Visitors from Afar

My second thought when woken by the rumbling of a JCB going up the road behind the house before six o’clock in the morning last Saturday was ‘poor neighbours’. I won’t tell you what my first thought was.

‘Poor neighbours’ because they had only recently arrived back at their Portuguese house after another year of working in France. They’re emigrants and the house behind ours is usually empty for much of the year and here they were, poor things, not long arrived for a nice holiday back in the home village being woken up at the crack of dawn. It was only a little later that I found out that the JCB was working for them. I was taking my pre-breakfast constitutional around the upper field with the cat (don’t ask) when their son went sprinting up the back road carrying a road sign. I looked back to their house and there they all were, plus brother and his family, all hacking at stones while the JCB was busy digging. My dawn chorus sympathy was misplaced. They were the culprits and were doing what all well trained emigrants do during August – working on their property.

They’re a pleasant family though my interactions with them have not gone much beyond what to do with the army of ants that occupy the border between our two properties. No doubt on Sunday they will be joining all the other Luso-Français families in the area who seem to congregate at a lovely picnic spot up on top of Viso for lunch, some bevvies of wine and a few rounds of jogo da malha. It’s worth popping by just to listen to the curious mixture of French and Portuguese being blended like a rich coffee.

The first sign of the emigrants return is when the car park at the local supermarket starts to fill up with foreign plated cars towards the end of July. Another sign is the arrival of the door to door collectors of money for local festas, no doubt hoping that generous minded returnees from Switzerland or Luxemburg will shove a fifty euro note into the collecting box in lieu of small change. Supporting local events in some way is proof that you are a local, even if you have no intention of actually going to the event. On a less cynical note, a lot of local festas are planned to take place during August so that returnees can join in. Our own village is thinking of reviving its own festa for S. Pedro and, liturgically speaking, this would be observed in June but August is being touted as the best time because this means that the emigrants can join in. This reflects the strong sense of community in Portugal, something that is retained in rural areas even if it is diminishing in urban ones.

Like the Irish, the Portuguese have a long history of emigration and currently something approaching a fifth of Portuguese born people live and work abroad. An interesting statistic here is that the current number of immigrants into Portugal more or less equals the number of emigrants out of it. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? (A further ‘interesting fact’ is that our freguesia has a high ratio of emigrants and low ratio of immigrants, yet a majority consistently vote at local and national elections for the outrage machine that is Chega. Not a good example of joined up thinking, methinks.) The most common destinations for our emigrants are France, the UK, Switzerland and Brazil – and those who have made the journey assume that identity and are often referred to locally as o francês, o brasileiro etc. Incidentally, our local butcher seems certain that I am German while one of the neighbours up the road always speaks to me in French on the basis that I am foreign and French is a foreign language ergo I will understand.

We won’t be visiting any local restaurants for the next few weeks. This is born out of experience. They will all be heaving with huge extended families as part of a continuous celebration of homecoming that takes over the whole month. This is a wonderful thing and should be encouraged and doesn’t require an extraneous older couple sitting nearby to function. We shall bide our time. The celebrations will be marked throughout by extravagant firework displays given in the streets outside the family homes and this will be regardless of the fact that half the region seems to be on fire at any one time. Do the GNR even bother to go and take the names of the perpetrators? I doubt it. They’re probably first cousins anyway and enjoying themselves at the party at the working end of a bottle of bagaço.

Time to go and see what our dawn chorus neighbours are doing with a JCB outside their house. The reason for the early start was because they would, for a short while, be blocking the little road that leads up to the capela and they thought that doing this while the birds were still clearing their throats was the best option. How thoughtful. They are putting in a new fosse and I would be in deep shit if I interfered.