Postcard From the Algarve

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Postcard From the Algarve - May 05

There are not a lot of dustbins in Sao Bras, individual dustbins that is. Presumably the rich have servants to carry their bags of rubbish to the communal bins, but we commoners have to lug our bulging plastic bags to the big green containers at most road junctions. And those junctions, just outside town can look just ever so slightly untidy.

Although the communal bins are emptied almost every night, they will be surrounded by other non-binnable debris - furniture, garden waste, big cardboard boxes, that sort of thing. Officially there are certain days for disposing of this extra rubbish: Mondays - furniture, Thursdays - broken tiles and bricks, but inevitably, if you miss the right day, the stuff hangs around for another week. Unless, of course, your rubbish is someone else’s godsend.

When we first came here, I put out a box of thirty or so UK plugs, a mirror with a chipped corner, and a huge and horrible lampshade. Half and hour later they were all gone. When I tried this recycling lark, it went terribly wrong. Driving home one evening I saw a wooden chair by one of the bins. Just the sort of chair that would go in a garden shed. You could saw things on it, stand on it to hang up other things, even sit on it to think what you’d done with that other thing.

Next day, I came out to examine my chair by daylight. It had been attacked by the largest woodworms in Portugal. Two legs were little more than sawdust held together by varnish. The seat was almost transparent. I took it back quickly to its home by the bin. Since then I have ignored other such possible bargains.

Another feature common to Sao Bras is the Post Box. Only houses that have been standing for many years have their own letterboxes. Those of us living in more recent abodes have to pick up our mail from a post-box which might be half a mile away. Our first post box, courtesy of a friend who was not using it, was in a town over five miles away. When I tried to cajole the ladies at the Post Office to let me have my own box (they all spoke English) I was met with pitying smiles and shakes of the head.

Then I had a brainwave. There is a legend in the Algarve of the upper class English lady losing her temper at the front of a Post Office queue and shouting: “I’ve been coming here for twenty years and they still can’t speak my language.” So, I learned the Portuguese for ‘please may I have a post box ‘, trotted it out with some hesitation at the counter, and was handed two keys and a post box number immediately.

One last point about post-boxes. A neighbour expecting an urgent letter went to the post office to complain that there had been no mail in his box for five days. The Post Mistress looked puzzled. “Of course there’s been no mail for five days,” she said, “it has been raining.”