With a shock, we discover that, while we were looking the other way, almost two weeks of our month-long stay in Portugal have slipped past. This last week began on a real high with the day on the land that I described last week, helping to lay the cob floor in the teepee. I’m pleased to report that the good weather continued throughout the week. Although we did nothing dramatic, just being with the family has been wonderful: fitting into their routine, spending lots of time with Tao, and freeing up Tslil and Micha’el a little, allowing them to get to the land more (and sometimes even to sleep more).

My personal highlight of the week was the discovery of a children’s book which post-dates our own kids’ childhoods, and was therefore unknown to me previously. I listened as Bernice read to Tao Oi Frog, and by the end was almost helpless with laughter. I realise I am probably very late to the party (as usual), but here is a book that has total integrity. It starts with a simple idea – animals sit on something that rhymes with their names, so frogs sit on logs, cats sit on mats, and so forth. The two characters in the book are wonderfully realised: the sophisticated and urbane cat, who knows all the rules for animal sitting, and who rather scathingly patronises the eager but ignorant frog. The author accepts the challenge of finding some seating arrangements for animals with challenging names –pumas and puffins for example – and the illustrations are full of humour and imagination. Add to all this a great punchline and you have an absolute classic.

The lowlight of the week was a puncture. While they are never welcome, this one proved (and, indeed, is still proving) particularly challenging. It happened on Thursday, when we took Tao to one of his two weekly playgroup activities. This one is in a village a 30-minute drive away. We arrived to find about nine children and half-a-dozen parents waiting to start a walk along country lanes. We walked for two-and-a-half hours, including some breaks for snacks, and, on our way through the gently rolling agricultural landscape,we passed fields with ducks, goats, sheep and pigs, as well as plenty of olive trees and some figs. Even at a slow pace, that represented a good workout, particularly as we had not brought a buggy and, although Tao walked most of the way, we each took a turn at carrying him at various times. Bernice was further burdened by the pocketfuls of acorns that Tao insisted on collecting.

We headed for home around 1:15 and, just after filling the car with diesel, as we reached 80kph, I suddenly noticed a flapping noise. I stopped on a convenient grass verge, at first wondering whether the petrol flap had not been replaced properly. However, when I walked round the passenger side of the car, I saw that the front tyre was completely flat. Remarkably, I had felt no juddering or pulling on the steering wheel: the wonders of modern technology.

I really did not relish changing a tyre on a fast country road (or, indeed, at all), and so I called the car rental office in Lisbon, and, within four minutes, I had been answered by a customer rep who spoke English, and had explained to him what had happened, and exactly what our location was. He said that he would send a tow truck, although I had expected a service van, and that it should be with us in 40 minutes. I was very impressed.

[A brief aside about customer-facing staff speaking English. On the phone, even though I have selected the ‘English’ option, the rep always greets me in Portuguese. I always then say: ‘Do you speak English?’, and the answer is always ‘A little’. I then usually find that the rep’s English is either excellent or more than adequate for the needs of our transaction.]

Bernice and I decided that, since we were only 7 kilometres from home, we would phone Micha’el and ask him to come and pick up Tao, who had slept through the entire incident. After that, we waited, and waited. I was a little less impressed. About an hour after my first phone call, I received a call from the tow-truck driver, who addressed me in Portuguese. ‘Do you speak English?’ Clearly, the answer was ‘No’. He then asked me for our location, which was aggravating, because I had, of course, given our exact location to the English-speaking customer rep. I was a little more less impressed. We managed to agree (as far as I could tell) on the road number and our location relative to Penamacor.

While we waited, again, Bernice sensibly suggested that I send the driver’s phone number to Micha’el and ask him to phone the driver to ensure he had understood our location. This Micha’el did and, 15 minutes later, the tow truck (actually a single-car transporter) arrived. The driver had clearly been expecting to arrive at the scene of an accident and, when I showed him the punctured tyre, he said ‘Problemo’. He was not prepared to change the tyre on the road, and said that he would load our car and drive us to Penamacor, to replace the tyre. However, he could only take one of us in the cab with him, so we had to call Micha’el out again. (In fairness, the original service rep had asked how many people were in the car and, thinking that Bernice would go home with Micha’el and Tao, I had said ‘One’. However, Bernice didn’t want me to wait indefinitely by myself, so we were two.)

When Micha’el arrived, it occurred to me to ask him to clarify with the driver whether I was expected to pay for the new tyre and be reimbursed, or whether the rental car company – which was, after all, Europcar, and not some fly-by-night cowboy – had an arrangement with a chain of tyre repair centres throughout Portugal. The driver (who works for a contracted haulage company, rather than directly for Europcar) knew of no such arrangement. I was starting to be rather unimpressed.

In the end, the driver took the car to the large parking area of the petrol station in Penamacor, changed the wheel for the temporary (80kph maximum) spare, got me to sign a couple of forms, and left. I phoned Europcar in Lisbon, and asked where I could take the car to have a new tyre fitted. The rep told me that I had a choice of bringing the car to Lisbon (270 km) or Porto (280 km). This was the point at which I became very unimpressed. ‘Do you honestly expect me to drive for 4 hours, at not more than 80kph, on a temporary tyre, and then for 3 hours back? That is not an acceptable solution. Do you not have a service centre closer?’

The rep promised to find out and asked me to hold. After a few minutes, he returned to say that I could take the car to Fundao (35 km) or Castelo Branco (50 km), where they would try to sort out the problem. I called the Fundao office and spoke to a rep (who, I suspect, may be the only person staffing the Fundao office) who clearly had little idea what to do with our problem. Determined not to despair, I called the Castelo office, where the rep said that, if I brought in the car the next day, the mechanic would look at the tyre, and repair it if he could. (Since the tyre has a six-inch gash in it, I knew that would not be an option.) If it proved irreparable, the office would exchange the car. ‘For a car of the same size?’. The rep could not guarantee this, and I felt sure that we would end up being given a much larger car which would use more petrol and would be much more challenging to drive and park on the country roads around here.

When I came off the phone, Tslil pointed out that the Israeli solution would be not to notify Europcar at all and to get the tyre replaced privately. In the end, that is what we decided to do.

So, the following morning (Friday), Bernice and I took the car (and Tao) to Penamacor’s tyre repair centre. Micha’el pre-armed me with the necessary vocabulary: to change = trocar, tyre = pneo (which is a sound not entirely dissimilar to Jack Lemmon clearing his sinuses in The Odd Couple). We found the place easily, even though we had never noticed it before, despite driving past its entrance every time we enter or leave the village. I parked and walked over to the owner-mechanic. ‘Bom dias! Trocar…pneo.’ Not for the first time, I realised too late the drawback of arming yourself with the two initial words you need: once you have fired them off, you are utterly defenceless. Understanding nothing of his response, I was forced to ask: ‘Do you speak English?’ ‘A little.’

In fact, his English was excellent. He was able to explain that he did not have the Bridgestone tyre we needed in stock, and he was not prepared to fit one tyre of another make, because we would not pass the MOT test if he did. I explained that the car was a rental and I couldn’t care less about the test, but he was still not prepared to fit another tyre, for safety reasons. Fair enough. He suggested that we try the nearest large tyre centre, in Fundao. I asked whether he could possibly phone to check whether they had a tyre in stock. He then asked where we were staying, and when I told him we were in Penamacor, he suggested that he try to get the tyre we needed himself. I told him that was an excellent idea. He took my phone number and said he would phone when he had the tyre. ‘How long will that be?’ I asked, expected him to say: ‘A week’. Instead, he said: ‘An hour or two’, which should have made us suspicious, but didn’t.

He phoned me an hour later to say that he had located a tyre, and I said I would drive straight down. That, of course, was when he explained that locating and taking delivery of a tyre are two different things. You will not, at this stage, be surprised to hear that we are still waiting for his phone call to tell me that he has received the tyre.

Once he has changed the tyre, and we have paid, I will then have to start the process of complaining to Europcar about their appalling service, and requesting a full refund for the tyre. And we all know how that will end, don’t we?

None of which is actually spoiling the wonderful time we are having here. We are very grateful that the whole tyre incident did not result in anything worse than a few hours’ inconvenience and some damage to the pocket, especially since we were carrying such a precious cargo.