectural, environmental, historical and cultural heritage in connection with Jewish heritage, by combining the recovery of history and heritage with the promotion of tourism.”

My observations are, necessarily, very marginal, and it may be dangerous for me to draw any broad conclusions, but it seems to me that at least a significant part of the motivation for this embracing of Portugal’s Jewish history is economic, driven by a desire to boost tourism.

Which leaves only one unresolved mystery – the windowless, anonymous, Magen-David doorknobbed ‘warehouse’ next door.

Online research reveals that it is part of the same project and is (very deep breath and a drumroll and cymbal clash) a small synagogue. Yes, dear reader, it’s the story of my life. As always, I find myself living at the other side of town and a steep hill away from the shul.

Ever since reading this fact, I have tried to understand the purpose of the synagogue. Here is what Penamacor’s mayor has to say: “[The] combination [of museum and synagogue] preserves the identity and cultural heritage and should also provide significant ‘added value’ in terms of promotion and tourist attraction. Casa Ribeiro Sanches will be another great piece from the point of view of cultural attractiveness for Penamacor”. He further stresses that anyone who wants to get to know the Network of Jewish Quarters in Portugal can now start their journey through Penamacor.

Exactly who is envisaged as using the synagogue (which is not a reconstruction or replica, as far as I can ascertain), and for what purpose, is not clear to me. Obviously, this is a field for further research on my next trip.

Meanwhile, up in Zichron, Raphael has been catching up on his reading while waiting for us to visit him.

Despite my best intentions to put this post to bed last Friday, I find myself writing it, on Monday, from more or less the same position in which I was writing 36 days ago, with one crucial difference; this time I am facing in the opposite direction. I say more or less, because I can’t be absolutely certain of my precise location then, or, indeed, now. However, in both cases, the Spanish Mediterranean coast is just visible below me; five weeks ago, it was racing towards us; today, it is receding behind us.

This means that it is time for Bernice to leave one worry behind, and embrace another. Having started the day (at 3:30 AM) worrying that offline Google Maps would let us down (it didn’t) and we would drive aimlessly for hours around the Valverde del Fresno (we didn’t, although when we eventually passed a sign to Spain we were both much relieved), she then graduated to concern that however far we progressed through the vast open spaces of Madrid Airport, the signs still seemed to tell us that Area S, and our departure gate, were 17 minutes away. (We did get there eventually.) All of this was, of course, a mere prelude to the big one – the fear, as we gathered speed down the runway,  that we would crash immediately after take-off. (We didn’t.) I’ve decided not to tell her that we are now over the Mediterranean, because her fear of drowning is almost as great as her fear of being destroyed in the impact of a Boeing 737 hitting solid ground at 200mph. (At the time of writing, the plane shows no signs of crahing imminently, but I’ll keep you posted…or not, as the case may be.)*

It seems like an age since we left home, and our week in Madrid is little more than a distant memory. At the same time, the four weeks in Penamacor seem to have flown by. In one sense, the month there did not really contain much in the way of highlights. In another sense, being able to be part of the daily routine of the kids, and especisally of Tao and Ollie, is all the highlights we need. The intensity with which Tao fills every day with purposeful and imaginative play, the way he soaks up and files away every eperience, exercising his constantly enquiring mind and becoming more of a genuine conversationalist even in the four weeks we were there, are all wonderful to see. And if four weeks is a long time in the life of a three-year-old, then our being with Ollie on a daily basis for 28 of his (to date) 35 days has been a miracle. Speaking personally, having Ollie reward my grandfatherly nonsense prattle with a beaming smile, and even, in the last couple of days, a chuckle, is right up there with visiting Niagara Falls, even if, occasionally, it proved almost as damp an experience.

I thought I would share with you this week a couple of reflections on Penamacor culture, of various brow heights. Let me begin with the culture of the street.

At the beginning of last week, an older woman who lives up the street knocked at the door (or, more accurately, shouted through the open window) with a bag containing about two kilo of large tomatoes, freshly picked from her smallholding. There are, apparently, a few neighbours who share their bounty in this way. Tslil reckons that she and Micha’el are favoured because they are newcomers, with two young and adored children, and also because they do not yet harvest their own crops, and therefore are much less likely to refuse to accept the proferred gifts.

We hadn’t yet managed to finish the tomatoes before another bag appeared in the middle of the week. When a third bag arrived on Friday, Bernice felt compelled to make Micha’el favourite soup – gazpacho – for Shabbat. It was delicious, a reflection of both the full flavour and freshness of the fruit and Bernice’s skill as a cook.

Speaking of open windows (as I was two paragraphs ago) it is interesting that the kids’ house was the only one in the street, and probably the only one in the village, with unshuttered windows. Throughout our stay, with temperatures averaging a daily high of 36, the entire village was shuttered against the sun. We also realised, for the first time, that the small houses immediately opposite ours have no garden. We had realised, of course, that their front doors, like ours, opened onto the street, and that they were terraced (town) houses. We had not realised that they shared a party wall with the houses behind them, the houses aliong the next street parallel to ours. These houses, then, have one window in the front, and are attached on all three remaining sides. I imagine they have one open-plan living room and kitchen downstairs, and just one bedroom upstairs. Unless they have a frosted glass panel in the front door, their hallway (and bathroom) can no natural light at all.

Out for a walk one day last week, Bernice and I took a different route back to the house: one that, while a little more circuitous, has the advantage for us that it can be tackled fairly comfortably without crampons and oxygen masks. This walk unexpectedly took us past the municipal library, which Tslil had mentioned, praising particularly the children’s section. I suggested to Bernice that we look around. What a discovery!

What first struck us was the excellent air-conditioning. The library, like so much of the municipal development in Penamacor, has clearly benefited from EU funding. It is housed in what was probably originally a very grand house (by Penamacor standards) or business premises. Rather than one large open space, it is spread through a number of rooms, each of which is 6–8 metres square. The décor, fixtures and fittings, as well as much of the stock ofbooks and CDs, all seemed very new. We strolled through a well-stocked reference library, an inviting children’s room, and a couple of rooms of general books for borrowing.

We then came to a room of books in languages other than Portuguese, with small sections devoted to French, Spanish, Italian and German, and an entire wall, floor-to-ceiling, of books in English. From the appearance and range of the books, it seems that the library has been stocked with contributions from the private shelves of English readers, with a fine sprinkling of books rescued from the discarded stock of a British Council Library in one of the big cities. As always in such a situation, this made for an eclectic mix, with Stephen King and John le Carré in one corner, Robert Nye’s ‘biography of Falstaff and a collection of Edmund Spenser’s verse in another, and Germaine Greer and Anais Nin in yet another.

Since we made this discovery only a couple of days before our departure, we didn’t borrow any books. However, when we next visit, I plan to enquire whether our status as local householders and payers of municipal taxes makes us eligible for tickets. If not, Tslil has invited us to use her ticket, which entitles her to borrow three books at a time.

This week, in honour of our visit’s imminent end, Tslil suggested a family photo. This seems like the perfect opportunity to make the switch from offering you a photo of all three grandsons every week to rotating between them. This will also take some of the pressure off Micha’el and Tslil who, in addition to adusting to life with two young boys (and a still quite young girl, if you count the dog, Lua, who refused to join the photo) have also had to put up with me nagging them every week for a photo. In addition, for the three months a year that we hope to be in Penamacor, it will likewise take pressure off Esther.

*The promised update. We arrived home, safe and sound and on time, as did both of our suitcases.

It began, for me, on Wednesday, during my weekly Zoom chat with my brother, Martin. He started by remarking on how another week had whizzed past, which I thought slightly strange, since we normally speak on Thursday or Friday, and this was only Wednesday.

During the call, I told him how I had spent the best part of two days during the week in bed with a stomach virus. As I was speaking, I was trying to work out whether that had started on Monday – but I didn’t think it had started that early in the week – or Tuesday – but that made no sense because it would mean that today was the second day, and I was no longer ill. In the end I gave up, and pushed the confusion to the back of my mind, since it didn’t seem to make much difference in the larger scheme of things.

The following morning (Thursday), I woke around 6:30, as usual, and, before going downstairs, opened my bedside table drawer to fish out that day’s tablets to take downstairs. I was surprised to discover that I appeared to have only two days of tablets filled in my daily dispensers. This was odd, since I always refill with a week’s supply on Sunday morning. “Oh well,” I thought, “I must have done it on Shabbat morning last week by mistake.”

Checking my email before going downstairs, I discovered, to my surprise, a notification email with a link to my friend Ron’s weekly blog. My surprise was because Ron always posts on Friday. Following the link, I started to read, curious to discover why he was posting early this week.

Yes, folks, even then the penny didn’t drop. My ingenious brain was perfectly happy reorganizing everyone and everything around me to accommodate the false conclusion it had come to. It was only when I had read the entire blog, and discovered that Ron was not having any truck with my internal calendar, making no reference whatsoever to early publication, that I reviewed all of the evidence of the previous 24 hours objectively, and realized my mistake. Martin and I had Zoomed on Thursday; I had filled my tablet dispenser on Sunday; I had been ill on Tuesday and Wednesday, Ron had posted on Friday as always, and I had better get going because there was challah to bake.

With mounting horror I realised that I had lost a day, which made me not quite as hopeless a case as Ray Milland, who, in 1945, lost an entire weekend. Actually,  he lost five days, which, even by post-Covid four-day working week Western standards, is quite some weekend!) For those unfamiliar with The Lost Weekend, it was the winner of four Oscars (and what a quartet: Best Picture, Best Leading Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay) and perhaps the least likely winner in Oscar history, being almost unrelentingly bleak in its portrayal of a man struggling against alcoholism. It was also one of only two films to win Best Picture at both the Oscars and Cannes.

If you haven’t seen the film, it comes recommended by almost everyone – other than, predictably, the American liquor-producing industry. It afforded Ray Milland what was, at the time, a rare opportunity to show that he was more than a rom-com lead actor. You can get a taste of the film from the official trailer, although, as ever, any nuance and subtlety seem to have been edited out for the trailer, in favour of bludgeoning over the head with a blunt voiceover. Not that the film itself is the most subtle treatment of the theme. Personally, my vote for greatest Hollywood treatment of alcoholism goes to another film that allowed an actor often considered primarily comic the opportunity to give a towering dramatic performance. Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick are both magnificent in Days of Wine and Roses.

So, there are two bleak, depressing recommendations, which might help to put you into something like my mood when I realised that I had lost a day, which, of course, meant that we were one day closer to leaving Penamacor and returning home.

Friday (as I had now discovered it was called) was followed by Saturday (in Portugal, they organise their days the same way we do in Israel), which was, as it happens, our 50^th wedding anniversary. When, several months ago, we looked on the calendar, and saw that August 6 fell on Tisha b‘Av (the saddest day in the Hebrew calendar), we realised that celebrating on the day was not an option. Of course, when Tisha b’Av falls on Shabbat, the fast, and all of the accompanying mourning practices, are deferred to the following day, which meant that we were unable to celebrate on Saturday night.

Around the same time, we realised that Tslil was due to give birth a month before our anniversary, and so we decided to schedule this current trip. On Shabbat, we raised a glass to ourselves, but little more. Since the Hebrew date of our anniversary falls a few days after we return from Portugal, we have postponed any celebration until later. Bernice and I agreed not to bring out gifts to give each other here (not least because we simply couldn’t spare the weight in our luggage).

I did, however, manage to give Bernice one small gift on Shabbat – my stomach virus, with the result that she spent all of Sunday in bed – most of it, thankfully, peacefully asleep. This morning (Monday) she woke up feeling completely better, which is a great relief. Very early next Monday morning we will be driving back to Madrid airport (assuming that the three changes in flight times that we have so far been updated with are the only changes), so today we have started our last seven days in Penamacor.

The weather has turned a little cooler over the last week, which is a great relief, and is due to stay unchanged this week. We have one errand in Castollo Branco to run for the kids this week, which we will probably combine with one last big supermarket shop and, possibly, lunch out. In addition, there is one site in Penamacor I would like to visit, which I might well tell you about next week, if I manage to get there.

Other than that, both Bernice and I would like to do some cooking and baking for the freezer, to give the kids a little cushion after our departure. Knowing the way time seems to slip through the fingers, even when I’m not mislaying entire days, that’s probably all we will have time for, until our next trip. By then, Ollie will undoubtedly have completely changed. He is already unrecognisable as the newborn we encountered when we arrived. Esther assures us we won’t recognise Raphael when we return to Israel either. Only Tao is changing less dramatically, although even he seems to be maturing before our eyes and ears.

One thing all three have in common is that they love stories, whether (R to L) on video, in books, or following the oral tradition.

As I am writing this, we are halfway through our four weeks in Penamacor, and, before you ask, no, we haven’t been anywhere or done anything yet other than dote on two-thirds of our grandsons and perform light household duties. (Can’t wait until Bernice reads that ‘light’.) As we never cease to explain, while Penamacor has its charms, it would not be our first choice of holiday destination, all other things being equal. However, since very few other things are equal, Penamacor is where we are, and, while the waterskiing leaves much to be desired, that’s not really what we’re here for.

Actually, it transpires that Penamacor and environs do offer a variety of attractions, particularly in the festival season, at the peak of which we appear to have arrived. Before we drove over the border from Madrid, a friend (who, clearly, does not know me at all) wrote to ask whether we would be attending the Boom festival. At the time, I had no idea what the Boom festival was. (My guess is that about 4% of you will be thinking: ‘Are you serious?’, 15% of you will be thinking: ‘No surprises there’, and the other 81% will be saying:’ What’s the Boom festival?’)

According to Wikipaedia (although I strongly suspect that anyone interested in the Boom Festival doesn’t look things up on Wikipaedia): it is ‘a transformational, multidisciplinary, psychedelic and sustainable festival that happens every two years in Portugal. Editions are in sync with the full moon. Born in 1997 in Herdade do Zambujal, Águas de Moura, Portugal as a goa trance psychedelic party, it has since then evolved into a global celebration of alternative culture.’ 41,000 people from 177 countries (third among which in number of attendees is, apparently, Israel) came this year to what is, by all accounts, a very well organised festival, with online ticket sales (sold out in 90 minutes), 21 official stages, 544 artists, 181 facilitators, 69 assistants and 100 therapists, and with art exhibitions, children’s activities and many other activities running throughout festival week. In addition, the festival has won several green festival international awards.

You can follow the link to find out more about this year’s festival.

Quite by chance, we almost crossed paths with the festival last week. The supermarket that the kids have started using since we were last here happens to be in the town – Idanha-A-Nova – on the outskirts of which the festival is held. This almost certainly explains the surprisingly large number of customers in the supermarket shopping in the organic food section and sporting a variety of tattoos and rasta hairstyles. It may also explain why this is the only supermarket in my experience whose car park features an open-air laundromat.

As if all of this excitement were not enough, the last few days have seen Penamacor come alive unexpectedly – at least, unexpectedly for us. The last week of July marks the local summer festival, promising all sorts of highlights. We became aware, on Thursday and Friday, that the village was filling up with visitors. People come for the last weekend in July from the coastal cities; some have bought second homes in the village; others have inherited their late parents’ houses, or are visiting their living parents. For the long weekend that they stay, the village takes on a new life.

Suddenly, our neighbours’ house came alive. Whenever we have visited before, it has been deserted. This weekend, two siblings and their families descended on it, in cars laden with equipment and supplies. They spent a few hours taming the back garden, and the next day barbecuing and attending the festival, before loading up their cars again and driving back to the big city this morning.

And what of the festival itself? Until today, our only direct experience of it was thumping music playing way into the small hours on Friday and Saturday night. (Fortunately for us, the open-air concerts are staged in a part of the village that the kids’ bedroom faces; in our bedroom, on the other side of the house, we could hear nothing – not that any concert half a mile away would keep either Bernice or me awake.) I must say, this seemed rather inappropriate for our sleepy corner of the country, but there is, we are beginning to notice, a younger population who, most of the time we are out and about are hidden away at work or school, and who come out just as we are crashing at what for us is the end of the day. Over the last week, we have seen many teenagers going to and from the municipal swimming pool, and playing football.

Today (Sunday) we decided to visit the festival, known as the ‘Lands of the Lynx’ fair, acknowledging that the national park a few kilometres from Penamacor is one of the natural habitats of the Iberian lynx, an endangered species. In 2015, the last known surviving wild lynx in Portugal was run over by a car. Since then, a programme of controlled release has been operating in a number of areas of Portugal, which is proving successful. There are currently over 100 animals that have been identified in the wild, consisting of 43 releases from captivity and 91 known births. Natural death, and some wild migration to Spain, has kept the net number in Portugal at a little over 100.

The fair was held in the small municipal park in the centre of the village – the Jardim da Republica – which boasts the village’s largest café, offering indoor and outdoor seating and liquid refreshment that was very welcome on a day that, when we arrived at 4:30, was nudging 39 centigrade. Around the park were arranged a number of very small marquees, each housing a display of very local produce – honey, cheeses, olive oil, sweets and liqueurs, reflecting the fact that the Portuguese have an incredibly sweet tooth. I was expecting the produce to have a very cottage kitchen home-made appearance, but in fact it was all packaged and labelled very commercially, less like an English village fair than a commercial farmer’s market.

In addition to the produce stalls there were some craft stalls, including one featuring the embroidery work that is traditional to the area (although Bernice detected that some of the items for sale were machine-embroidered, and there were some Disney characters featured there). There was also a medium-size inflatable bouncing castle (for any children who wanted to experience the equivalent of walking on red-hot coals), a face-painting stall, and a stall offering biscuits and craft work made by the children of the local forest school.

Wandering among the small crowd that had gathered were a number of costumed figures from Alice in Wonderland – the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat – and an itinerant gardener accompanied by a ballerina flower. The gardener offered to water the children from his can (a welcome relief from the heat), and encouraged them to then open out their arms and grow.

Musical entertainment was provided by a strolling guitar and vocal quartet. They were dressed inexplicably as a bumblebee, a cow, a dalmatian and a cockerel. (Inexplicably to me, at least; perhaps there is a local fairy tale about four such animals, but I rather suspect those were the costumes left in the dressing-up chest when they arrived. It is just possible that the animals reflect the source of the agricultural produce for sale, but I’d like to think that did not include any dogs.)

Just as I was beginning to feel that this was all a little inauthentic, another musical trio arrived, which proved to be the real deal, even down to the traditional costume. This was a gaita de fole (literally bellows harmonica) trio, comprising bagpipes, snare drum and bass drum, who played traditional folk tunes. Such a trio has, for many centuries (at least since the 1200s) been an indispensable part of village life, playing at weddings, fairs and religious festivals. The tradition is particularly strong in the northern regions of Portugal, bordering Spain.

Apparently, the tradition died out in the second half of the 20th Century, giving way to recorded music, and was consciously revived just before the millennium, in an effort to keep folk customs alive. It is, however, possible, that the tradition never really died out in rural enclaves such as Penamacor.

My research indicates that what we saw was the authentic Portuguese gaita de fole, made from a goatskin, with carved wooden chanters and single drone. Interestingly, the bagpiper performing here did not use the drone (which creates a continuous higher-pitched note to fill out the sound), but only played the melody on a single chanter. You can get a sense of the sound from this clip of a concert.

After we had spent about an hour and a half at the festival, we slipped away just as the sound stage was being equipped with amps for the evening’s main attraction – a performance by Augusto Canário & Amigos. Canário, I hardly need tell you, is a very popular accordionist and singer. Judging by the age of the villagers who were arriving as we left, his appeal is primarily to a more mature audience than had been the case with the previous night’s DJ, but nevertheless we decided to give it a miss. There’s only so much local colour you can soak in at one sitting, particularly when the temperature is close to 40 and you still have 152 steps to climb to get home.

I thought this week you might like to see the mothers who gave birth to our wonderful grandchildren.