IKEA comes to Flores

When I used to live in the Athens of the North, I vowed never to go back to IKEA after the time I got caught in the returns queue behind a woman who'd bought a lighting solution FUKKA by mistake and wanted to swap it for something else.

The item in question was a light bulb and it reminded me of the scene in Blackadder about potatoes which goes:-

Blackadder - "What's this?"
Baldrick - "I'm surprised you've forgotten, it's a potato"
Blackadder - "I haven't forgotten, it's a rhetorical question."
Baldrick - "Nah, it's a potato."
Blackadder - "Look! To you it's a potato, to me it's a potato! But to Sir Walter-bloody-Raleigh, it's more women than his tongue can handle."

So, to you it's a light bulb, to me it's a light bulb, but to IKEA-bloody-Home Furnishings it's an ambience option FRIGGIN-BASTAD.

It's a measure of how far we've come, then, that when we had a day to kill in Lisbon last December, did we spend it culture-vulturing round the Torre de Belem or the Mosteiro dos Jeronimos? Or get on a bus to take in the architectural delights of Sintra? Did we co-co, we got in a taxi to go to an industrial suburb called Amadora wherein resides Lisbon's IKEA.

IKEA, Amadora - visible from space

This is due to the fact that, although the best iron-monger's in the world is Avila, Fraga e Cie in Sta Cruz das Flores and Helder and his wife (I'm sorry I don't know your name!) at "the yellow shop" carry a very good stock, there's no getting away from the fact that the shopping for household items opportunities on Flores, an island of fewer than 4,000 people, are necessarily limited. Hence even I find it quite engaging spending an afternoon browsing storage solutions WANKA and dining options FARTTE.

There were two highlights of the trip. The first was the pneumatic wooden buttock in a glass case (complete with button to press like in a museum to set the mock up steam engine running) demonstrating how robust the world famous IKEA Poang chair is:-

The other highlight was the display they have of a complete mini-apartment with sleeping, living and kitchen areas and lav all crammed in to something like 30 square metres ("living option SHAGGIN-PAHD"). It was fantastic and we were really choked we had a hotel room booked because I would have liked to stay the night there and perhaps invited some people round for supper.

Now you may be thinking this is all noses up against the window for us on the basis how would we get this stuff out to Flores anyway, considering we're usually hard up against the 20kg baggage allowance of SATA (that's an Azorean airline, not an IKEA product). We did, in fact, use up the remaining 100 milligrams of our allowance by buying on the day - of all things - a doormat (shoe wiping solution SAAD). But in reality, we were on a fact finding mission because there is a way to bring IKEA to Flores.

He's called Manuel Viana, the owner of a company called SAIrei, Lda. The SAI stands for Serviço de Apoio Insular which translates as "Island Assistance Services". Manuel's business is sourcing stuff on the mainland which you can't get on the islands and sending them out to you. Thus, we got our car from Manuel (who speaks very good English). We basically e-mail him an order from IKEA and he goes and gets it and then goes to the port at Lisbon and puts it on the ship which comes out here. Also car parts - the glass of the wing mirror got cracked and, not surprisingly, these aren't kept in stock on Flores but it's no problem because you e-mail Manuel and he'll get it and send it out. His own fees are very small (although the carriage, which is out of his control, is always a consideration but that's just part and parcel of island life we have to accept).

So that's all by way of a long introduction to the fact we had an IKEA delivery from Manuel yesterday which for Carol was like opening the presents on Christmas Day

I personally can't get too excited about cushions (bottom solutions SOFTI) or towels (cleft options SKRATCHE) but as Carol so appositely points out, a wife HAAPI is a husband less GRUMPE.

How TROO.

PS, I am rather cock a hoop with my LED (=light emitting diode, not an IKEA product name) reading light you clip to the headboard of the bed. Projector c/mola JANSJO. A snip at 9,99€. I'm finding I'm remaining awake at night reading because I can due to spouse option TORN-FASE not complaining about big light BRITE remaining on.

      

Athens of the North

Brilliant line in this week's Economist:

"In the 18th century, Edinburgh’s fine architecture and its Enlightenment role earned it the nickname “Athens of the North”. It would be a shame if that name became apt again for less positive reasons."

That may need some explanation for non-British readers.

The Economist is a British weekly news magazine that believes everything from climate change to global poverty can be solved by democracy and the unrestrained application of the free market. Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland, the autonomous regional government of which is now dominated by the Scottish National Party (SNP). It wants to hold a referendum about whether Scotland should secede from the United Kingdom. The Economist is agnostic about Scottish independence except in so far as it affects the economies of Scotland and the remainder of the UK (England, Wales and Northern Ireland). Athens is the capital of Greece, a country that's economically up a certain creek without a certain instrument.

A central plank of the SNP's economic argument for Scottish independence is that the UK's oil reserves in the North Sea are all off the coast of Scotland so would become Scottish in the event of independence. The British government's riposte is that, if you're going to play at that juvenile sort of game, you can have the Royal Bank of Scotland's £187 billion worth of toxic assets we (the British government) picked up the tab for in 2008. And we'll withdraw the Royal Navy's atomic submarines from their base in Scotland leaving an unemployment blackspot that would make a nuclear winter look quite cosy by comparison.

Again for non-British readers, that's the leader of the SNP, Alex Salmond. He's got up to look like MacBeth, an 11th century king of Scotland about whom a famous English playwright, William Shakespeare, wrote a play. A scene in the play has MacBeth unable to wash his hands of the blood of his predecessor ("Out damned spot") his ambition compelled him to murder.

Back to the point, who would bank on North Sea Oil nowadays? At current oil prices, the recoverable reserves in the North Sea are almost finished while the cost of decommissioning the rigs and pipes and what have you has only just started. If all the kit isn't humanely disposed of, it will start washing ashore in Arbroath and you'll have dirty Greenpeace types setting up camp and piddling in St Andrew Square again. The economics of North Sea Oil look like this:-

As I understand it, the British government has agreed to bankroll decommissioning through tax breaks so the oil barons are frantically dragging their rusty old toot out of Scottish waters as fast as they can. It's all totally x + y = 0 unless the price of oil soars due to another "oil shock" such as Israel nuking Iran. That probably explains why you won't be able to get over to Rothesay this summer - Salmond's got the entire Caledonian MacBrayne fleet patrolling the Straits of Hormuz waiting for the balloon to go up (although doubtless there will be a disappointment when the MV Isle of Eigg's ramp doesn't fit the slipway at Bandar Abbas any more than it does at Eigg).

Mind how you go with these nukes now, Lachie!

The more serious point is that, although "Scotland's oil" has flowed into the UK's treasury, Scotland has been receiving a disproportionately high share of funding from London as a result. Do we really want to swap an annual triple-A rated cheque for the dubious privilege of a flutter on the spot markets? I don't. 

Of course Fat Eck isn't putting all his eiggs in the oil basket. Oh no! Due to Scotland having totally bogging weather, he's pinning a lot of hope on Scotland becoming "the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy". (This quote explains why the SNP has become known in certain quarters as "the House of Ibn-Salmond".) You mean all these windmills and that wave machine off Ultima Thule that keeps breaking down ...

The picture above is of a landmark in Edinburgh. I can't remember what it was supposed to be for but it was never finished and it's known as "Edinburgh's Disgrace". I do know it was modelled on the Parthenon. Be careful what you wish for ...

Farolim

If you've been tuning in recently for an update on progress with the Avenida Marginal or perhaps to hear how the first week of the Recolha Seletiva went (remarkably well!), then sorry I've been off air but it's been because I haven't had a camera to illustrate recent developments.

Anyway, I've now got a new camera - a Canon Powershot SX220 (pictured above), since you asked. It's got 14x optical zoom which is camera geek-speak for "my reproductive organ really is quite large". Though not as large as anybody with 18x optical zoom. But thank heavens I didn't let Carol persuade me to get a gay pink one (the colour being her only input) or I'd be remaining in therapy for quite a few months to come.

 Anyway, how did I get on to that? Oh yes! I was out with the new camera for the first time today and unleashed all 14x of its optical zoom (Ooh! Suits you, sir!) and took the picture below of the farolim at Fajã Grande. I thought it turned out quite well considering I was about 3 miles away from it at the time. That's an exaggeration - I was about 100 metres away but nevertheless ...

The thing is, there's a Portuguese word for a farolim (it's farolim) but not an English one. You wouldn't call it a lighthouse because a lighthouse (farol in Portuguese) is one of these:-

Skerryvore

I'm not sure what you'd call a farolim in English and I'm a nautical cove as well and generally do know things like that. I think you'd just call it a "light". I can imagine non-nautical coves (and covettes) calling them "beacons" but that's not a maritme term of art. Just like there's no such thing as a "rope" at sea, there are only warps, halyards, sheets, braces (as in "splice the main ~"), painters - want me to continue?

But how interesting that Portuguese has a word that is effectively "lighthouse-let". And if you go to the excellent Linguee website (which is an online dictionary but much better because it gives you actual bi-lingual examples of words in context), you find that farolim can also be tail-lights whereas farol is headlights (although that could be Brazilian because they tend to refer to headlights as médios here).

Anyway, for those not so interested in nautico-linguistic trivia and more interested in the Avenida Marginal or recolha seletiva, I will report thereon shortly and leave you meantime with these pictures. Because I can.

 

Wagner moment

A "Wagner moment" is what we call it at 5RdA when you momentarily confuse two very different people because they have similar names. As for example Richard Wagner (19th cent. high-brow opera composer) and Robert Wagner (1970s B-movie star).

We had a great one the other night and, not for the first time (remember Robert and John Altman?), it involved the cast of Eastenders.

 
By way of background, David Wicks has made a return to the Square after 15+ years. For actor Michael French (pictured above), it must be a welcome relief from the purgatory of "Casualty" (British equivalent of ER) to reprise the role of son of the late "Fat Pat" Evans, father of Bianca (Ricky!/Strictly) Butcher and brother of - I forget his name but he was whatsname in "Heartache".

So, we were watching Easties the other night and Carol says "Do you think from the number of times he gets mentioned, they're going to bring back David's son Joe as well? You remember, he was a bit strange. Played by Paul Nicholls."

No I didn't remember. And it was one of these moments when you don't want to open your mouth for fear of making a total prat of yourself because I was thinking Dancing with the Captain ...

Eventually, I cracked and said "Wouldn't Paul Nicholas be a bit old to play Michael French's son ...?"

Aahhhhhh! Paul Nicholls! Why didn't you say?

Not to be confused with Nick Berry

Hang your head in shame if you can (a) name another Paul Nicholls hit apart from Dancing with the Captain; and (b) kill yourself now if you remember the name of his character in "Just Good Friends"

I remembered he was a bookie and her name was Pen. Carol remebered the name of the actress (using the term in its loosest possible sense) who played her was Jan something that's a first name. She's right.

Progress resumed

Fajã Grande's Avenida Marginal sounds awfully grand but in fact it's just the dirt track which winds along the rocky shoreline. And to be honest, that's all FG needs by way of a thoroughfare along the rocky shoreline because there's not much there apart from, well, rocks.

But the Câmara Municipal thinks differently. They have a vision of doing up the Avenida Marginal so it can take its place with Cannes' La Croisette, Havana's Malecon and Nice's Promenade des Anglais amongst the great seafront boulevards of the world. These ambitions were first announced as far back as July 2009 by a billboard under the the slogan "O Progresso Continua" (Progress Continues).

The timing was in no way related to the forthcoming elections to the CM and the billboard further advised that work would be starting "brevemente" (soon). But six months later - and in no way related to the fact the incumbents of the CM had won the election in the interim - Progress had stumbled:-

That was two years ago. The remnants of the sign finally blew away in a storm in March 2010. Progress had not so much stumbled as been knee-capped and thrown down an abandoned mine shaft with its head and limbs chopped off to prevent identification. Progress was floating face down in the water. Quite like the billboard. Somewhere off Tristan da Cunha, I expect, having been dragged thither by the Humboldt Current - a force which moves with the same sort of sinuously inexorable lethargy as (but perhaps with greater predictability than?) the sluggish machinations of the Câmara Municipal das Lajes das Flores.

But Thomases of the world, doubt ye not for I can report that Progress (if not the billboard) has been fished out the water, given the kiss of life and resumed! Work on the Avenida Marginal has at last begun and bits of it are looking quite promising - particularly this rather fine drystone retaining wall along the seaward side:-

Although other parts of the project are looking a bit like the border between Israel and the West Bank:-

I assume that's going to be clad with natural stonework as well. Although "assume" is a very dangerous word to use in Portugal. We regularly find ourselves "assuming" a bit like people in London in 1940 lit lights. For us, the equivalent of "PUT THAT LIGHT OUT!" is "NEVER ASSUME!".

 
So I'll rephrase that as "I hope that's going to be clad with natural stonework." I'll keep you posted.

Sailing to the Azores

Nowadays, if you want to get to the Azores, you have to go in a boring old Airbus A320 like every other European destination.

Between them, the Portuguese national airline TAP Portugal and the Azores airline SATA have about four or five flights a day from Lisbon to three of the larger islands (Sao Miguel, Terceira and Faial). From these three, you can then fly on to any of the other six islands the same day on a SATA Bombardier Dash 8-Q400, the regional propliner of choice:-

Thus, you can get to Flores from Lisbon in less than 6 hours. But it was different 50 years ago (which, I would remind people of my age, is as recently as the 1960s) when you had to go to the Azores on a ship - slower but a lot more fun.

The shipping company was called Empresa Insulana de Navegção ("Island Shipping Company") and it served the Azores and Madeira from Lisbon in the days before mass air travel. In 1961, EIN made its last big investment in passenger ships by commissioning two new vessels.

MS Funchal - photo credit Luis Miguel Correia

The first - pictured above - was called Funchal (after the capital of Madeira). Built at the Elsinore Shipyard in Denmark and carrying 400 passengers at 20 knots (23mph/37kmh), she sailed from Lisbon to Madeira and the larger islands of the Azores. She was the equivalent of today's TAP and SATA Airbuses except the journey by sea took two days instead two hours by air nowadays.

The other new ship of 1961 was a mini version of the Funchal called Ponta Delgada (named after the capital of the Azores). Her role was to take passengers out to the smaller islands of the Azores and thus she was the equivalent of today's SATA Q400s.

That's a classic picture of the Ponta Delgada lying off Fajã Grande in the 1960s. There was no pier a ship could lie alongside at Flores before the 1990s so passengers had to be ferried out in a small launch as you can see here. (I assumed the ships lay off Santa Cruz on the east coast of Flores but perhaps they made additional calls round the island or maybe there was some reason why the PD could not call at SC that day.) The picture above is one of a very interesting series of old photos of Fajã Grande you can see on Facebook (I hope that link works but as I'm not much of Facebooker, I'm not sure.)

The Ponta Delgada alongside at Sao Jorge in the 70s - phot credit Luis Miguel Correia

Air travel gradually replaced these ships in the 70s and 80s. First to go were the Funchal's services from Lisbon which ceased in 1973. She was converted that year to a cruise liner and, in fact, is still sailing in that role, still under the Portuguese flag - a remarkable achievement for a 50 year old ship.

That picture of the view from the Funchal's bridge is from Bruce Peter's blog where you can find lots of other pictures of her. And if you fancy a cruise amongst 60s Scandinavian decor, here's the link to her owners - Classic International Cruises. It looks all very spit and polish and you get the distinct impression the captain of a CIC ship wouldn't be careless enough to bang his vessel into a bit of the scenery. And if he did, that he'd have the decency to hang around and face the music rather scarper on the first available lifeboat. (I'm at risk of digressing into stereotypical Italian cowardice but they really do ask for it, don't they? As if Berlusconi wasn't enough of a role model, they had to invent Francesco Schettino just to ram the point home.)

Which lifeboat is the captain on?

Anyway, wrenching myself back on topic (somewhat reluctantly), the Ponta Delgada's career amongst the Azores lasted longer as not all the smaller islands had airports until the 1980s.

Regular "commenter" on this blog, Marisa Perreira, is from Graciosa but as a child in the 1970s she travelled to Flores most years to spend the summer with her grandmother in Fajã Grande. As there was no airport on Graciosa until 1981, that involved a sail on the Ponta Delgada which began with being taken out to the ship in a launch as Graciosa didn't boast a pier in the 70s either.

The Ponta Delgada at Ponta Delgada - photo credit Luis Miguel Correia

In the course of a 24 hour voyage calling at São Jorge, Pico and Faial, Marisa's main memory of the Ponta Delgada is that it smelt of diesel and rocked "like a cot" - an idiom which doesn't exist in English although we know what's meant!

But at least she didn't suffer from sea-sickness like her sister who didn't emerge from the cabin for the whole voyage. Marisa used to wander off round the ship and one particular memory is of leaning in through a hatch cover on the foredeck chatting to crewmen below when the tannoy announced "If anyone has seen a curly haired little girl ..." On being reunited, her mother informed her that the crew were apt to throw naughty children overboard!

Photo credit - Luis Miguel Correia

Landing at the Porto das Poças in Santa Cruz das Flores by launch from the Ponta Delgada lying off (as the pier at Lajes hadn't yet been built), Marisa recalls that what the sea journey didn't do to her, the journey in the back of Albino's truck weaving its way across the island to Fajã Grande did! The only cure was Grandma's canjinha which in Marisa's words is "home made chicken soup with the little eggs that were still inside the chicken". (Apparently there isn't a Portuguese word for these "little eggs" and there isn't an English one either, as far as I'm aware. If anyone knows different, leave a comment.)

The bar on the Ponta Delgada - photo credit Luis Miguel Correia

The Ponta Delgada made her last leisurely sail round the Azores in October 1984. Finally rendered redundant by the relentless march of the aeroplane, she also took up a career as a cruise ship but by the late 90s her owners had gone bankrupt and she was lying abandoned at a remote quay in Lisbon, in an increasing state of decay and literally sinking fast:-

Photo credit Luis Miguel Correia

In 2008, the Lisbon Port Authority ordered the removal of the wreckage. There are lots more fascinating photographs of the Ponta Delgada - in life and death - on Luis Miguel Correia's blog .

So, today, people come to Flores on the plane and "stuff" comes on the container ship once a fortnight. In the summer, there's a rather infrequent (once a week at most) ferry service subsidised by the Azorean Government. If it were up to me, I'd sooner they spent the money on lights at the airport that would allow SATA's planes to land after dark in winter.

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.