Election Result

The orange t-shirt lot - the Partido Social Democrata (PSD) - won both the Câmara Municipal of Lajes das Flores and the Junta da Freguesia (parish council) of Fajã Grande, the elections to both having been held simultaneously on Sunday.

The PSD are Portugal's centre right party, the equivalent of Britain's Conservative ("Tory") party. I find it hard to understand the relevance of national party politics in constituencies as tiny as the concelho of Lajes das Flores (1,500 souls) or the freguesia of Fajã Grande (pop. 225): in Britain, such small and remote units would be contested by independents (i.e. unaffiliated to any political party) but the PSD's win represents victories for the incumbents as presidente of the Câmara (João Lourenço, the owner of a builder's merchants) and the Junta (José Teodósio Fragueiro, a taxi driver).

It was about 55% of the vote in favour of the PSD as against 45% to the other lot but the truly extraordinary statistic of the election in Lajes to my mind was the turnout - 81%. You'd be lucky to get a 40-50% turnout at a local election in Britain.


As for the other lot, the Partido Socialista (the centre left party of Portugal equivalent to Britain's Labour Party), they can console themselves with the fact that they retained the Câmara of Santa Cruz das Flores and are also the party of government of the Azores and Portugal as a whole (although in a general election a few weeks ago they lost their overall majority and are now a minority government). Back to ministering to the cows for Luis the veterinário (pictured above) for now, though. Not to mentioning giving our cats their booster jabs next week - "auld claes an' parritch" as we Scots say.

I leave you with a picture of José Teodósio (in the middle, blue jeans and striped shirt - a nice man) with his PSD equipa as pictured in an election leaflet. Now I don't understand the Portuguese electoral system but you're looking at getting on for 10% of the entire adult population of FG here - are we voting for all of them? Seems to me like an awful lot of chiefs for such a small wigwam.

Obrasprazotory Update

I'm conscious I've been neglecting updating you on the various obrasprazotories going on around the island. You'll recall that obrasprazotory is a word I made up from the Portuguese words obras - "works" - and prazo - "period of time" - to signify an ongoing job which it's fun to inspect periodically to see how it's getting on.

The reason for the silence is that the various obrasprazotories I'd previously covered all tended to have an early surge of activity and then plateau a bit. Anyway, even if the graph has gone a bit flat, that's not to say there hasn't been progress so here goes:-

1. The shop/bar in Fajã Grande

With this one, I hadn't realised when it began that the job involved re-doing the interior of upstairs over the shop as well as the exterior of the whole building. Anyway, outside is about 90% complete with the remaining 10% awaiting completion of inside which is still ongoing. And now as I type this, I realise I don't have a recent picture of progress outside because I've been conscious I've been waiting for it to be finished before photographing it again. Anyway, I took this one this afternoon. It looks a bit dull but observe that it would have been very simple for Joe and Linda to have ordered up replacement UPVC windows but instead they've opted to have the wooden ones refurbished - the mouldings on the lower, unglazed panel are new in today (and, of course, haven't been painted yet). Inside the window, the lintel of the embrasure (the Portuguese have a nice easy word for "lintels of the embrasure" which is vãos) has been renewed and a couple of weeks ago you were looking at bare laths here:-

2. The church in Santa Cruz

Again, after something of a plateau phase, this is now coming on in leaps and bounds with scaffolding up on the facade and Soo-Lucino's boys painting away for all they're worth. These are the same boys who were painting at our house when S-L was doing our palheiro two years ago so I got a cheery wave as I took this picture:-

In a subsequent post(s) (as this one is at risk of getting over long), I'll bring you up to speed on the house down the road (the addition today of smart new stainless steel banisters to the new external staircase outside of which reminded me to review the obrasprazotory list), the Câmara Municipal and the GNR building in Santa Cruz (these two also being Soo-Lucino jobs so the colcha em lã - whatever it was - obviously cut the mustard) and the harbour works at Lajes. And the new museum in Fajã Grande.

Lookalike

Has anyone noticed the uncanny resemblance between France's President Nicolas Sarkozy and The Sopranos' Christopher Moltisanti played by Michael Imperioli? I wonder if by any chance they're related.

                     Chris                                             Sarko

(I think I prefer Chris' chick to the fat bloke speaking to the President.)

Flatulent Voter

I'm not so sure I'm going to vote for the orange t-shirt lot after all.

This is due to their campaign tune driving me to distraction. I know I said I preferred it marginally to the other lot's but having heard the orange t-shirt tune about 223 times today as their campaign vehicle drove endlessly up and down the street past the house, I've changed my mind.

Don't take my word for it, though - judge for yourself. The orange t-shirt tune goes "Nah, nah, nooh, nooh, nah, (etc.)" whereas the other lot's goes "Diddle-dum, diddle-dee, diddle-dum, diddle-dee (etc.)". What do you think?

Another factor to weighed in the balance is that the other lot dropped a rather splendid ball point pen into the letter box this afternoon.


So, on balance, I think I'm back to being a flatulent voter - that's a private joke around the fact that the Portuguese for "floating" is flutuante.

All the presidente's men

In turns out there are two parties contesting the forthcoming elections for presidente of the conselho of Lajes das Flores and junta da freguesia (parish council) of Fajã Grande - the orange t-shirt lot and the other lot.

The other lot are Luis the veterinario's lot referred to previously but the orange t-shirt lot's tardiness in getting going (their posters only started going up last week whereas the other lot's have been up for ages now) is made up for by the verve of their campaign.

The orange t-shirt lot also have a campaign tune which grates marginally less on the ears as it's blasted from loudspeakers mounted on pick-up trucks trundling up and down the road. In fact one lot - a completely different lot (I think) - has hi-jacked the theme tune from the West Wing. Another lot has the Russian national anthem, bizarrely enough. But I don't think it's either of our lots (orange t-shirt or other). I digress.

Anyway, the other lot have responded with a new set of campaign posters showing Luis the veterinario in a sober dark suit. I thought I had a picture of this but I don't and it's too dark now to go out and take one but, anyway, this was as nought compared with the orange t-shirt lot's electoral trump card - bribing the voters.

In the course of a particularly exuberant parade up the village street this afternoon, marching to the tune of fife and drum, they were handing out goodie bags containing the treasures pictured below:-

Now, I'm a sucker for a goodie bag and this was a quality one: not only was the bag itself functional and reusable but it contained a t-shirt (white, mysteriously), a cigarette lighter, two inflatable - er - biffing things (the kids in the parade - for it was very much a family affair - were enthusiastically biffing each other over the head with them) and - best of all - three pencils with rubbers on the end (my existing ones have worn so far down that they've begun to scratch the paper when you try and rub something out).

So that's my vote well and truly sold to the orange t-shirt lot. Unless and until the other lot hand in a goodie bag containing (at the least) a pad of small Post-It notes (the small 3 x 2cm ones, mark you, not the big ones), a magnifying glass the dimensions of a credit card and a tube of tomato purée. In that case all bets would be off.

Momento de Verdade

Computers are great when they're working but a royal pain in the jacksie when they're not so imagine my dismay the other day when I pressed the big button and nothing happened.

Because the box under the table was whirring away and making all the right noises, my amateur IT diagnostic skills led me to suspect the fault lay in the monitor so it was unplugged and whisked off to (French but English speaking) computer man in Santa Cruz. He sounded pretty upbeat about being able to repair it (unlike his reaction to the symptoms of the printer a few months ago which was "the chances are it's f***ed").

Back in Faja Grande, I called on PL, our Italian neighbour of the burning car disappointment to ask if he had a spare monitor I could borrow pro tem. PL is the sort of chap who would have a spare monitor and, sure enough, he did. A clunky old 14 inch "fat screen" one (what were these all about?) but I wasn't complaining.


Got it home and plugged it in and same problem - whirring under the table but blank screen. Urgent phone call to computer man in SC - did this suggest to him that the problem lay in the box under the table rather than two different monitors? Yes it did except his preliminary foray into the guts of my monitor suggested it had big problems as well. In short two coincidental but separate problems.

Computer man in SC, who is more of a hardware bod, reminded me of the existence of (Portuguese but also English speaking) computer man in FG who is more of a software bod - why didn't I give him a ring? Which I did and he was kind enough to call on his way home from work that evening. He did something called "uninstalling and reinstalling the VGA driver". That could be Mongolian for "looking for portents in the entrails of a sacrificial yak" for all I know but it had the desired result - whirring under the table and things visible on screen as well.

Computer man in FG was kind enough to refuse any payment for this 45 minute evening house call and the point of this post was that, as he was re-booting the computer to see if his VGA whatsname thing had worked, he said "This is the moment of truth". I asked him what the Portuguese for moment of truth is and he said it's momento de verdade - same idiom as in English. You can't always take it for granted that these idioms translate directly word for word so as well as getting my computer fixed, I got a Portuguese lesson as well. How good is that!

Apropos of nothing to do with computers or Portuguese idioms but just to get another photo into this post (as there is a limit to how many interesting computer pictures you can have), it's been raining very heavily - a chuver gatos e cães, as I would be fairly certain the Portuguese idiom is NOT (but note to self to find out what it is) - here recently and here is our neighbour's car about to be washed down the street this afternoon.

Things that make me cross #1 - the SNP

There are a lot of things that make me cross but #1 (for now) is the SNP.

For non-British readers, the SNP is the Scottish Nationalist Party, the political party which believes Scotland should become independent of the United Kingdom.

At present, Scotland has "devolution" (autonomy) within the UK so Scotland is to the UK what the Azores and Madeira are to Portugal - i.e. enhanced regional self government but with key and international matters reserved to central government in London/Lisbon.


The present administration in Scotland is led by the SNP although it's a minority government. But this has not prevented them from coming up with some pretty bonkers ideas in pursuit of gesture politics. For instance that Berwick - a town in England - should become part of Scotland on the basis that it was in Scotland until 1482. Uh huh. Or that Mary Queen of Scots' remains should be "repatriated" to Scotland. Great.

I'll be coming to MQS in due course in the history of Scotland series but, in fairness, the Berwick and MQS proposals were not mainstream SNP policy but utterances of their "loony left" - although why the utterers were not immediately expelled from the party for bringing the cause into disrepute baffles me.

But recently there have been signs that official party policy is beginning to lose the plot as well.

The headline in "the Scotsman" (newspaper) today is that the SNP would abolish the BBC in an independent Scotland and replace it with an alternative state sponsored broadcaster "specifically attuned to the needs of viewers in Scotland". These needs including - wait for it - broadcasting free Scotland's qualifying football matches for the World Cup and European Championships.

My first thought was this was mischief making by the Scotsman which is not exactly noted for its nationalist leanings. So I turned to the actual discussion document published by the Scottish (soi disant) Government and, sure enough, there it is at bullet point 11 of the Executive Summary:-

We would be able to add national events which are prioritised and broadcast on free-to-air television. For example, Scotland’s football qualifiers for the World Cup and European Championship are currently only available on satellite television, but a Government of an independent Scotland could make them available to all fans on terrestrial television.

Talk about bread and circuses!

Still, I give the SNP credit for their realism - it will only ever be Scotland's qualifiers that will be broadcast. No question of us ever getting to the finals!

The opposition parties' initial reactions were right on the money, though, and, in fact, exactly the same as my own - would this mean we don't get Eastenders and Strictly Come Dancing any more? Something for the SNP's spin-doctors to home in on at their focus groups - footie or Easties and Strictly - what would you vote for?

For f**ck's sake ...