Respect

Sorry I've been off-line for a bit but I wanted to share with you (to use a ghastly expresion used by the cumbersomely titled "Director of Business Relations and Client ... something ..." I think I've got that wrong. Maybe it was "Director of Client Management and Business ... Whatever. Who cares. It was someone at the office I used to work in. Let's start again.

I'm going to upload this photograph. (Ooh, and at the risk of digressing again, how crap is Internet Explorer these days? I've had to log out of IE and go to Firefox to do the upload, Tchoh!)

I snapped this this afternoon and what you're looking at is Jose Agusto working on his chimney stack with the aid of some very rudimentary scaffolding consisting of a couple of tree trunks and a step ladder. He explained that he needed to heighten his chimney to stop the smoke blowing back down into the house.

It made me think that awful soft handed northern European townies like us would probably suffer in silence at the smoke in the house or else phone the council or Google who we could sue about it. But not Jose Agusto - he cuts down a couple of trees, commandeers a step ladder and hoys some breeze blocks aloft and sets about rebuilding his chimney. And if it doesn't work, then he'll go up and try something else.

Respect.

I don't normally mention my neighbours by name but I make an exception for Jose Agusto as he's a very nice man who's one of these guys for whom nothing is too much trouble when it comes to helping out neighbours - a true gentleman in every sense of the word.

This is him ploughing a field opposite the house seen above. The horse is not for the tourists or some kind of retro-affectation. It's because he knows that ploughing a field as small as this is more practical with a horse than with the tractor so many of his neighbours have adopted.


I'd originally planned to write a blog entry about the interaction of researching the udal law of the seabed in Orkney with biscuits and cheese and tomateiro chutney of which I'd taken a photograph. But while downloading that photo, I came across the one of JA's chimney which I realised was a far better blog topic. But for the sake of completeness (as we lawyers say) here's the udal cheese pic (although the cheese has been eaten leaving just a chutney smudge).

It's a funny old life on Flores. But a good one.