So May has arrived with its promise of sunshine and butterflies, and I can almost smell barbecue burgers burning, see the ants in my beer, feel my nose burning from pollen and hear the wasps buzzing over my ice cream already. Now picnic blankets will be getting used as God intended rather than being draped over knees in the TV room through winter.
Perversely, to celebrate the arrival of the season of hope and suntan, the UK is drowning in nonstop rain and the British Olympic Swimming Team is training in the streets. I’m sure I ran over someone doing the backstroke in Kingston High Street a couple of weeks ago, and I’m certain that was Tom Chambers diving off Wimbledon bridge last week.
I don’t do rain. That may sound odd coming from someone born in Scotland, a country where rain is like deep fried pizza -ever present. Here every traffic warden is called Moses, and I believe it was driving through Glasgow’s deluged streets one summer that gave God the idea for parting The Red Sea.
I left the land of my birth because of the crummy weather, so the current climate in London suits me about as much as having piles suits someone with hopes of being a tennis umpire. It’s time for me to escape to the sun.
Last week I travelled to the Algarve in Portugal, scene of many glorious holidays and groggy mornings, looking for weather that was vastly different from the UK. And boy did I get it. The place was colder than a polar bear’s bum and wetter than a goldfish’s steam room. It was awful.
But poor old Portugal is suffering from more than just bad weather. Everyone is pleading poverty. So what do the authorities do to help? They have installed tolls on the main road through the Algarve, which was greeted enthusiastically by people setting fire to the cameras and even firing shots at them. Anywhere else in the world these toll booths would be well thought out and done properly, but not here.
Someone has sat down and thought of every single way to make this as difficult as possible. Like the labour market in Portugal, it just does not work.
In Britain, America, and anywhere else I have used toll roads there is a machine you chuck money in or someone in a little booth who takes your money from you with a polite smile and a “thank you”, but that’s too normal for this part of the Iberian peninsula. Here, cameras take a photograph of your number plate and you then have to wait two days and go to the post office to pay. Every single time!
Not to labour a point, but when I did eventually take the car back to the airport and asked how I was to pay the tolls for that journey, the car hire man didn’t know. Apparently no one had thought of this and so no one pays. The computer cannot cope.
In The Algarve almost no restaurants will accept credit cards. They want cash so that there isn’t a record of any money that the nasty tax man may want to get his hands on. But the shop owners are clever. In case an official happens to visit the restaurant you will always find a sign up saying “Sorry, our credit card machine is broken today”, or more accurately “Sorry, our machine credit not work. Broked.”
Is it any wonder the Eurozone is in such a mess? I love Portugal but it, and Europe, need someone very clever to sort this mess out. I think it must be a woman, and here’s why.
A single guy living at home with his father found out he was going to inherit a fortune when his sickly dad died. One evening he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and said, "I may look just ordinary, but in a few weeks my father will die and I will inherit $200 million". Impressed, the woman asked for his business card and three days later - she became his stepmother.
See? Women are so much better at financial planning than men.
Showing posts with label The Algarve. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Algarve. Show all posts
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Mama Mia
Sorry about the missing blog last week but I’ve just got back from a week long trip with my bucket and spade to the seaside in Portugal. The weather there was magnificent; in fact I lay awake marvelling at the magnificent lightning, listening to the magnificent thunder and watching the magnificent, teeming, rain only this morning before I left.
Portugal, or more specifically The Algarve, seems to be where British golfers, with more money than sense, selflessly go to give their friends and partners a break. It’s a kind of care home for the terminally nylon waterproofed which gives their golf widows temporary respite from embarrassment and the chance to enjoy life back home.
Every Winter and Spring, the airport at Faro gets filled with middle aged men watching their golf clubs go round on carousels while discussing the merits of tartan socks and Pringle jumpers in neon colours. Here in the UK, sadly, they’d be laughed at but in the Algarve, a bit like lady boys in a Thailand dance club, they can all congregate for mutual support and to share stories.
I love sport, and I’ve played rugby, football and tennis with various degrees of failure and an extraordinary lack of success. But golf has escaped me and, after a lot of thought, I think I know why. It’s because it’s not really a sport, is it?
Fat men with shoes that resemble gangster’s spats left over from the Valentine’s Day Massacre perspire as they push themselves out of a seat on a motorised buggy, remove the woollen pom pom covers that were “hand” knitted by large machines in the Third World and bought as a Christmas present for their clubs, and then hack the fairway to death before jumping back aboard and repairing to the “Ninenteenth” hole for a lager shandy and discussion of their latest cholesterol level checks. It’s not quite up there with Sir Chris Hoy and his miles of cycling each day while dragging Ben Nevis behind for resistance work is it?
But, as a round of golf in the Algarve can cost around a hundred pounds, the locals stifle their laughter and welcome the thousands of Euros that these weekend walkers and wide waisted wastrels bring in hotel fees, refusing to sneer at the procession of pink sweatered dodgy salesmen showing their passports to the girls at check in and quipping “my ‘phone number’s on there too”. My how we all laughed in the Easyjet queue each time we heard it, over and over, and over.
This week, then, you won’t be surprised to learn I didn’t go to Portugal for the golf but, instead, I went for a holiday, to do some business, and also to take my mum and dad for a well earned break.
My mum is someone everyone should take on holiday because she guarantees a laugh in restaurants, or just about anywhere really. She’ll turn down the waiters’ offers of fresh fish as she doesn’t like the bones, shellfish is a non starter as she’s scared of food poisoning, steak is out as she says she can’t chew it if it’s tough, and spaghetti stays on the starting blocks as it makes a mess. “So, what would you like then?”, the waiters will say in exasperation. “Oh,” my Mum will reply with a smile, “I’m not fussy, I’ll eat anything”.
She has a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time which surprised a very kind waiter this trip who said, in a broken accent, not to hesitate and to ask him anything at all as he’d lived in Britain for a while and was proud to say his English was very good. As he turned round my mum said, very loudly, “What did he say? I couldn’t understand a word.”
In fairness, this may have something to do with the fact she wears a hearing aid and it may also have something to do with the fact that she’d worn it in the shower before coming out. “It’s not working now”, she said. “Full of water”. I asked for a look and discovered the real reason. She had forgotten to turn it on.
Mum has an affinity with toilets and will always have a holiday adventure connected with porcelain. A few years ago, on a trip to Italy with my Dad, she disappeared for ages to the ladies’ toilet leaving him to get more and more anxious as the minutes ticked away. When he eventually set off in search of her, my mum was laughing her head off. She’d desperately gone to the loo and, after the initial relief, had panicked as she realised she’d rushed without checking if the lid was up. It wasn’t!
On this trip, as we settled in to a cosy café after a long walk, she disappeared to the toilets for some considerable time and, as my dad and I speculated on whether she’d repeated the Italian trick, she arrived back saying she’d had a shock. A man had come in to the ladies toilet. When we discovered that she’d gone to the gents by mistake, she admitted she thought it was a bit different from usual and had wondered about the large wash hand basin on the wall and why she couldn’t get the water to run. That, we explained, was a urinal.
Now it’s back to reality with a week’s worth of bills and other post piled up, including various holiday brochures and special offers. There’s even one advertising a golfing holiday to Spain. If you’re going on that one then don’t bother to ask if I’m free to join you. But my mum, on the other hand, is always up for a holiday.
Portugal, or more specifically The Algarve, seems to be where British golfers, with more money than sense, selflessly go to give their friends and partners a break. It’s a kind of care home for the terminally nylon waterproofed which gives their golf widows temporary respite from embarrassment and the chance to enjoy life back home.
Every Winter and Spring, the airport at Faro gets filled with middle aged men watching their golf clubs go round on carousels while discussing the merits of tartan socks and Pringle jumpers in neon colours. Here in the UK, sadly, they’d be laughed at but in the Algarve, a bit like lady boys in a Thailand dance club, they can all congregate for mutual support and to share stories.
I love sport, and I’ve played rugby, football and tennis with various degrees of failure and an extraordinary lack of success. But golf has escaped me and, after a lot of thought, I think I know why. It’s because it’s not really a sport, is it?
Fat men with shoes that resemble gangster’s spats left over from the Valentine’s Day Massacre perspire as they push themselves out of a seat on a motorised buggy, remove the woollen pom pom covers that were “hand” knitted by large machines in the Third World and bought as a Christmas present for their clubs, and then hack the fairway to death before jumping back aboard and repairing to the “Ninenteenth” hole for a lager shandy and discussion of their latest cholesterol level checks. It’s not quite up there with Sir Chris Hoy and his miles of cycling each day while dragging Ben Nevis behind for resistance work is it?
But, as a round of golf in the Algarve can cost around a hundred pounds, the locals stifle their laughter and welcome the thousands of Euros that these weekend walkers and wide waisted wastrels bring in hotel fees, refusing to sneer at the procession of pink sweatered dodgy salesmen showing their passports to the girls at check in and quipping “my ‘phone number’s on there too”. My how we all laughed in the Easyjet queue each time we heard it, over and over, and over.
This week, then, you won’t be surprised to learn I didn’t go to Portugal for the golf but, instead, I went for a holiday, to do some business, and also to take my mum and dad for a well earned break.
My mum is someone everyone should take on holiday because she guarantees a laugh in restaurants, or just about anywhere really. She’ll turn down the waiters’ offers of fresh fish as she doesn’t like the bones, shellfish is a non starter as she’s scared of food poisoning, steak is out as she says she can’t chew it if it’s tough, and spaghetti stays on the starting blocks as it makes a mess. “So, what would you like then?”, the waiters will say in exasperation. “Oh,” my Mum will reply with a smile, “I’m not fussy, I’ll eat anything”.
She has a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time which surprised a very kind waiter this trip who said, in a broken accent, not to hesitate and to ask him anything at all as he’d lived in Britain for a while and was proud to say his English was very good. As he turned round my mum said, very loudly, “What did he say? I couldn’t understand a word.”
In fairness, this may have something to do with the fact she wears a hearing aid and it may also have something to do with the fact that she’d worn it in the shower before coming out. “It’s not working now”, she said. “Full of water”. I asked for a look and discovered the real reason. She had forgotten to turn it on.
Mum has an affinity with toilets and will always have a holiday adventure connected with porcelain. A few years ago, on a trip to Italy with my Dad, she disappeared for ages to the ladies’ toilet leaving him to get more and more anxious as the minutes ticked away. When he eventually set off in search of her, my mum was laughing her head off. She’d desperately gone to the loo and, after the initial relief, had panicked as she realised she’d rushed without checking if the lid was up. It wasn’t!
On this trip, as we settled in to a cosy café after a long walk, she disappeared to the toilets for some considerable time and, as my dad and I speculated on whether she’d repeated the Italian trick, she arrived back saying she’d had a shock. A man had come in to the ladies toilet. When we discovered that she’d gone to the gents by mistake, she admitted she thought it was a bit different from usual and had wondered about the large wash hand basin on the wall and why she couldn’t get the water to run. That, we explained, was a urinal.
Now it’s back to reality with a week’s worth of bills and other post piled up, including various holiday brochures and special offers. There’s even one advertising a golfing holiday to Spain. If you’re going on that one then don’t bother to ask if I’m free to join you. But my mum, on the other hand, is always up for a holiday.
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