Day Four in Figueira. Hindsight, pavements and nostalgia.

Another grey day in Figueira da Foz. Phil is currently running on 1.5 points out of 3. Over breakfast this morning another player commented to him that the game he drew last night could have been a win for him. But then, it was against a Grand Master and it was the Grand Master who offered the draw. It would have been rather annoying to turn down a draw and then blunder against the GM and los the whole thing. Besides, it’s a lot easier to win games with hindsight. It’s also easier to spot other people’s wins. I say all of this as a strictly non-playing observer, of course, who tramps the streets of this seaside town while the games go on.

I might be tramping them again later looking for a chemist selling antihistamines as Phil was bitten by a mosquito last night. He is prone to allergic reactions to mosquito bites. But who expects mosquitos in Portugal at the end of October? Are they attracted by the warmish damp conditions that prevail at the moment? The world is crazy!

Tramping the streets, I see a lot of the pavements. Most of Figueira’s pavements are made up small square cobblestones, about two inches across and at least eight inches deep. I know the depth because I have seen them laying stretches of pavement, a very slow and meticulous process. They are flat on the top but this does not prevent Phil from complaining that he finds them uncomfortable to walk on - the wrong kind of shoes, I reckon. They do look amazingly treacherous when wet but in fact are not as slippery as they appear.

Mostly they are white or pale yellow but in at least one street they are a nice shade of pink. along the promenade they are interspersed with blue cobblestones in a geometric pattern on one side of the road and on the other they are arranged to depict seashells and other seaside odds and ends. In one street they depict figures of children indicating that you are passing a school. The work involved must be quite something.

In our bit of the UK paving stones of any kind seem to have been replaced with tarmac, a poor and rather boring substitute for the old paving slabs of yesteryear. You would have to draw a hopscotch pitch, if that is the correct term, if you wanted to play the old game, which I suspect children no longer do. Also gone are the games of walking only on paving stones of a specific colour. And the old rhyme “tread on a square, you’ll marry a bear, tread on a line, you’ll marry a swine” has completely lost its meaning. Along with seeing an ambulance and being told to “hold your collar until you see a dog!” Mind you, who walks to school with a bunch of mates any longer? So there is no longer any need for such fun and games.

Having said that, at our five-year-old granddaughter’s school they have a system of rewards for walking to school.

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing. Sometimes you wonder how things change as much as they clearly do.

I was reading about Jacob Rees-Mogg, something I try to avoid, but this time he was describing his aunt. “She was the most lovely aunt,” says Jacob Rees-Mogg. “Wonderfully kind, and took a lot of trouble with her nieces and nephews.” It turns out that the aunt in question, Anne Rees-Mogg, was an avant-garde film-maker and little Rees-Mogg and siblings appeared in her films. She belonged to a film-makers’ cooperative who took over a former British Rail canteen in north London in the 1970s.

She was, I read, a committed socialist and champion of gay rights. Are we really talking about the same family here?

Jacob Rees-Mogg seems to remember her fondly and he was apparently her favourite among the Rees-Mogglings. Perhaps he had hidden charms before he turned into Lord Snooty. “She would have turned in her grave if she knew what Jacob had become,” says John Smith, who served with her on the board of the co-op, at the time the place to be for artists interested in film-making. “But she absolutely doted on him. Even as a baby, she would regularly bring him up in conversation. She thought he was the most marvellous person on the planet.”

The world is clearly full of strangeness!