Cansei de Ser Sexy

This was going to be a post about a Brazilian band called Cansei de Ser Sexy but already it's digressed into a rave about the crapness of our internet connection on this island.



Above is a YouTube of CSS's irritatingly catchy track "Move". You'll be able to stream that seamlessly but we here on Flores are denied that privilege. It takes about an hour to download it without it stopping to buffer every 0.5 of a second (he says not really knowing what "stream" or "buffer" actually means in any context other than tides or railways).

Apparently, it's due to our internet being beamed down from a satellite instead of through a fibre optic cable (thinner than a human hair, I gather) laid across the ocean floor. They've been talking about laying a FO cable to Flores for as long as we've lived here (nearly 6 years now) but nothing's happened. I expect laying something thinner than a human hair across hundreds of miles of ocean without breaking it is quite tricky. Although it must be possible because I watched a TV programme recently with Richard "Top Gear" Hammond on a ship which can pick up both ends of a broken FO cable and splice them back together again. Anyway, as Germany is being a bit beady about Portugal's expenditure just now (and who can blame them - I must say I have every sympathy with the Boche having to pick up the tab for southern Europe), I expect laying a FO cable to Flores has slipped down the list of priorities. Meanwhile, our satellite connection doesn't even register on the BBC's "Check Your Speed" test thingy.

So CSS vids on YouTube are an impossible dream but when you remember that people were starving to death on this island in winter within living memory (in the 1930s), it kind of puts the importance of broadband into perspective. Although I'm not sure I'd want to live without Brain of Britain and Eddie Mair on Radio 4 (said in a "I'd simply die without Mahler" tone of voice.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Cansei de Ser Sexy. We're not great music buffs but one of the Portuguese TV channels we watch heavily advertises upcoming gigs in Lisbon including Britney and Rihanna. CSS seemed very much the poor relations to these megastars but the trailed track "Move" really stuck in our heads and we were gutted when the date for the gig arrived and there were no more ads for it in the commercial breaks.

And then I got to thinking what Cansei de Ser Sexy means. Superficially, it's "Tired of being sexy" except should that not be Cansado de ser sexy? Past participle. Cansei is the simple past tense of cansar (to tire) so it seems to read "I tired (myself) of being sexy". Which surely ought to be reflexive - Cansei-me de ser sexy. Perhaps it's some Brazilian idiom which doesn't work in continental Portuguese. Perhaps I need to get a life and not dwell on it too much.

Going to the dogs ...

Going? Passed through customs at Terminal 3 The Dogs International an hour ago and now checking in at The Dogs Holiday Inn.

I'm referring to Portugal. It's not normally my style to have a go at my host country which I'm very privileged to live in - thanks for that Portugal. But I got something through the post the other day which made me think no wonder this country is broke!

It's a fixed penalty notice for the princely sum of €15 (£13) because I paid my 2008 Road Tax late. (Called Imposto Unico de Circulação (IUC) in Portugal - it's the annual tax you pay for owning a car.)

Now I don't object to paying Road Tax, especially as it's very cheap in Portugal - €52.84 (£45) for a year - compared with the UK (about £150). Nor do I even object to paying the penalty for late payment. But what I DO object to ...

 

... is the reason WHY I didn't pay the tax on time, namely, because nobody reminded me to pay it. In Britain, you get a letter a couple of weeks before which you take to the Post Office and you buy your Tax Disc - couldn't be simpler.

And the other thing about this which makes me even crosser is the fact it's taken them three and a half years to get round to sending out the penalty notice. It's not because I object to the €15, it's just the sheer and utter hopelessness of the incompetence of having left it so long!

Can you believe that it's not possible to pay monthly National Insurance Contributions by direct debit in Portugal? You have to pay at an ATM between the 1st and the 20th of the month following. How easy is that to forget to do? I'm quite an organised person where that sort of thing's concerned but when I signed up to the Segurança Social online portal thingummy recently, I consulted my conta corrente and was surprised to discover I was €1.36 in arrears. Turned out this is interest because I was a few days late paying the May 2010 instalment! Well sod them, I'm not going to pay it until someone asks me for it.

Note to Portugal - the way to get people to pay taxes (or anything else) is to make it easy for them to pay. A system like direct debit whereby they don't even have to think about it is optimal. And once you've made it easy to pay but they still don't do it, you hit them hard and fast with the penalty. It's a simple little thing called cash flow.

And you wonder why the Germans are getting a bit fed up with bankrolling Greece?

Water, water everywhere ...

... but not a drop to flush the lav with.

Today's the first day since March in 2011 I've had socks and shoes on and anything more than a T-shirt.

October is one of the nicest months on Flores with calm, clear days. It's a real Indian summer and all the plants and shrubs start to flower again until a big storm comes along in November to mark the onset of winter and trashes them (there's no other word for it) - the vines, the hibiscus, the bougainvillea - with the salmoura (salt spray). It comes as a shock every year but if anyone's "data-mining" this for climate change research purposes, it happened on the 1st November in 2011.

Jings, I've just read that previous paragraph back and it makes me sound like some kind of hippy-dippy, tree-hugging eco-warrior. Far from it - I've got a carbon footprint the size of Greece's sovereign debt and I'm quite comfortable with it. (Unlike Greece. Or Italy. Don't let me digress onto that.)

Where was I? Oh yes - yesterday's perfect storm. First one of 2011 which photo above doesn't really capture at all. Not only was the electricity off and on all day - we're used to that - BUT THE WATER WENT OFF as well.

I put that in CAPITALS because the initial reaction was any excuse not to have to do the dishes by candle light was a good thing. But that was before the dire implications became clear - when the electricity goes off you can light a candle but there's no quick fix to not being able to flush the lav.

We had a team talk "You need a pee and we've got two flushes left - is this a good use of resources?" It reminded me of "Did he fire six shots or only five? You gotta' ask yourself a question, do I feel lucky?"

"Well, do you punk?"

I'll spare you the full details of how this resource allocation scenario panned out [yes I did type that with no irony intended] and suffice to say, we found ourselves this morning around 8am gathering every receptacle in the house together. That included emptying a half drunk bottle of wine (the fact it was merely half drunk in our household is a rare enough event.) Then we drove to Ponta da Faja to fill them all from a public tap - I'd remembered from translating Pierluigi's definitive history of Flores that PdF has a different water source from Faja Grande. Before I remembered that, I'd been thinking about the mill lade to the water mill at Fajazinha. But just as I was about to strip atavistically to the waist and stride out in search of man's most basic need, I turned on the tap and it was flowing again. Phew!

Great, now I can have a nice hot shower and stick the electric kettle on for a cup of instant coffee and generally increase my carbon footprint to the size of Novaya Zemlya (and if you don't know where that is, it's easier to spot on Google Earth now the ice has melted round about it).

But it did get me thinking about composting toilets. Well not for too long as I'm not sure they'd work work very well en suite. Apparently the flies are the problem. Anyway (back in the real world), we've not yet poured away all the bottles and pans of water we assembled today. Once bitten twice shy and all that.

    Makes you think.

Distinguished visitor #2

This was as close as I got, unfortunately - the Presidential Merc swishing past our front door just before seven this evening:-

About ten minutes earlier, I'd been summoned by the "Whoop" of a police siren (American style - not a British "Nee-Naw") to be told by a Fed that I'd need to get my car off the street. This was presumably in order that the Presidential motorcade could indeed swish down the narrow streets of Fajã Grande rather than have to carefully negotiate the usual obstacles lesser mortals have to contend with on a daily basis. (As today was dia do lixo, we were having a titter earlier about the prospect of the limo crawling down the road after the Lajes falling apart bin wagon (garbage truck) and its attendant pong.)

I was down at the Balneareio earlier in the day. José Diamantino had shaved but was chain smoking with a nervous demeanour and admitted "tudo pronto - mais ou menos" (everything ready - more or less). It appeared the jantar was taking place in a marquee on the lawn (which, with the box hedges, was noticeably recently cut).

Looked like everybody was going to be seated on forms, though - no sign of any spaces for thrones. Nice weather for it as well.  

Lookalike

Surely I can't be the only one to have noticed the uncanny resemblance between aging rocker Brian May and pioneering English scientist Sir Isaac Newton. I wonder if by any chance they're related - I think we should be told.

Newton                                                           May

What's that barnet all about Brian? Isaac had an excuse. You don't.                                          

Distinguished visitor

Tomorrow, Friday 23 September 2011, Fajã Grande plays host to no less a personage than His Excellency Prof. Aníbal Cavaco Silva, the President of Portugal.



There's going to be a grande jantar (piss-up) at the balneareio hosted jointly by the presidentes of the câmaras municipais of Lajes das Flores and Santa Cruz das Flores. That requires some explanation.

First, the venue. Balneareio translates literally as "bathing facility". It can apply to the showers in a sports stadium but in FG means the bit where you swim in the sea (there being no beach as such) and more particularly the bar-restaurant there where you get your beers, ice creams and burgers on a hot summer's afternoon.

Often booked for island weddings, the Balneareio is run by a jolly chap called José Diamantino and his wife with the assistance of a team of local teenage girls. I can picture Senhora JD lining them up (inc. JD ele mesmo who will be ordered to shave for the occasion) to give them a sharp lecture on minding their Ps & Qs and telling the local lags usually to be found lined up at the bar shouting at each other that they'll need to make themselves scarce (rather like Fawlty telling the ladies they wouldn't be welcome at the Gourmet Night.)

Second, the hosts. There are, incredibly for an island of fewer than 4,000 people, two separate câmaras municipais (local authorities) on Flores - Santa Cruz (the north half of the island) and Lajes (the south half). Beaten only to the bottom spot by Corvo (pop. 400), they are respectively the third and second smallest CMs in Portugal and they don't get on with each other.

"The White House" - HQ of C.M.L (Camara Municipal das Lajes)

For a start, there's a territorial dispute. As long ago as the 18th century, worthies were sent to adjudicate but unfortunately they only fixed the boundary as being an imaginary line between the mouths of two rivers on the west and east coasts of Flores. In a pre-GPS era, that left not so much wriggle as thrashing about epileptically room as to where that line actually ran through the island's unhelpfully irregular interior.

More recently, border tensions erupted into open warfare a year or two ago when a Santa Cruz JCB was found digging sand alleged to be a few metres on the Lajes side of the DMZ. The matter was pursued to court (I'm not kidding!) and SC were mulcted in damages amounting to tens of thousands of Euros which, last I heard, had not yet been paid.

The presidente of the CM of Lajes is João Lourenço, the owner of the Flores equivalent of B&Q

That picture of JL sitting magisterially on his throne on the pier at Lajes glaring King Canute style at the waves is scanned from an edition of the Lajes Boletim Municipal which caused gales of mirth locally - had His Highness been borne aloft in his chair on the shoulders of the vereadores (councillors) from the White House down the hill to the sea, asked one wag? Presumably, the presidente of SC will be bringing his chair to the presidential jantar tomorrow - I can just picture them jostling their chairs against each other to get closer to His Excellency.

I must say, I'd been expecting the village to be swarming with Feds today, sweeping the place for security and making sure Frank's cows were safely penned in so they couldn't shite on the street and risk splattering the presidential limo. But no sign - the skies are darkening and the wind's getting up. Perhaps SATA have cancelled and the whole thing's off. I'll let you know what happens.

Incidentally - in case anyone's in any doubt about my British sense of humour - I consider it to be a GOOD THING that Frank's cows are allowed to shite on the street here. There's probably some humourless nanny state somewhere (Scotland, probably) where that sort of thing is banned. Don't get me started.

Tax demand

I received a tax demand today from Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (the UK tax authority) for the princely sum of £12.30 (14€, $18) for fiscal year 2010-11.

Money very well spent, IMO, as the "subscription fee", as it were, to be able periodically to write to UK (and Scottish soi disant) Government Departments who annoy me saying "Though resident in Portugal, I remain a UK tax payer ...". (In fact, when I first did the calculation myself, it appeared I would not be paying any UK income tax at all for 2010-11 which was a matter of some chagrin to me. I was having to console myself with the fact I pay UK VAT and excise duties on booze and petrol when I'm there in December/January each year. But in the end, I just slipped under the bar of being an income tax payer.)

Anyway, I shall be writing to HMRC tomorrow with my cheque telling they can have it with my pleasure provided they spend it on something deserving like a by-pass or an aircraft carrier but under no circumstances are they to give it to anyone to buy a community woodland with. And especially not the crowd who said on their website:

"A necessary element of land acquisition funding is the raising of a proportion of the price paid by the community itself ... It is proposed that the community contribute approximately [5%] of the acquisition cost from sources such as:
* Charitable trusts - there are a number of grant giving charitable trusts that have supported community land initiatives in the past.
* Local fundraising - this can include fundraising events (sponsored activities such as walks, swims etc.), ceilidhs, raffles, bring and buy etc.
* Private donors - many of the large community land buyouts have been assisted by sizeable donations from private individuals ..."

So, apart from the fun-run and the raft race ("Right, so we've got sixpence!"), your idea of contributing to the price yourself is not putting your hands in your own pockets but scrounging it from charities and donors?

"So all we have to do is buy a raffle ticket, yeah?"