Weather warning

According to the local weather forecast, the temperature in the Algarve could drop as low as zero this week.
Bloody hell, I didn't come here for this kind of treatment, I want my money back.

Read all about it

Never thought of myself as much of a fashion icon, but we at Whittaker Towers are included in the December issues of Vogue and also some other top magazines including, GQ, House & Garden and Tatler, all obviously part of the same magazine group.
If you can allocate the £4 that some of them cost or are a cheapskate and can't afford to splash out on one of these, you could always pretend you are thinking of buying one at WH Smiths and just check it out with the rest of the dirty raincoat brigade.
Failing that you could always hope that your personal gynecologist has it available the next time you pay a visit to his consulting rooms in Harley Street.

The article is about the Villa Works, which is a new front for the company that built Whittaker Towers, Pedro Costa e Costa. The website; http://www.thevillaworks.com/index.php/case_studies/#
includes a nice picture of me and my dearest and is just grainy enough not the show the 4 days of stubble that I have, scruffy bugger.

Wine Tasting

On Friday evening, I along with a few friends went to a wine tasting with a difference.
The wines were very varied, all of which were Portuguese & excellent, ranging from some very nice quoffable whites to Special Reserva reds, allegedly selling for 37 euros a bottle. Portugal has invested millions of euros over the recent years and are really are getting their act together when it comes to wine making.
Along with the wines we had a dinner of at least 7 courses, I lost count after that. Every course was superb, maybe the almond tarty thingy sweet was a bit dry but above all, excellent.

Another difference was that the meal was served by smiling happy staff, sometimes a rarity in itself, hot in all the right places (the meal not the staff), very tasty and very well presented.
The biggest difference was that the cost for this gourmet extravaganza was only 25 euros, including welcome gin & tonics, and after dinner 12 year old whisky, fantasticly amazing value.

Strangely my own golf club, apparently struggles to make a profit from charging 25 euros for serving a very poor buffet of chicken curry (from a jar) & chips without any wine, priceless.

Well done BoaVista Golf Club, put me down for the next one.

In the Hazard

As you will know if you have read a few of my ramblings, I like a spot of golf. Sometimes it goes well and sometimes it goes horribly wrong. I have had days when my ball always seems to find the hazard but I have never managed to put a buggy in the hazard as this person did at my golf club last week.
To save the person's blushes I will not name them, I will also refrain from making chauvinistic jokes about what sex they were, however needless to say, a bloke surely would have hit the brake pedal before parking the buggy in the hazard, f-o-r-e, woman driver coming through.

Recycling, the Portuguese way

Sometimes the Portuguese really do have some good ideas, this one being a recycling stations. All over Portugal I assume, certainly in the Algarve they are scattered all over the place in populated areas, some only a few hundred metres apart. In fact within a 3 kilometre radius of my house there must be over a 100 such collection points, the one in the picture nicely positioned outside someone's bedroom, not sure I would be too keen on that though, especially when Carlos comes along to dispose of his glass bottles at 6 in the morning.

They are very neat and tidy, most of the new ones are below ground level. Not at all like the ones that you have to drive 5 miles to in the UK, usually outside your local Asda, which defeats the point in my book. After you have used all that fuel, you arrive only to get there and find someone's old pram, cardboard boxes all over the place, broken glass on the floor, or the local divvy rifling through what someone chucked out yesterday.

Here at Whittaker Towers we like to do our bit to save the planet so we recycle anything we can, religiously separating items for the respective containers at the recycling centre.

Then every week along comes the big collection lorry and empties all the bins into the same space in the back of the truck and probably takes it to the local landfill, priceless, why do I bother.

Ace Reporting Update

If you read the blog entry about the English geezer that got had his ear cut off, toes & fingers removed, legs broken and got tortured a few blogs back, just thought that I would let you know that a man and a woman have been arrested in connection with the crime, both were British.
I have no idea how the Portuguese police manged to track them down and arrest them, usually they are not that asute, guess the said Brits must have walked in to the police station to give themselves up.

Cry Baby Fernando Alonso

Can you here the drums Fernando, they are saying that you are not the Formula 1 champion this year, what a shame.

I was glued to the TV on Sunday watching the final race of the Formula 1 Grand Prix season, hoping that the whinging, moaning, toys out of the pram, cry baby Fernando Alonso would not win the drivers World Championship.

Earlier in the season at the German Grand Prix, the dummy spitting Spaniard instigated team orders so that the driver in front of him, who just happened to be his team mate, Fellipe Massa would be ordered to pull over so that Alonso could get past him and so win the Grand Prix.

True to the last, in Sunday's final Grand Prix when again he could not get past another driver in front of him, this time the Russian Petrov, he finished in a lowley 7th place and therefore losing the World Championship to Sebastien Vettel by 4 points, shame.
After the chequered flag, Alonso drove along side Petrov and berated him for not letting him pass during the race, what a dip shyte, does he not know its called racing, you twonk.

Congratulations Sebastien Vettel on becoming World Champion, he's OK, for a German.

Clocks

I love clocks of all kinds, I think its a Whittaker thing as most of my family does too.

I have just spent the last 7 days getting one particular French pendulum clock to work, it has to be perfectly level else the pendulum won't swing, like most pendulum clocks. So each day I have a fiddle, put another piece of packing under one particular leg, give the pendulum a swing and call back later to see if its still swinging.

The next time I pass the clock, it has stopped so I try again. Then on Thursday evening, eureka! success.

Off to play golf on Friday morning, leaving the house maids to do a spot of cleaning. This week we have new maids and you guessed it, I returned from golf to find the clock has stopped due to the maids dusting and my felt levelling pads all over the place, don't you just love 'em.

The Stig

Just thought that you may be interested to see me in my normal work clothes.

Toll roads in the Algarve

Tourism in the Algarve is allegedly down, airlines have cancelled winter flights and except for August the beaches are relatively empty, which is great for all of us that live here.
So in an effort to totally kill off tourism altogether, the Portuguese government are supposedly introducing Road Tolls early next year on the main A22 dual carriageway that runs the length of the Algarve.

There will be no toll booths as they cannot afford to build them, instead they intend to bill the motorists by having microchips fitted to number plates or building a device into the vehicle. Of course they can only do this to vehicles registered in Portugal, so if you are a foreign traveller in any car, motorhome or whatever, registered in any other part of the world, currently you will be exempt.

According to figures released, the estimated cost of a trip from my house to Faro airport which is approximately 100 kilometres, will to be in the region of 22 euros, EACH WAY. The only other option would be to take the EN125 road, which will add at least an hour on a run to the airport. It is also a traffic clogged death trap of a road at the best of times with an increasing death rate each year and this is only going to increase the situation.
The Portuguese love beaurocracy and red tape, and can be a real pain in the ass and a right bunch of numpties, but most of the time I love them to bits.

Health & Safety Portuguese Style

Surprisingly it is 5 years since the house was finished and due to settlement and earthquakes we have a few cracks in the internal and exterior walls, so it is time to get them repaired and the house painted.
Unfortunately Mrs Lynette managed to get hold of the pantone colour chart that has more colours than Joseph had on his dreamcoat, which in turn most of them managed to find their way onto a section of our walls in a test area to see which colour looked best.
Over a period of 3 weeks we have whittled it down to about 10 colours and finally to the chosen 2, which the painters are now busily applying and at their speed will take the next 4 weeks, I prefer to think that they are doing a thorough job.

Now that we have put the clocks back for winter, they arrive each day at 7am disturbing Mrs. Lynette's sleep and start by moving their tower frame across the calacada making a noise like thunder which doesn't put her in a good mood for the day and of which I always get the backlash.
Having moved the tower to todays chosen spot, they then secure it with a thin piece of wire as you can see if you look very closely at the picture, and that is all that's holding the tower from toppling over.
Now that the tower is secure, they ignore it and choose a ladder instead.


In the second picture, they throw all caution to the wind as they continue to work on the roof without the aid of a safety net, Billy Smart would be very impressed.



And if that wasn't enough, for his finale, he balances a ladder on a couple of pieces of wood on the roof, whilst he paints underside of the roof tiles on the roof above, piece of cake really.





It just gets worse, found this one yesterday, he was hanging onto the pillar with one hand and painting with the other, I hope he doesn't need to scratch his nose.

Engagement

Just thought that you would like to know that, today on Bonfire night November 5th , 39 years ago, Mrs Lynette and I got engaged, aaaaarrrrrr and they said it would never last.

Mind you, we have had a few fireworks along the way.

Nature Watch

What a pain in the arse wasps are, especially if you are unfortunate enough to get stung by one there, and yes I know it's November but we still have shed loads of the little blighters. So far I have been stung 9 times this year, they are everywhere.
I have found a number of nests, this one behind the garden thermometer hanging on the wall.
No more wasps in this one after I sprayed them, tell your friends buzzies, I'll be back.

And what about this little beauty for all you arachnophobes;




............found this one just as I was about to remove a few dead plants, think I leave it for a while.

The kittens are no longer kittens and we have managed to catch one of them last week ("Kibbles" named by granddaughter Alice) and took her to the vets to be spayed (the kitten not Alice), she was OK and strangely still wanted attention and a stroke when we returned so she must have forgiven us. She was the easy one, catching the other 3 will be a different matter, their Mum certainly wasn't impressed, she gave us a real throaty rumble.
Meanwhile "Shadow" kitten, so christened because he was never more than 12 inches behind his Mum when we first saw him, has grown up and is already catching rats, I saw him playing with one last week and went to fetch the camera, when I returned he was gone, so was the rat. Shadow is on the right having just been woken up by someone with a camera, along with Buttons (button nose) on the left and Kibbles. The only one missing is Stig named by Morgan, he was probably snoozing in a quieter place.

And this is "Monty" the mongoose, he calls late afternoon and if I am in the garden, he takes one look at me, ignores me and carries on, on his hunt to keep the snakes down to a minimum.
I have only seen 2 snakes in the garden while we have been here, one was about 18 inches and the other was over a metre, they could have been the same one for all I know and had just grown up. Perhaps I should set a trap and tag them, then again perhaps not.


Finally, we have the Partridge family, I think the big one is David, (think about it, if you are younger than 25 years old you may have to do some research) taking the rest of the family for a walk. They ground feed and just walk across the land most days, exactly like the picture although I had to borrow this one from Google.