I’ve recently realised we don’t live like real people. When real people have a problem, they call someone – a workman, an expert, a master technician, Ghostbusters, or whoever it might be – and they come with some tools and they solve it.
It costs some money and takes some time to arrange, but it works. They know what they are doing and, grumbles aside, they get things working again and real life goes on.
But, somehow, I’ve found myself in the position where I’m kind of responsible for everything … and when stuff breaks, I have to work out for myself how to fix it. I’m not entirely sure how that happened.
Obviously, the not-being-connected-to-anything thing means we’re pretty much off most workpeople’s grids when it comes to the usual sorting of gas and electric.
We’re very lucky to have some amazing people who we’ve met over the past few years who are the real experts. But I don’t want to bother them for the small things which I can probably do if I’m careful … or if I find the right YouTube channel.
Given that getting this place up and running – and keeping it running – falls under my area of responsibility, I do pay a lot of attention to what the professionals do when they’re here.
Much more so than real people might do. They trust the experts to get on with it unsupervised and don’t need to know how they do whatever it is they’re doing.
Perhaps my engagement and enthusiastic nodding confuses them into thinking I understand what is happening, can remember it, and might even be able do it myself next time.
And we are “bootstrapping” things as they call it at business school, doing it on the cheap – if I can do it myself next time, then we save money.
All this perhaps explains why when the solar hot water pump started making a very expensive sounding noise, Guido, the German boiler master, felt confident enough to tell me I could do it myself.
“You just need two pairs of pliers of the right size,” he said after watching the video of the screaming water system and recommended buying a new pump.
I’m sure there’s a lot more to it than that, but he is very busy at the moment … I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
One thing we can now do very successfully by ourselves is roast chestnuts on an open fire.
This year, I celebrated Verão de São Martinho (St Martin’s Summer) – officially now one of my favourite times of the year – by buying a metal roasting pan.
St Martin’s Day (November 11th) marks the opening of the talhas, the fresh natural wine still made in huge clay amphorae here in Alentejo as it was by the Romans 2,000 years ago.
We made our annual pilgrimage to Vila de Frades, the spiritual home of talhas, to taste the new wine and meet the winemakers.
And this year we were invited to take part in a couple of films being made by famous Portuguese wine writer Madalena Vidigal called “Rota Tesouros do Alentejo” (The Treasures of the Alentejo Route).
Each episode looks at a different aspect of Alentejo wines and we were invited along as special guests to learn more about old vines and talha at Vidigueira cooperative and ROCIM where Pedro Ribeiro makes amazing wines with clay pots.
He hosts an Amphora Wine Day every year with wine producers from all over the world who make wine using clay pots … and it gets bigger every year.
It’s a great story with wine and song and you can hear it come to life in Going Roman, Episode 4 of our podcast series Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure.
St Martin’s Day also tends to coincide with a spell of beautiful sunshine, warm temperatures and surge of growth for all the plants before the temperatures drop.
The meteorological explanation is a little wobble in the high-pressure zone over the Açores – one of the most important influences on Portugal’s weather.
The Atlantic is the warmest it has been all year thanks to the warmer southern waters being pushed north during this annual transition into winter.
I’ve also written before about the story of St Martin’s progression from plain old Hungarian Martin, to patron saint of the poor, of tailors, winemakers and curiously both soldiers and conscientious objectors. Oh, and of France.
It’s all linked in with Halloween, Martinmas, bonfires and Remembrance, and is an interesting dose of history.
I wrote back to Guido asking if it was really all that easy to just change the solar water pump without emptying the whole system of very hot water.
“You’re right, that will probably be too much of a problem for you,” he replied, while requesting more photos of the offending items.
Maybe I will get some help after all.
ALASTAIR LEITHEAD is a former BBC foreign correspondent now living off the grid in Odemira. We writes the blog “Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal” here and produces the podcast Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure.
