Chafariz

On the way back up from getting the bread at Joe & Linda's recently, I was hailed by José Augusto, the vice-president of the junta de freguesia (parish council) of Faja Grande. He hoped that the works to the chafariz were not causing us any problems.

JA's enquiry was in Portuguese (not unreasonably) and I felt quite chuffed with myself that I managed to get the "I hope that the works to" and the "are not causing any problems" bits. But the key word which linked these two concepts - chafariz - eluded me totally. I was left looking at JA blankly thinking "It's nice of you to ask but I haven't a fucking clue what you're talking about, mate ..."

JA for his part was far too polite to express his utter contempt for this Gringo fuckwit who has lived in his village for the thick end of seven years and STILL doesn't know what a chafariz is. For a few ghastly moments I thought he might have been contemplating the indignity of being reduced to doing some sort of charade to demonstrate what a chafariz is. But he wisely refrained and instead the conversation just rather embarrassingly petered out and we went our respective ways with a safe and mutually comprehensible comment about the weather (Ta Bom Tempo!) instead ...

Next day, I asked Linda at the shop (born in California, ergo native English speaker) what a chafariz is. "Oh" she said "it's one of these things! You know! In the street. You know - with the water and all ...!"

The fact is there just isn't an English word for chafariz. As seen in the photos above, it's a public tap, well, fountain - all of these things. Here's the Portuguese Wikipedia entry. It the thing where people went to get water before it was piped into everyone's houses. On Flores, that was much later (1970s (?)) than anywhere in Britain. There are chafarizes on Flores with dates on them in the 1950s (don't have a picture but note to self to make a point of taking one). I can't think of a single chafariz in any town or village that I've seen anywhere in Britain.

I suppose in flat territory (like the Mississippi basin), the equivalent of a chafariz is the village pump - where the water is beneath you and has to be pumped to the surface. Flores, being a hilly kind of a place, though, means the water is generally above you and so flows down to a tap - fawcett as our American cousins would have it. Though, while we're on the subject, the Portuguese word for a tap is torneira - literally, a "turning thing". How apt.

Anyway, this is all a massive digression from highlighting (the Portuguese verb destacar comes to mind - meaning to emphasise, showcase; em destaque means the headlines or top story) the good work being done by the junta de freguesia restoring all the chafarizes around Faja Grande. Everyone's got water piped into their houses now but it's remarkable how often you see the chafarizes still being used by workmen cleaning their tools or just farmers cleaning cow shit off their boots.

The work has been done by a nice young bloke called (better not mention his name) who is a real craftsman. He's made the little - here's another example of where I'm not sure if there's an English word but in Portuguese, I think, it's placas - the bass relief decorations - by himself - i.e. he didn't buy them out of the Portuguese equivalent of Homebase. Nice one.

I think this is money better spent than on museums and sports facilities. Although I may be guilty of sentimentality. Discuss.

 
But more seriously, I couldn't help wondering how you would do a charade for a chafariz (note the relative paucity of English words just there) if ever called upon: don't scoff - two people in this village have come perilously close in recent weeks. I found myself involuntarily doing a sort of extending my nose out and downwards movement with my left hand and a twirling motion above my head with my right. And with both hands, pulling the bottom of my T-shirt out in a sort of basin/sink forming gesture. This could all get misinterpreted, though. Best confined to the privacy of one's own home and certainly not to be attempted anywhere near the gates of your local primary school. 

Of museums and sports facilities

Browsing back through the Forum Ilha das Flores, there's news of a new centro cultural - to be branded Museu - being built in Santa Cruz at a cost of €1.78m:-

Reason it caught my eye was it looks remarkably similar to the museu being built in Lajes at a cost of something not unadjacent:-

Is it just me or does that look like a Thunderbirds set?

That apart, you're probably wondering why an island of 4,000 people needs not one but TWO museus (centros culturais - whatever).

After all, it's not as if the island is not already entirely un-endowed with museums as witness below from the Camara Municipal of Lajes' website boasting of the three they already have. (There's also a fourth in Fajazinha which, though complete, has never, so far as I know, been opened to the public.)

And, of course, because we have not one but two local authorities on this island of 4,000 people, there's also the Museu das Flores in the Sao Boaventura monastery within the bailiwick of Santa Cruz das Flores:-

 
There's also the Centro de Interpretação Ambiental do Boqueirão in the old whaling factory. You can dress it up as a centro de interpretação all you like but to my mind it's still a museu. It's also the only one on this island I've ever been in. It was while I had time to kill while Braga's were doing a job on the car. You'd need a Smithsonian Institute to kill the amount of time it actually takes when Braga's bloke says "uma hora mais ou menos" but, anyway, being plunged into darkness with whales and turtles and whatnot squawking at you out of telly screens doesn't really do it for me. 

It was very slick, but for my 2,50€ a museum is not complete without a glass case containing a cutaway working model of a steam engine with lots of cranks and pistons and - most importantly of all - a button you can press to set the engine in motion.

I do, however, give the Centro de Interpretação Ambiental do Boqueirão credit for not having any examples of what we call "broken pots" - nondescript fragments of Iron Age earthenware out of which some archaeologist trying to make a career for himself has built an entire civilisation in a triumph of hope over expectation. (That's because nobody lived on Flores in the Iron Age - and the day someone discovers evidence they did is the day we leave.) 

If you can't have a steam engine in your museu, then a Boeing 707 flight deck (supra) is a good second best. In fairness, I doubt if a 707 has ever landed on Flores. If it had, it could certainly never get off again and thus would merit a centro cultural to house it in. But what does exist on this island is a typewriter ribbon cassette thingy still for sale on a shelf in a shop in Lajes (naming no names) and priced in escudos (the Portuguese currency before the Euro). I kid you not. I'm jolly tempted to buy it and present it to the new museu in Lajes (or Sta Cruz if they'll make me a better offer) as a centre piece. Because otherwise, I have a mental picture of bargain hunters fanning out across the island shaking down old ladies' houses in the hunt for bits of old toot to fill this over capacity of espacos culturais.

But if there's one thing we've got even more of on this island than museums, it's sports facilities. Thus, for example, there is currently being built in Faja Grande what the Camara Municipal is billing as the "21st century sports facility":-

This is in addition to the already existing sports facility in Lajes (which admittedly is 20th century and perhaps, therefore, no longer fit for purpose - not being a sporty type myself, I wouldn't know):-

That's as well as the indoor gym and swimming pool at Lajes which has never been finished for about 3 years now due to some contractual dispute between the Camara and the contractors:-

 
You can replicate all of that in Sta Cruz municipality in the north half of the island.

Of course, we all know what's going on here - there are EU development funds on offer to "fragile peripheral areas" to fund "cultural and sports" developments. I have a mental picture of some earnest Eurocrat imagining the back streets of Sta Cruz to be hoatching with undiscovered Ronaldos kicking tin cans around their mothers' skirts for want of a paper bag in the middle of road never mind a 21st century sports facility.

And the Camaras of Lajes and SC hoover all this dosh up to keep people in short term employment. And well done to the Camaras for being so astute to take advantage of what's on offer. It's not them I blame but Brussels for designing grant schemes for developments of dubious long term value to the island. More and more museums and sports facilities are not - to use a word very popular just now in British English - sustainable.

Given that the fibre optic cable is now underway (I believe), I don't know what I'd spend a couple of big ones of Eurodosh on in pursuit of a truly sustainable investment in Flores once I'd paid for the runway lights to be upgraded to allow night flights so as to give a far more flexible schedule, perhaps even allowing a day trip to Lisbon at least one day a week.

Note to self to think about that but I'll leave you with the observation that the new museum in Sta Cruz which provoked this post is being built on the site of - irony of ironies - a redundant football pitch!

       

Living While We're Young

I'd been going to title this post "Teenage Dreams (Adult Education)" until I remembered a blog I follow by a douce lady called Isobel who's a member of the church in Rothesay, a small town on the west coast of Scotland.

She did a post about search terms associated with links to her blog and was surprised to discover that, for some inexplicable reason "access to male showers in the military" featured highly. Any traffic's good traffic as long as it spells the name right (and isn't too rough), I say, but I reckoned "Teenage Dreams (Adult Education)" might find me cropping up in all the wrong search results were it not for the fact I'm talking about nothing so innocuous as tracks downloaded from Apple iTunes.

Yes, about 250 years after the rest of humanity, we've got into downloading tracks from iTunes.

The eponymous "Live While We're Young" is by a pre-pubescent boy band called - I've forgotten - but they won Popfactor a couple of years ago and we saw them on the tellybox at Jose Antonio's recently and Carol insisted we try and download it.

The issue about this, as ever, is the crap internet connection on this island. If we lived on an island like Great Britain, we could be living while we were young in the blink of an eye before lunchtime (although I might need a cup of tea afterwards). But out on here Flores, downloading a track is more of a struggle. Indeed such is the marital disharmony provoked ("why haven't you done it yet?"), we call it iTones.

I believe it's all to do with our internet connection being beamed down from a satellite. That sounds very space age but apparently the weather buggers it up - how very British in a corner of a foreign field! If it's cloudy (which it is quite a lot on Flores in February) you can forget it but if it turns out nice, downloading "Skyfall" might just work after the fifteenth attempt of 45 minutes before it says "download failed".

Suffice to say we've been doing the downloading off Apple thing (which you out there all take for granted) for about three weeks now and the weather has permitted us to download a grand total of twelve tracks in that time.

But today, the weather was particularly good and it allowed us to indulge in an unprecedented orgy of "Teenage Dreams" (Katy Perry, supra), suitably dampened down by a dose of "Adult Education" (Hall & Oates) administered by "My Brother Jake" (Free). I could continue in this vein but suffice to say we managed to get to "The Edge of Heaven" (Wham!) before a thunderstorm just before tea time prevented "Everything She Wants" (ditto) reaching its logical conclusion. "Same Old Scene" (Roxy Music)

 
If it's nice tomorrow, I might do "Sultans of Swing" before I go out and propagate the vine. People think it's all picking oranges on this island but there are dirtier jobs to do like getting on midnight trains to Georgia.

Lookalike

Latex Mask                                                    Berlusconi

Am I the only one to have noticed that former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi looks nothing at all like latex masks meant to look like him?

Considering he's the only person in the whole world who does actually look like a latex mask of himself, I'm surprised the latex mask barons haven't made a better fist of Berlusconi.

Actually, I think I've answered my own question here - these masks are normally a bit exaggerated to point out what a dick-head the person portrayed is. Except Berlusconi is such a colossal dick-head, the mask industry think that, if they exaggerated him, that would blow the windows out on the dick-head exaggeration Richter Scale. Hence they've actually toned him down a bit so the masks look just ordinarily risible.

Pistorius

It's an embarrassingly long time since I've written anything here but I'm breaking silence to report that we watched the Oscar Pistorius bail decision on the telly box today:-

It reminded me a lot of watching the Egyptian election result.

You're probably wondering why I made that connection. It's because SKY telly breathlessly announces that they'll be carrying it live at 11:30 GMT. At 11:29:47 GMT, you need a pee but think "I'll not go just now, don't want to miss the result". And at 12.29.47 GMT, with your bladder the size of a basketball (and television executives frantically rearranging their schedules), some beak is STILL droning on. The Pistorius judge managed to trace the history of bail back to 7th century England (not kidding) while the Egyptian election commission bloke dutifully narrated each recount demand ("in Thebes Central, there were there three spoilt papers ...").

Even worse, around 13.12 GMT, when you're at the point of serious genito-urinary damage, the beak says "Taking all of this into consideration, I have come to the conclusion that ..." and it's a damp squib like "there are no grounds for a recount in Sharm-el-Sheikh North" or "I am entitled to draw the inference that I may proceed to consider the accused's arguments on Schedule 6 which I will now express my views on ..."

As far as elections are concerned, I recommend the Egyptians follow Britain's lead in by-elections. Thus, you have a TV anchor-man, Mohammed el-Dimbleby, saying "I'm sorry Professor el-Pundit, I'm going to have to interrupt you there because we can go live now to the Tahrir Centre for the declaration ..." [takes off glasses and looks down at monitor]

[cuts live to the Tahrir Centre where some middle management official uncomfortable in the limelight stumbles through the following set-piece speech]

"... as the duly constituted returning officer for the Republic of Egypt, do hereby declare the number of votes cast for the candidates to be as follows:-

- Morsi, Mohammed (Muslim Brotherhood) - 20,000,001 votes
- bin Laden Moi?, Osama (Raving Muslim Loony Party) - 50 votes
- Hopeless, Gillian (Liberal Democrat) - 700 votes
- Beardy Bloke, Some (Egypt Out of Arab League Party) - 701 votes
- Bloke, Other (Backed by Army for Mubarak Era Business as Usual Party) - 20,000,000 votes ...

It then cuts back to the studio where Mohammed el-Dimbleby says "Quick reaction Professor el-Pundit?" which is "Lib-Dems beaten to fourth place by EGOALP - shocking!" Whereupon, el-Dimbleby smiles beatifically to camera and says "And that's about all we've got time for, next its Sue el Barker with Question of Sport. Good night!"

And as far as the South African justice system is concerned, I'd recommend they take a leaf out of 70s British TV series "Crown Court".

Is that the bloke that was in the series about an airline during the Berlin Airlift?

Remember that? It was on at lunchtime so I only ever got to see it at school holidays. The format was that the case was fictional but the jurors were members of the public. The trial ran for half an hour Monday to Friday and at the commercial break on the Friday, the stagey voice said "Join us after the break for the verdict - in the Crown Court!" That way, you had time to go for a slash and knew for certain that you'd get the result within about 13-14 minutes thereafter at most. British justice at its best!

Back to Pistorius, I'm not sure what he's guilty of but one thing I am certain about is that Warrant Officer Hilton Botha should have a TV series. You can't make him up - how could someone so royally screw up an investigation? And be under investigation himself? Makes Luther (Idris Elba - Stringer Bell in "the Wire") look like positively benign by comparison.

Still, Botha is positively magisterial compared to clown of the week, US Vice President John Biden. Did he really urge people to go out and buy a shotgun as part of a gun control campaign or was that some elaborate spoof?

The skin is white, the language is English but they're just not the same as us, the yanks, are they?

Election fever look-alike

It's election time in the Azores again.

Already? I hear you ask. Yes, and not a moment too soon because the pen I got from the orange T-shirt lot the last time round has just run out so the pen deposited in our mail box this afternoon by the turquoise pen lot (above) could not have been more timely.

I don't normally like fat chunky type pens like that with the rubbery bit to get hold of [as the actress so memorably observed to the bishop]. I can't see past a plain Bic myself, the transparent ones, not the yellow ones. But what the turquoise pen lot's pen lacks on the tactile front, it gains on the quality of writing front:-

Not at all bad. But the key test will be whether the nib will be able to sustain that quality in the longer term - that's to say until the ink is about 75% used up (which is when Bics begin to go off the boil)?  Cheap pens have a habit of going a splotchy after a disappointingly short period and showing one up for being a jotter-blotter - a most unwelcome state of affairs.

But let us not prejudge and, anyway, that's not what I was going to write about. Which was that surely I can't be the first person to have been struck by the uncanny resemblance between the turquoise pen lot's Flores candidates Paulo Rosa and some other bloke - let's zoom in below:-

other bloke                                       Rosa

 and TV gangster Tony Soprano's nephew Christopher Moltisanti and veteran British left wing politician, Tam Dalyell:-

Dalyell                                                      Moltisanti

But when I looked inside the brochure of which the scan at the top is the front cover, I was equally taken aback to find a row of pictures of people many of whom I know:-

I suppose this goes with the territory of living on an island of fewer than 4,000 people but Anselmo's the boy with the high-viz "knock me doon jacket" who wheels the steps out to the plane at the airport; Catarina works at Bragas' supermarket (gets my vote because she cuts the leaves off the cauliflower before weighing it); Tiago is our computer whiz-kid (came to the house for negligible call out charge when our modem decided not to play ball); and Stella's mother in law lives across the road from us. I think the way it works is that, if the turquoise pen lot get voted in, then only the first two or three of them get to go to the Azorean parliament but if one of them demits, then you don't have to have a by-election because you've got all the rest of them pre-elected and ready to step up, as it were.

Under the row of photos, it says "O Que Queremos Para As Flores" which is "What we want for Flores". I won't bother to translate all of these but among them is the airport lights issue I alluded to in my previous post  -  I'm not sure if the fact it's third from the bottom on the right hand side is indicative of the priority the turquoise pen lot give to this issue.

I went down to the turquoise pen lot's sessão de esclarcimento (public meeting) this evening. When I got into the hall, Chris Moltisanti was speaking to an audience of about 20 people in that Fidel Castro way latin politicians have of not pausing for breath and with no notes: they don't do soundbites in this country. When at last he wound up and asked for questions, there was a cringingly awkward silence - a cough, a child cries. I was just drawing breath to say "I'm sorry, you'll have to excuse my very bad Portuguese but could you explain why there's enough money to put street lights up along the Avenida Marginal but not enough for the airport lights? Oh and - sorry to interrupt you - there's not much point in having airport lights unless SATA establish a schedule whereby, at least once a week, the plane arrives late at night, stays over and departs early the next morning and comes back again late the same day so as to permit the possibility of a day trip to Lisbon for a medical appointment etc. I've heard it's because the SATA crews refuse to spend the night away from home on Flores, is that true ...?"

Fortunately for Chris, he was spared that (unintelligible) rant as someone else broke the silence with another question although I didn't catch what it was. And by the time he'd answered it, I had to get back up for tea anyway.

    

Avenida Marginal

The Avenida Marginal along the sea front at Faja Grande is now more or less finished and contrary to earlier misgivings that big concrete retaining wall along the seaward side has been very skillfully faced in freestone and is undoubtedly a work of art:-

I do have one small problem with the Avenida Marginal, however. Up at Faja Grande's village square, there are half a dozen little lights on bollards.

They used to light up the square causing a pleasant glow under the trees on a warm summer's evening with the cicadas chirping as the old gents of the village gather on that bench to pass the time (I was going to attempt the Portuguese velhote there but thought better of it as I'm not sure if that word connotes "nice, wise older person, salt of the earth" or "tiresome old fart who's a thoroughgoing pain in the arse")

But I digress, where was I? Oh yes, unfortunately the mood lighting in the square has been switched off for as long as I can remember now. A sticker on each of the lights explains why:-

For anyone who doesn't read Portuguese, that says "Lighting switched off under the energy saving programme".

But what have they just stuck up along the new Avenida Marginal?

Un-fucking-pardon-my french-believeable!

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not some kind of namby-pampy, wishy-washy, hoity-toity, lah-di-dah, middle class, tree-hugging, greeny-weeny, lefty, liberal tree hugger. Far from it - we run our washing machine and dryer during the day at premium electricity rates and pay the fellows and damn their impudence.

And I've always felt it's not my place as an incomer to this island to march in and start lecturing the locals how to run the place. But come on, Camara Municipal das Lajes das Flores - 45 new lamp-posts along a road that's a dead end and has only one house along it? You're having a laugh!

What kind of message does this send to the world about the Azores' commitment to the environment? The island of Flores is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, for Christ's sake.

Apart from general issues about the energy consumption of all these useless street lights, there's a purely local issue as well - cagarros. These are Cory's Shearwaters (Calonectris diomedea), a sea bird which breeds in burrows on the cliffs of Flores.

Photo credit - duffbirder

Every October, the young birds leap off the cliffs to fly out to sea for the first time. Except some get distracted by the street lights and land in the village. Unlike most birds, they can't take off again from a standing start so will die unless rescued and taken down to the shore where they can take a run at the sea to get airborne. We used to get a few in our garden every year until we learnt to put our outside lights off at this time of year. The picture below is of a juvenile cagarro, the first time we got one in our garden:-

We took that one down to the shore and it flew off out to sea just the thing - very satisfying.

Below is pic of a clutch of juvenile cagarros which ended up in an empty swimming pool as a result of the same syndrome of being distracted by lights from flying out to sea.

I don't know if the owner of that swimming pool was planning to release them or make a pot of soup but the point is, what have the Camara just constructed along the seafront of Faja Grande but a great big illuminated landing strip for cagarros? And the irony is that, every year, there's a "Save the Cagarros" campaign with flyers handed out telling you to switch off your outside lights etc. ...

Of course, I know the Avenida Marginal is being paid for by EU grant schemes. And I realise that this funding is helping keep people of Flores in work building it in troubled times for Portugal. But my point is, is this European assistance being targetted properly? Is it, dare I say "sustainable"?

If the EU wants to pay for a night-time landing strip, then could it not perhaps pay to upgrade the lights at Flores Airport? I understand that this is the issue which prevents SATA's planes from landing here after dark and thus permitting the chance of getting to or from Lisbon in a day.

It is not at all my style to whinge. Especially not in an adopted country. But I do pay taxes here in Portugal and I simply cannot bear to see money being wasted. If we're going to pay people to dig holes and fill them up again, could we not pay them to do it in the right places?