It’s been a week of pleasant surprises, starting with the weather, which has continued to be bright and sunny, with clear blue skies. Indeed, in the two weeks since our arrival, we have still not seen any rain, and, on Wednesday last week, the temperature peaked at an incredible 14^oC. Our house stays naturally cool, which is a blessing in summer but less so in January, particularly since the temperature at night falls to around 0-1 ^oC. At least, during the day, when the sun climbs over the house and shines directly into the back garden, from around 11 o’clock, we have something of a suntrap.

I’ve actually been proving my bread dough outside, very successfully. (When people ask me what aspects of life in Britain I miss in Israel – and even more so in Portugal – “The airing cupboard” is my standard answer. Not only is it perfect for bread dough, it is also the ideal environment for warming pyjamas and drying bath towels between showers.)

We’ve also unexpectedly enjoyed the generosity of neighbours, although I’m not entirely sure that ‘enjoyed’ is the right word. A couple of days after we arrived, a lady who lives round the corner arrived on the doorstep with a gift of a large shopping bag full of tangerines and a few oranges. We feel obliged to include a clutch in our breakfast fruit salad, squeeze several fruits every morning for fresh juice, and grab one every time we walk past the bowl in the kitchen. Nevertheless, we were still only two-thirds of the way through emptying the bowl when I answered a knock on the door a few days later to find the same lady offering another large shopping bag full of citrus. If only I had the Portuguese, I might have plucked up the courage to say the equivalent of “That’s very kind of you but we haven’t actually worked our way through the last lot you gave us”. As it is, my Portuguese only runs to “Obrigado”, which is how we ended up with a second industrial load of citrus.

Tslil assures me that most people in the village refuse to accept these gifts, because everyone has their own citrus tree. This particular lady probably knows that we only have a small and not very prolific satsuma tree in the garden, and also knows that we are now a household of five rather than three, and so she insists on showering us with gifts.

A third large shopping bag arrived on Friday, so I’ve been googling recipes for tangerine fritters and satsuma surprise, but I now basically despair of ever reach the bottom of the bowl.

Added to this, we have our own lemon tree, which grows close enough to the house to allow fruit to be picked from the balcony leading of the kids’ bedroom as well as from the garden itself. It is currently full of fruit, and so, since we arrived, I have made lemon curd and lemon ice-cream, and Tslil and Tao baked a delicious lemon cake for my birthday lunch on Shabbat. (This cake was, as Tao conspiratorially informed me a couple of days before my birthday, a surprise!)

My birthday was actually full of surprises, and not only for me. In the morning, nobody alluded to my birthday, but this was more or less what I had expected. We have developed a tradition in the family, over the decades, of ignoring birthdays until we have the time to celebrate them. So, for example, when we were working, we would wait to wish Happy Birthday and give cards and presents until we sat down to dinner together.

This Shabbat, around noon, Tslil came into the salon and said: “I haven’t wished you Happy Birthday yet!” When Bernice heard this, she almost collapsed, because, although she assures me that she had been aware of my birthday all week, she had in fact completely forgotten on the day itself. I’m trying to comfort myself with the fact that her average over the last 50 years is still 98%, which must be a pass mark.

Fortunately, the others hadn’t forgotten, and I received a lovely card, decorated beautifully by Tao, who, Micha’el assured me, had also decided on the exact wording of the heart-warming message inside.

The greatest surprise of the week took place outside the China shop. We were, of course, unable to get through the week without a couple of visits to the China shop. On this occasion, Bernice and I had popped down to pick up a bolt for the front door, some socks for Micha’el, and a connector to attach a hose to the bidet…and thereby hangs a tale.

You may remember that, during our last visit, we arranged for the bathroom to be renovated, and, a couple of weeks after we left, the job was completed…or, to be more precise, not completed. In the time-honoured tradition of British workmen, Mark the plumber and Eric the tiler had finished the job on schedule, other than connecting said hose to the bidet tap. They assured Micha’el that they would, when next at the building supplies store 30-minutes’ drive away, buy the requisite connector, and return to complete the job.

If we had been in Portugal then, I would have paid them the balance owing, less 100 euros, which I would have held back until the job was completed. However, I didn’t feel it was fair to expect Micha’el (who was holding the money) to do my dirty work, and so I told him to pay in full. Hands up all those who are not surprised to learn that Mark the cheery plumber and Eric the jovial tiler have not returned to finish the job…..Yes, I thought so.

Which explains why we were, unsuccessfully as it happens, searching for the right connector/adaptor (3/4” to 5/8” if you’re interested) last Thursday.

When we arrived at the shop, Bernice suddenly realised that, having come out without her handbag, she had no mask with her. (It is still a legal requirement to wear masks in shops in Portugal. In this part of Portugal, a lot of people wear masks in the street as well.) You need to understand that Bernice is rather like the Queen when in Portugal, in that she goes around with no money on her. I handle all that side of things. (On the other hand, she carries the passports and, in transit, the various papers that we need to travel these days.) So, I lent Bernice my mask for her to go into the shop and look for socks. She would then have the task of explaining to the shopowner that she was going to swap with me, so that I could come in to look for the bolt and connector and to pay for everything. (I’m not sure how we thought Bernice was going to explain that, but, since they had no socks in the right size, the question was academic.)

Anyway (and here we reach the point of the story, for the benefit of those of you who were beginning to despair of ever reaching it), while Bernice was inside, I was waiting outside, unmasked, pretending to study the display of artificial flowers outside the shop window, and carefully avoiding coming too close to any other pedestrians. I suddenly heard, from the road behind me, a voice call out: “Kvod Harav!” Before I had time to register how odd it was that someone should call out to me in Hebrew, let alone elevate me to the rabbinate, I turned round to see a couple of Breslov-looking hassidim in their thirties, sitting in an orange Transit van. (This is not, to be honest, a sentence I ever expected to write.) I think they were probably a little surprised to see a kippa-wearing Jew in Penamacor, but their surprise was as nothing compared to my total astonishment at seeing hassidim in Penamacor.

They stopped to chat for a couple of minutes, during which time I discovered that they are part of a community that has just bought a sizable plot of land outside a village about 10 minutes from Penamacor. Since they were stopped in the middle of the road, they didn’t have time to furnish any further details, but I shall certainly be trying to find out a little more about them. There, as they say, goes the neighbourhood.

And that’s about it for this week. As you can see, this trip has no major projects, just a daily portion of fun and games, stories and make-believe, cooking and baking, which is, after all, what we are here for.