Old traditions.

At the restaurant at lunchtime yesterday I saw an item on the television news involving children going from house to house asking for not just sweets but bread and fruit and whatever people wanted to give. The children were dressed in their ordinary clothes. No Hallowele”en costumes and masks. No gruesome make-up. And some of the grown-ups were out on the street with tables offering specially baked bread with chorizo inside.

Of course, the 1st of November is All Saints’ Day, a public holiday in many places in Europe, a day for visiting the family graves and tidying them up, as at the start of Almodóvar’s film “Volver”. I read that in Mexico they have parties in the cemeteries to include the dead family members in the celebrations. In Italy they take two days holiday: November 1st is Ognisanti, All Saints’ Day, and November 2nd is il Giorno dei Morti, the Day of the Dead, for visiting the graveyard. In some parts of Italy, children receive gifts from their dead relatives. Nice but a bit spooky!

In the UK we just forget about the dead, it seems to me. And October 31st, Hallowe’en, seems to be taking over, American style, in many countries.

Anyway, tradition still holds in parts of Portugal, in small villages at least. The tradition is called Pão por Deus, Bread for God. In some places it is called Dia do Bolinho, The Day of Cake. Children up to the age of about ten go round receiving gifts of food stuff. Bakers give bread, fruit shops give fruit or chestnuts. Some people give sweets or money.

There is a rhyme that goes with the day:-

Bolinhos e bolinhós
Para mim e para vós
Para dar aos finados
Que estão mortos e enterrados
À porta de vera cruz,
truz, truz
A senhora está lá dentro
Assentada numa banquinha
Faz favor de vir cá fora
P’ra nos dar um tosttãozinho, ou um bolinho


Bolihnos e bolinhós (cakes and buns)
For me and you,
To give to the deceased
Who are dead and buried
At the beautiful, beautiful cross
Knock, knock
The lady who is inside
Sitting on a stool
Please get up
To come and give us a penny or a little bun

The children go around from quite early in the morning and greet the people who open their doors to them with “Pão por Deus”. In the Azores, people give them a cake shaped like a skull (just as in Spain you can buy “huesos de santos” or saints’ bones made from marzipan, with realistic looking marrow!).

There are records that date this tradition going back to the 15th century. Pretty impressive! One suggestion is that it was reinforced back in 1755 when the great Lisbon earthquake took place on All Saints’ Day. The vast majority of the city’s residents lost everything and the survivors had to ask for bread in neighbouring towns.

And here is a link to a clip about some children at a nursery school preparing for Pão por Deus.

My small granddaughter’s nursery, bu contrast, put on a Hallowe’en Party with children too small to know what was going on dressed up as skeletons and other such strange things!

Pagan celebrations!

Okay, that’s Hallowe’en out of the way-and now shops can concentrate properly on getting ready for Christmas.

I think I first came across Trick or Treating in the UK 25 or more years ago. If it’s really that long, I suppose we can almost call it a tradition. Anyway, the “tradition” had not really established itself. You couldn’t buy cute costumes for little kids in the supermarkets. Yummy mummies did not yet escort their charming little vampires and ghouls from house to house getting a sugar high. Bigger kids mostly still concentrated on preparing for the celebration of burning Catholics that is November 5th, Bonfire Night.

However, we had heard that some youngsters were going around our area Trick or Treating and I was half prepared to hand over some sweets when the knock came at the door. When I opened it, however, the Trick or Treater was a huge great 15 year old girl, not even dressed up, and more often seen hanging around outside the local off license asking people to go in and buy her bottles of cider. I was rather busy and more than a little impatient and told her in no uncertain terms that thought she was too old to be getting involved in that nonsense. And I shut the door and forgot about it.

Next morning, I opened the door, a door with black surrounds and white panels, to find that the white panels had been inscribed in permanent marker: “F*** OFF!” It may be one reason why I feel disinclined to celebrate Hallowe’en, especially now that it has become so commercial. What I would like to know is when we actually started wishing people “Happy Hallowe’en” and even buying and sending cards to that effect.

Here in Portugal, we had other things in our mind. In Phil’s case this involved preparing for his third chess match. Monday night’s, against his unfavourite kind of opponent, a 12 year old girl, was a draw. Last night’s was another junior. A friend of ours commented that he should be thankful for small mercies: at least it was a boy this time.

As for me, I went walkabout in the sunshine, photographing local bits of beauty

 and noticing that Rapunzel’s house appears to be being refurbished. It’s actually the Castelo Engegneiro Silva, built in the 1950s by António da Silva Guimarães, a merchant marine, entrepreneur and explorer.

I have long admired its fairytale look.

I also admire the tilework at the tops of widows on the building next door to the Castelo.

At lunchtime we set out for a light salad at the Caçarola 2 restaurant only to discover that it was closed to give staff a day off. So we ended up at a place called O Picadeiro, a bit further up the road. We were unsure of the size of portions at this place and our light lunch ended up looking like this.

So it goes.

Modern day problems!

Oh boy! So now someone has come out and accused Kevin Spacey of sexually abusing him thirty years back. This took place at a party in Spacey’s hotel room. Spacey was in this 20s and the young man was a 14 year old impressionable adolescent actor. Kevin Spacey says he doesn’t remember, it was a long time ago, he might have made a pass at him when he was drunk and if he did so he apologises. He has had relationships with both genders and now declares himself properly gay. This brings the gay lobby down on him for bringing them into disrepute, by suggesting that that somehow excuses bad behaviour. Of course it doesn’t, but I do wonder what bandwagons are being jumped on. And maybe I am doing the now not so young actor an injustice. He may well have been truly traumatised by the whole business!

It makes me glad I never wanted to get into show-business!

By contrast, the actress (I still like to call female actors actresses, by the way) Claire Foy seems to be taking a fairly sensible view of things. She has been on the Graham Norton chat show and Adam Sandler repeatedly put his hand her knee while telling an anecdote during the performance. She gestured to him to remove his hand, he did so but then forgot and put it back. So she had to tell him again. A spokesperson for Ms Foy said:"We don't believe anything was intended by Adam's gesture and it has caused no offence to Claire." Thank goodness somebody can be sensible. I would have thought that over the top, extravagant touchy-feely stuff would be expected on the Graham Norton Show!

Meanwhile Theresa May is apparently planning to take measures to crack down on all the sexual harassment in parliamentary circle. It really does seem as though all the predators are crawling out of the woodwork. More and more of them are being revealed every day. Is it an epidemic? Is it taking her attention away from Brexit?

The men I know are not all sexual predators, at least as far as I know. But perhaps they all have secret lives and nasty secrets will be revealed any day now. Or maybe the men I know are not powerful enough to get involved in such activities. But truly I begin to despair of men in public office.

I wonder as well how soon it will be before they start to find a similar stick to beat powerful women with. Oh, no, that’s not necessary. It already happens with nasty tweets.

And now, here are some comments from people who have smart phones, from an article about smart phone use:-

 Tom 28

Sometimes I’ll be watching TV and I’ll end up not even watching it because I’m too busy on my phone. It takes up a lot of my time, just scrolling through Facebook and stuff. I’ve thought about having a year off, deactivating Facebook and not looking at my phone that much.

 Freya 30

I’ve got friends who ban phones on a night out or when we’re having dinner because everyone is obsessed with using social media. I was even at a wedding recently where the bride banned people from uploading photos before the end of the ceremony. I climbed Kilimanjaro recently and I was looking forward to not having my phone for a week. It was so nice because it meant I had conversations with the people I was with. When I came back, I wasn’t that bothered about using my phone but then it slowly crept back in again.

Maria 69

I only use my phone for practical things or to call people. I don’t just watch what’s happening on there, so I don’t see any need to cut down.

 Shashi 32

I use my phone quite a bit – it’s in my hand right now. I use it for emails, WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook. I have tried to cut down but I can’t because I get emails constantly. Some days I don’t carry it, but then the work piles up.

It seems to me that a little more self control is needed in the modern world!

Talking about food!

I decided it was time to talk about food again.

When we arrived here on Friday and the heat knocked us put, we almost forgot about food and only into the evening did it dawn on us that we had not eaten since breakfast. We were rather looking forward to revisiting an old favourite place here, A Caçarola, a restaurant whose name I totally misread first time around and assumed it mean The Snail. In fact it means The Saucepan, The Stewpot, The Casserole. They do an amazingly good fish soup. Imagine our consternation when we discovered that it was shut, not only for the weekend but for holidays. It would not re-open until November 7th. We will be gone by then.

What to do?

Well, go to Caçarola 2, of course.

This is it’s posher cousin round the corner, refurbished last year and bow doing quite splendidly. It might appear a little posher but the prices are still very reasonable. Phil had the fish soup. I had a cream of shellfish soup followed by fanecas, small fish which I also eat in Spain but whose English name I never can remember. Phil ordered squid to follow his soup. Then came a question: would he like his squid grilled, or stuffed with mashed potato? What? Stuffed with mashed potato? Is that even something you do to squid? So he opted for grilled, not being a mashed potato man at the best of times.

The squid, when they arrived, were enormous. No wonder they could be stuffed! Quite tasty but a prodigious amount of squid! The fanecas were also tasty but fiddly, a little dry, a lot of effort for little reward. So it goes.

On Saturday I rose early in order to have time to wash and dry my hair before breakfast. Then we went shopping for the items on the list we had made the previous evening: chocolate (for the chessplayer to take to his games), fruit, toothpaste, toothbrushes (Phil had left his at home), deodorant (I had left mine at home), bottle of water, suntan lotion (29 degrees out there!) and mugs (our room has a kettle but only expanded polystyrene beakers to drink out of). We also acquired sunhats - not on the list. The last of the big spendsrs.

At lunchtime we went to a little place called Buzio, located in a back street. We had come across it accidentally a few years ago, spotted it had a menu do dia, tried it out and found it good and gone back several times. We had a soup made with unidentified vegetables and containing floating strands of grelos, the ubiquitous greens that crop up in so many northern Iberian dishes. Very good! Then came bifes de frango, chicken steaks (maybe bife comes from French biftek which comes from English beefsteak!) served with chips AND rice. Very good too.

Very good except that I was feeling odd. Not quite in my plate, as the French say. I did not finish my wine; I gave it to Phil. I thought a fruit salad might refresh me. It did. It was a good fruit salad. We ordered coffee. Just the smell put me off. I gave it to Phil as well.

The bill arrived and we had a small but amicable disagreement with the waiter. We had been charged for olives and a tomato salad which we had not consumed. He went off and changed the bill. Then we were consumed with guilt as we realise that we had not been charged for the unidentified vegetable soup! It was a small items, only €1.50 or so but we felt churlish, having quibbled over olives and tomato salad!

And so we set off back to the hotel but I was definitely not right. We took the lift instead of the stairs - a sure sign that something was wrong. I made it to the room and promptly threw up my lunch and slept the rest of the afternoon. What a waste! I wondered of I had suffered from a mild heat stroke and dehydration from the travelling!

By the time Sunday came around, with an extra hour’s sleep, courtesy of the clocks going back, I seemed to be recovered and ran down the promenade as usual. At lunchtime we planned to go to A Caçarola 2 again but the queue was immense: victims of their success. So we went back to Buzio. It was just as well that I was sure it was me and not their food that was wonky on Saturday.

I had a fine salada de camarões with grilled prawns and pineapple. Phil manfully tackled a huge fish, robalo, and an enormous plate of chips. No wine, only water, as the chess games were beginning that evening. Nothing untoward ensued! Hurray!

And the chess tournament started.

And Phil lost his first game against a stronger player.

To begin woth a win would have been nice but today, to misquote Scarlett O’Hara, is another day!

Protests and reading matter - food for thought!

It would seem that even as I write this, 11.45 am Portuguese time, a big anti-independence rally is going on in Barcelona. Carles Puigdemont is reported to be pretending that nothing is happening apart from lunch with family and friends in Girona. Goodness knows where it will all end.

I also read that a small part of Catalonia is talking about bidding for independence from Catalonia. We should perhaps revert to city states everywhere. Maybe we could even declare our house an independent state!

The reading group I attend when in the UK meets on Monday or Tuesday of this week. It does not matter which evening as I shall not be there, being happily ensconced in Portugal, which continues to be fine and sunny.

The book chosen for discussion is Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”, set in the American south and dealing with questions of racism. Curiously enough, I read yesterday that a junior high school in Biloxi, Mississippi, removed the book from an eighth-grade lesson plan recently because the language in the book “makes people uncomfortable”.

Eighth-grade is for 12-13 year olds, I think. Our 12-13 year old grandson can hold quite sensible conversations about topics like racism, gender equality and fairness in general. Of course, it is possible that he is a genius but mostly he seems like a reasonably normal child of that age.

If youngsters are “protected” from controversial topics than they will never learn to think about them rationally at all. Well, that’s what I think anyway.

In the end it was decided that junior high school students will be allowed to study “To Kill a Mockingbird” after all, but their parents need to give permission. I wonder if anyone has considered asking for parental permission for Hallowe’en parties!

I have been reading David Nobbs’ autobiography. Interesting stuff. At various points he talks about who he considered to be the best writer in the world at various stages of his childhood and youth. The “Biggles” books were firm favourites for a good while, only to be replaced by “Swallows and Amazons”, supplanted in his late teens by the works of Thomas Hardy.

I too read lots of Hardy in the sixth form: not a writer to read of you are at all depressed as fate will always get you in the end.

In his childhood, our son was a great reader of the “Swallows and Amazons” books. Do smallish boys still read books about fairly privileged children messing about in boats in the summer? I wonder. Or is there too much description and not enough modern technology in them.  

Maybe they should be set texts, studied to remind today’s youngsters that there was a time when mobile phones and their apps did not exist.

Some odd things in the 21st century!

Despite what their president might say about climate change being a myth. US scientists and weather monitoring experts say that winter has grown shorter by one whole month in the last hundred years. The first frost of the winter comes gradually later and later.

I suppose that tallies with the reduced snowfall we have seen in our bit of the Northwest of England where we used to get snowed in back in the 1970s, something that simply does not happen now. This does not prevent everything grinding to a halt when it snows but the snow rarely stays on the ground for 12, let alone 24, hours.

And here in the Iberian peninsula, even though this year some people complained that the summer in Galicia did not get going until later than usual, the good weather seems to be lingering on and on. With blue sky and sunshine and temperatures in the top 20s, we have just bought sun hats and suntan lotion! No doubt this will provoke a rapid meteorological change! Fine weather we certainly hoped for, but we are seeing people wandering about in short shorts and vest tops. I clearly should have packed sun dresses.

In the 1960s, when I was a grammar school girl - yes, one of the privileged, upwardly mobile! - my school had a strict uniform code. Bottle green almost everything, including knickers but you really only had to worry about that on days when you PE, and prefects strategically placed along everyone’s route home to make sure you were wearing your bottle green beret correctly and did not pop into the sweet shop for a snack along the way. Heaven forfend that we should let the headmistress down by being seen eating on the streets and in uniform. She would spin in her grave to see our local high school kids queueing outside the baker’s or walking along with a portion of chips!

I mention all this because I heard about a school in Japan which excludes not only pupils who dye their hair a funny colour but also those who happen to be born with brown rather than black hair who neglect to dye it properly black! One poor girl has had to miss school because of an allergic reaction to the hair dye. She is sueing the school for compensation. What a topsy turvy situation!

That school may be extreme but it is not alone. “This year a survey of high schools in Tokyo found that almost 60% asked students with lighter hair for proof that it was naturally that colour. Ninety of the 170 schools surveyed by the Asahi newspaper said they asked students to provide photographs of themselves taken when they were infants or attending junior school to prove they had not coloured their hair.”

And finally, here’s a link to an article about a judge in Canada who suggested that the victim in a sexual assault case might have been “flattered” by the advances of her aggressor. Although she had a pretty face, the 17 year old was a bit plump, he suggested, and so might have welcomed the attention! The man in question was a 49-year-old, who the judge said “looks good and doesn’t seem his age”. 

This is still the 21st century, is it not? And we have had a lot of stuff about sexual predators in the news lately, have we not? The mind boggles!

Getting to Figueira.

When I stuck my head out this morning, it was fine and sunny with a beautiful blue sky, but rather chilly. A perfectly good October day in fact!

We set off for Liverpool airport midmorning with the sun still shining and our daughter’s car registering a temperature of 6 degrees.

At around 2.30 this afternoon we landed at Porto where the temperature was 28 degrees. Talk about a shock to the system! It’s lovely, to be sure, but it’s not natural. Even the locals agree with us. I wasn’t surprised. A friend in Vigo had already broadcast a temperature of 27 degrees yesterday. She was wondering when the rain would arrive. Well, as we are heading there next week, it’s quite likely that we will make the rain turn up.

We arrived at the airport, expecting to be collected and driven to Figueira da Foz, where Phil is playing chess over the coming week. We hung around and hung around, trying to look conspicuous but nobody showed.

A terribly elegant lady in killer heels came over and asked if my name was Elena. She must have been getting desperate. I had already walked past her several times, noted her sign saying “ELENA” and ignored her. Surely she had noticed that. Besides, she was so elegant that she must have been expecting someone more suave and sophisticated looking that me in my travelling best with a little backpack!

Eventually we phoned got through to the chess organiser, who assure dus that we had not been forgotten. Our driver was about to arrive. And sure enough, he did. He had been stuck in traffic because of an accident.

And off we went, speaking a mix of my bad Portuguese and his better, but not perfect, English. I did try. I managed to say a fair few things but his replies were incomprehensible! Not to self: must try harder.

We drive through a few places that had had fires recently, at the time that Galicia and Northern Portugal had seemed to be burning up completely. Maybe this is just a little further south but the devastation did not seem as great as I had expected. Maybe we just did not get close enough. Our driver told us that Figueira itself had had problems over about four days with fires raging. As I go exploring, I shall see what I can discover.

We arrived at our hotel to find that they had no record of our booking. This was not a problem, the receptionist assured us, he could find us a room. But we did not want to book just in case it turned out that our driver had made a mistake and brought us to the wrong one of several hotels patronised by the chess organiser. So, back to the phone we went. All is well. Thank goodness for modern technology.

Meanwhile, in the wider world, Catalonia has had a go at declaring independence and Spain has taken over. Direct rule from Madrid. It never did look as though it was going to end well. Now we shall have to wait for further developments! Simon Jenkins in the Guardian says it”s a problem for all of Europe. 

And Alistair Campbell is writing fantasy speeches in which Jeremy Corbyn turns around and pulls the UK out of Brexit.

A world gone mad! Or perhaps not!