Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal

I suppose the first lesson of over-sharing ones trials and tribulations on social media is understanding the jigsaw effect of a headline and a photo placed together..

A lot of people only have time for the top line, and so posting a picture of me in hospital alongside the words “Hitting a Wall” would obviously lead to some not wholly accurate conclusions being drawn.

Quite a few people now think I’ve had some kind of coronary as opposed to a colon-ary.

The hospital-bed picture captured by Ana who was first on the his and hers colonoscopy train and therefore the first to wake, does look pretty bad on reflection.

I profess to being physically fine (at least until the recent routine blood test results come back and inform me otherwise) and it’s been more of a mental meltdown...and even that is “more blue than black” to quote one of the amazing responses to my last despatch.

Writing about the Downs rather than the Ups was in itself very therapeutic because it became a self-diagnostic process of putting into words what was going on.

Why was I so grumpy – angry – de-motivated, unproductive, lazy and in such a slump?

Well, the top three candidates are:

* a delayed reaction to being de-institutionalised from a personally-defining career;

* prioritising finishing things rather than thinking them through properly;

* and taking on too much with a cloak of invincibility disguising a need to be busy.

It’s all things the wonderful Ana has been saying for ages, but you sometimes don’t see the hive for all the bees when it comes to those closest to you and who bear the brunt of it all.

Once I’d finally managed to formulate my thoughts through writing, we were able to chat it all through on a long drive to Évora in the baking hot Alentejo interior for a meeting and reflect on structure, realistic ambitions and ways to keep level-headed.

As we drove, and the thermometer started to rise, an amazing barrage of brilliant messages started to arrive from every which way – only a few of them wondering if I was at death’s door!

And it’s been the responses to my warts-and-all post about the trickier side to paradise in Portugal which been a huge lift.

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Thank you to everyone who shared their own stories or similar experiences, wonderful words of encouragement, smart thoughts on how to get back up to full speed...and one extremely entertaining forwarded email on what to expect from your first colonoscopy (sadly a little late).

My despatch seems to have resonated with many people from many different places and it generated all sorts of messages of advice and encouragement, some of which I’d like to share – because they’re brilliant and they help.

The first, and most important entry belongs to Ana and was posted on the 11th anniversary of our second wedding which was in Northumberland (we’ve had three weddings...without any separations in between!).

We took ourselves off to our favourite crab-staurant (as Oda calls it) for the best sapateiras in town and one of our favourite fresh Alentejo white wines (Vidigueira Antão Vaz).

We moved on to the wild Aniversário Beach for a dip and then dropped into a couple of the beach bars on our way home as tourist season has clearly started heating up along our coastline.

Ana started her post on Facebook with a song:

Super trouper beams are gonna blind me

But I won't feel blue

Like I always do

'Cause somewhere in the crowd there's you.

And went on to explain: “Eleven years ago we were married for the second time to the words of ABBA, uttered by beloved superstar Matthew Price.

“I remember having picked some crusty old poem for the ceremony and was (joyfully) surprised at this choice of lyrics at the altar - and boy, were they better.

“I am so happy to be married to my incredible force of nature husband. Super Trouper indeed - come rain and shine.”

Thank you my love – it was a great anniversary and we’ll make this work because we’re stronger together than the sum of our separate parts.

I was grateful for the kind words from my former colleague Fergal Keane who shared my post and helped bring a flurry of messages from ex-BBC folk and those leaving long careers who have also been through the de-institutionalisation process.

One of the first to come in was this:

“As I opened your post, I’d just read this Nietzsche quote (not something I’ve ever said before and I’m aware how it sounds but please bear with me, it’s in Oliver Burkeman’s brilliant book Four Thousand Weeks): ‘we labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.’”

There were thanks for “putting it out there,”  one of my friends associated with “the challenges of settling into the rhythm of not having a rhythm,” and there was the reflection: “we’ve all been brainwashed to work all the time and feel guilty when we don’t.”

One friend added: “I’m in the same boat and it’s s**t,” and another said “Seriously you are not alone in this space or rabbit hole right now – recently someone sent me a quote that took my breath away as I saw how everything we were doing seemed stuck and heavy and impossible, and the past felt safe:

“She turned and looked at her old life one more time

Whispered I will never see you again

I do have a new life to be lived

She took a deep breath and walked towards all that waited & needed her.”

A good suggestion was that “a smaller to do list might be healthier” and there was a fabulous comment which cut through all the noise to remind me that tensioning sails for a car cover was physics rather than maths.

I think the key take-aways are more structure and understanding there's a long game here, not just a series of short sprints.

I shouldn't really be complaining with all the beauty around us...I think I got a little bout of tunnel vision, so I’m now in reset mode and hoping to re-boot stronger.

But one of the biggest lifts has been spending time with our great friends Lotti & Andriy and their wonderful girls Sasha and Katya who are staying with us.

We’ve been showing off some of the amazing beaches which I wrote about last year and I’ve been trying WFB (Working From Beach), but their energy and enthusiasm for our project and their encouragement that we are creating something special has been priceless.

We have an ambitious vision, but one we now have to speed towards. I think we will return to it in a few weeks after our little holiday reinvigorated for a crucial stage of the project.

My only concern is building is the easy bit...running the place (and making it pay) is going to be even more complicated!

I think I just need to take it a little easier on myself and go with the flow...use this time for learning and readjusting.

And to sum it all up, Andriy & Sasha – wonderful musicians that they are – performed an amazing version of John Mayer’s song Stop this Train.

It’s worth reading all the lyrics but in summary, it’s about life speeding up as you get older.

Stop this trainI want to get off and go home againI can't take the speed it's moving inI know I can'tBut honestly, won't someone stop this train?

Then John Mayer’s “old man” gives the advice:

"Don't stop this trainDon't for a minute change the…

We’ve had our challenges since beginning this crazy new-life, off-grid-living adventure-in-paradise experiment, but the last couple of weeks have been my toughest so far.       

And what’s odd is that it sneaked up on me.

I just hit some kind of wall which has sapped me of energy, drained me of enthusiasm and ground everything I have been doing to a halt.

It could be the impossible list of things we’re trying to achieve, the increasing pressures of our building project, or the final realisation I haven’t got a proper job anymore – at least not one that pays – and I don’t actually have to do anything every day.

And that is quite a scary mindset to get into.

I’ve spent a week trying to put it into words, but writing has joined the list of things I currently can’t get that excited about.

I often joke that writing these despatches keeps me sane, but perhaps it does.

So while this might be a tougher read than usual, it’s been much tougher to write, and by keeping it honest maybe I can shake off the dark shadow and get back in the groove.

It was, objectively, a particularly shitty start to the week.

As romantic as a his and hers colonoscopy might sound, we were both grateful for living in a house with two toilets during the cleansing process ahead of the procedure.

I was more concerned about the one and a half hour drive to the hospital, but things moved faster than I anticipated and, without wanting to be faecetious, it all passed without incident.

A great hospital with lovely staff combined with a dose of general anaesthetic to ensure the whole experience went smoothly.

We have a slew of routine check-ups courtesy of our medical insurance, but my lack of productivity frustrations have been amplified by multiple time-stealing trips to the Algarve.

We’re lucky to have good friends to help lift us over some of the bumps, but it’s been a bit of a downward spiral recently.

I had high hopes for June – lots of time to edit, write, plot and scheme; to run, to do a couple of hours’ landscaping work every evening outside, to get a grip on everything and to get into a routine.

We had a gap in visitors – the perfect opportunity to hit high levels of productivity, to get in the zone and achieve a load before going away.

But none of that happened.

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Instead I grumped around the house, snarling about wasteful trips to the carpenter and the window guy, unable to string more than a couple of hours of reasonable focus together and getting lost in flight-connection hell for our airmiles California trip out of London next week.

I’m not going to list the tiny grains of sand that became pebbles in both shoes but some are as stupid as where to go for lunch or the time-thievery of a rubbish second hand furniture store.

Without having the excuse of hosting dinners and taking pals to the beach...of being very busy...there was nowhere to hide.

I’ve written about our water woes and scope of the work we need to do on electrical infrastructure to get this tourist lodge open by next Easter, but there’s something else weighing heavily which I haven’t mentioned.

A few months ago the entire funding for our building project was suspended while a loophole in our contract was being ironed out.

We thought we had six months to start asking for money, but it turns out we had six months to spend it, and I’d love to meet anyone who can build a tourist lodge in Alentejo from start to finish in that time!

Our bank manager is being brilliant and is reassuring us everything will be fine, but as we keep paying our bills, it’s an extra layer of stress which hasn’t helped.

I lost interest in my daily obsessive To-Do Listing, my restorative rabbit-holes of Portuguese history and without a hard deadline, the podcast editing drifted into a sprawling mess of scattered story threads.

The emails-requiring-a-response are piling up, the gardening isn’t doing itself, and why is it so hard to put up and tessellate sails to protect the cars from the sun?

We are just about keeping on top of the builder’s questions about taps, tiles, fireplaces and plumbing, but the Duracell Bunny is drumming a slow march.

For self-motivation I suppose structure is all important, and since the house of cards I’d constructed out of to-do-list post-it notes collapsed, I’ve felt a little bit in freefall.

From getting up at silly o’clock to write, edit and plan, I now wander around half-heartedly half doing things...badly.

The more I slump into the sofa, the larger it gets, the more it consumes me and the harder it is to pull myself out.

Perhaps it’s a delayed reaction to leaving my career at the BBC and all the structure, identity and actual deadlines that came with it?

Exercise has always been my answer, and perhaps that is the way out...once I can be bothered to do something about it.

Facebook tells us six years ago Ana and I ran the Lewa half marathon in Kenya, but beyond the occasional revitalising hot yoga, it’s not been happening here in the valley.

I don’t know what’s going on, but my best bet is that’s it’s some kind of burn out.

The good thing about burn-outs is something new and brilliant can emerge from the ashes, and if you’ve made it this far through my June gloom I’d like to finish with a spirit-lifting story.

Regular readers will remember we lost one of our 150 year old cork oak trees in the fire last year – embers got into its roots and a week later the grand old tree slumped into the hill (I know the feeling).

First we asked chainsaw legend Lionel to cut it up and tractor it from the opposite slope and then we met Joshua, whose outdoor sawmill can slice tree trunks into planks.

We now have a load of beautiful wood drying in the shade which can hopefully produce some amazing pieces of furniture – particularly, tables – to help the legacy of our grand old cork oak live on in the valley.

Something good to come out of something bad. That’s worth considering.

Check out the video and hopefully the next time I pop up in your inbox I’ll be out of the sofa, back down a rabbit hole drumming hard, and building up my post-it-note house of cards on a stronger structure.

Oh, and please don’t charge me for the therapy session.

It’s been one of those weeks in the Valley of the Stars.

For the best part of three years water has been our obsession, but the latest attempt to solve our biggest long-term challenge has just ended in an expensive failure.

We shower in mineral-rich borehole water and drink filtered rain, but for our new eco-lodge that’s not going to cut it.

We need a reliable system of delivering plenty of clean drinking water and have called a lot of people – from Colorado to the Netherlands – and there’s no simple answer to the variables of supplying, filtering, treating and storing our H2O.

We hadn’t realised just how hard it is to purify your own drinking water when the work isn’t already done for you, or the amount of unsustainable plastic bought becomes unsustainable.

At this point I’ll be honest – this is my second draft of this week’s despatch because the first attempt was so far into the weeds that while reading it out loud I bored myself, my wife, the dogs and even the cats (who are trying to endear themselves to us at the moment).

So in short, we spent months sussing out different water diviners, hearing a pitch from a man with a magically suspicious SENSOR and eventually betting on twitching Justino whose divining inspiration first marked the spot with an X in late August.

In December the wild-west crew dug deep and struck water, and this April the pump was installed and the first samples of our not terrible 5,000 litres a day could be collected.

Simon the dog seemed to like it, but the proof of the drinking is in the testing, as I have explained.

The samples took an age at the lab, with results dribbling through to us like an under-resourced tap...and each result slightly drained away our optimism a little more.

This week the report came back in full with the worst of all worlds...

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Not only is our new water salty, but it also contains iron, and while both are good for us in small quantities, these are not small quantities.

And salt and iron are removed from water in two different ways...both systems can be as expensive as each other.

So now after years of pondering the best solution to deal with salts in solution, we are back to the drawing board...less than a year before we’re due to open.

We will solve it – through a combination of rainwater capture, reverse osmosis and ion exchange filters and storage – but it’s frustrating pouring money down a well only to see our levels of water confidence falling.

And when we do, and water becomes an even more scarce resource, we will have a good, long-term, sustainable solution.

If you would like more on the pros and cons of all our solutions I have pages of copy ready to run, so please let me know and I’ll try not to nod off while explaining it.

The borehole was always an expensive gamble, but we hoped the water gods would be shining down on us.

Perhaps they will be happier now we have sacrificed two of the kittens.

When I say sacrifice...Cam Camarena popped over this week to pick up Batcat aka Bruce Wain and Doc Holliday as the time had come for two of the four mittens to move into their new home.

Mum Val Kilmer had been holding advanced fight training and roof running classes this week, so we’re confident they’ll be just fine in Quinta Camarena.

Moving from seven animals to five, and five cats to three has instilled a certain level of calm – herding cats is a bit like...herding cats.

In fact a lot of things related to our building project are like herding cats, but in an attempt to keep you away from the unsubscribe button, I’ll employ restraint and allow all the frustrations to wash over me like a crisp, clean waterfall, because there’s more fun to be had...

HAPPY PORTUGAL DAY! Yes, June 10th is a national holiday here!

It commemorates the death of famous 16th century poet Luís de Camões – Portugal’s equivalent of Shakespeare – who penned the country’s national epic poem Os Lusíadas about the golden age of Portugal’s globetrotting explorers.

And there’s nothing like decorating the streets of your local town with ceilings of paper flowers to take your mind off water woes.

On the eve of the holiday we headed into our nearest town São Teotónio to help our friend Rui and the team of dedicated decorators install the decorations.

We’d popped into the local parish council offices a couple of times to half-heartedly help fold coloured paper tissues into flowers and fluttering strings for the biennial Festival de Mastros, or festival of the masts, and even brought a few friends along.

But now the time had come to hang strings of colourful bunting from masts so they fan out across town and in a few other nearby villages.

It used to be a huge event in the community with dozens of people pitching in, but a lot of younger folk have moved to Lisbon or beyond and a COVID lull lost some momentum.

But the volunteers folding and cutting by day and by night have created a most astonishing array for street decorations.

While Portugal Day launches the festival, the flowers also bring colour to a series of saints’ days from now until the end of July when the road roofs will remain.

Music, marches and dances will take place underneath, and a small stage has been set up for the opening this evening.

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But just as Rui was planning for an all-nighter to get all the decorations in place, the rain we’ve wanted – but a day earlier – began to deliver a sudden storm, the like of which climate change now provides.

“It’s tradition,” one of the guys shrugged as the rain fell and some of the colour started dripping out of the first fan of paper strings, which were at least a little protected by trees.

Apparently it happens most years – even when the weather forecast predicts just a 3% chance of rain (as it did this year).

Overnight efforts were suspended...but the new day began with sunshine and hopefully there’ll be time to get all hands on deck in time for the party!

Water woes eh? We can’t seem to escape them!

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There are many great things our off-grid life in rural Portugal gives us, but sometimes parachuting into another place with other people reminds us how different we have become.

Ana and I are not known for living in normal places and working nine to five (what a way to make a living?), but I enjoyed a moment of self-refection while we spent a sunny Sunday afternoon drinking beer brewed by monks and eating steak tartare on a rural Belgian golf club terrace.

Apart from red/orange trousers, I had little in common with the Belgian golfers hammering balls down the practice field with differing levels of success...except, of course, for the ones who weren’t very good at golf.

Golf-terrace-life may be normal in many places, but being alien to us, we headed to the nearest village petrol station to chose from a wall of Belgian beers and then drank them under a beautiful linden tree on the golf course enjoying Belgium’s first weekend of sunshine.

It’s funny, I thought, how Brexiteers and in-the-heart-of-Europe Europeans both wear red trousers, where COVID is such a distant memory that everyone kisses everyone they greet, and there are places where you can hire a clifftop castle for a weekend on AirBnB.

The occasion of our Belgian break was the fortieth birthday of our great friend Lukas, who with his wife and our old pal Aela know how to put on a very good party, on this occasion at Chateau Mielmont and arriving later than most, we stayed at the nearby golf hotel.

Friday and Saturday featured barbecues, speeches, fireworks, generous pourings of wine and champagne, and a theme of “I don’t believe I’m wearing this.”

It involved a host of old friends and a clutch of even more new-to-us smart people who do proper jobs in proper places.

Machine learning up-starters, spin-doctors, diplomats, artists, educators, UN experts: weekend visitors from Amman, Cairo and Melbourne – yes, just in for the weekend – and all wearing outfits they would rather not share pictures of on LinkedIn.

As much as I try to stop myself, I’m so obsessed with our current water mineral content levels it’s hard not to disappear down rabbit-sized bore-holes when making polite “so what do you do” conversation.

A number of times I caught myself ending a long rant with the phrase: “so now we’re going back to the idea of reverse osmosis...” 

When people feign interest and nod without looking over my shoulder it merely encourages me: “so we’ll need three separate water lines into each house and can use the residue salt water in the pool – great eh?”

“Interesting,” polite people reply.

As regular readers know, I continue to be laughingly rubbish at the off-grid thing, and some of the self-deprecating stories do keep real people listening, but it helps when they’re trapped in the corner battlement of a castle where the only escape is leaping into the valley below.

I also found myself keen to ensure Portugal was properly represented in the face of all this northern European-ness.

“Call that a monastery?” I inexplicably said to Aela, while touring Maredsous Abbey, one of the most famous monasteries in Belgium which happened to be just half an hour down the road, but only built in 1872.

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“We went to one recently in Alentejo that dates from the 1500s and is so much bigger,” I said for some odd reason.

It was an amazing Abbey – with a fantastic tour guide who explained the importance of religious crooks and why they point different directions, how the history of western Europe is told through what's depicted on Euro notes and the strict rules defining what can be called a Trappist beer.

And after all, there’s no real competition: the reason spring is so vibrantly green in Belgium is that winter is so terrifyingly wet and grey.

Hark at me: not even three years living in Portugal and already playing the “my monastery is older than your monastery” game.

It was an educational weekend: I learned just how many German hospitals fake their invoices, how half of Mexicans get paid in cash, how expensive mezcal is more subtly smoky than the cheaper stuff and that Belgians eat a lot of cheese.

Belgian croquettes – especially the cheesy ones – are a bit like the Irish sport of hurling: if you grew up with it you can safely participate, but if not it can be extremely dangerous to stomach.

It’s perhaps the combination of the croquettes, the raw meat and the monk-u-factured cheese (served with their beer) that made by tummy ache - longing for a session of hurling - once we made it to Sweden.

We flew into Stockholm and took the cross-country train to surprise Ana’s stepdad Christer for his 71st birthday – traditionally a significant one after we did the same for her mum two years ago (when COVID had kept us away from her 70th).

Gertrud picked us up at the nearest station a little after 9pm after a sneaky switcheroo of cars to ensure Christer didn’t suspect anything.

We tiptoed around to surprise him at the kitchen table and slipped into the house delighted to hear the buzz of his Stihl strimmer and that he was still out in the fields cutting grass.

We waited in anticipation...

The strimming continued.

We turned off the lights to avoid detection and then waited a little longer...

The sound of strimming stopped; we got ready; the sound of strimming started again.

Then it got properly dark. The cutting continued.

It was 10.45pm before Christer returned to the house, exhausted and extremely (and happily) surprised to see us.

On his last day of being 70 he was strimming into the night...it’s exactly this kind of hard-working, determined rural living which inspired us to move to the countryside.

They also have a lot of great toys. I say toys, but this is proper farming.

Peak sheep is now over 80, the rye crop is tall and straight, and today Christer will be spinning yesterday’s cut grass into lines ready for bailing as Gertrud clips some sheep toenails and weighs the last three smallest lambs to see if they still need bottle-feeding.

They’ve been doing it more than a decade since Gertrud retired as a GP and they moved from the east to the west coast of Sweden to follow their dream.

Now they are definitely farming, as opposed to planting a few dozen trees and talking a lot about planting a vineyard.

They are fit and strong, look younger than ever and don’t drink very much wine.

I live in the hope that they had no idea what they were doing when they started, but I doubt it.

Staying at Rya Gård farm is a great refresher course in countryside stuff.

As well as detoxing with healthy home-grown food (and no croquettes) and collecting milk just one step away from the teat, Christer taught me how to set up an electric fence, and which strimmer wire to use to cut well with minimal plastic waste.

He was surprised by my speedy hole digging for wooden posts, but their land isn’t clay and it was a lot easier than digging our olive grove.

And while on the west coast of Sweden we took the week full circle by visiting Lennart and Marie Linnér at their summer house.

Lennart was Swedish ambassador to Thailand (and Ana’s old boss and dive buddy) when he married us in Bangkok a shade over 12 years ago - when we first met Aela and Lukas and friends.

There’s a lot of concern from friends and in the media at the moment that the machines are taking over the world and we will soon to be doomed to a life of servility to our artificially intelligent masters.

Perhaps we are already in The Matrix and now the ChatGPT bot can write undergraduate essays, human life on the planet is all but over.

Obviously those of us sitting off the grid in rural Portugal may not feel this as much in our day to day life of strimming land, calibrating our new irrigation system or trying to decide what tiles to choose for the new bathrooms.

We have a more clear and present danger.

It’s far from being an artificial fear and is felt both by us and by Simon & Garfunkel the dogs: that the cute small balls of mewling fur are becoming a gang who now control the valley.

Apologies to the collective noun pedants – I know that our litter of kittens is growing up to become a clowder – but they are behaving increasingly like a street gang.

I haven’t explicitly seen this, but I suspect they deal drugs from under the table grapes, are laundering tinned pet food and are in a territorial alliance with the wild boar (wild boar).

Cats can also be referred to as a clutter, a destruction or a nuisance – all of which are eerily accurate – and to be honest a “chowder” of cats is currently becoming a more attractive prospect.

Of course it’s Val Kilmer who’s the gang boss; I guess I should rename her Uncle Angelo (yes, Val Kilmer played a mob boss...in the 2021 film The Birthday Cake which I’ll be honest I’ve never watched and which received terrible reviews).

It began as simple stalking and basic-level begging (which Simon has mastered over many years), but it’s progressed to attritional meowing and complex attacks combining aggressive door-opening, with kittenburst deployment.

They scatter in a feline form of clutter bombing, distracting us by employing kitten chaff as covering fire as the boss advances straight for a direct assault on the kitchen to grab anything available SAS-style (get in, grab the chicken, get out).

As soon as we get one kitten back outside, another one sneaks in and it becomes a farcical round the table/over the sofa chase scene from an old Laurel & Hardy movie.

The destructive nuisance made off with most of Friday’s grilled chicken leftovers in a rare lapse of Saturday morning defences and retreated to the indoor/outdoor room to pee on our favourite leather chair and lick their paws while staring at us like serial killers.

The sooner we pack off BatCat and Doc Holliday to their new home the better...three cats might be more manageable than five (and cost us less in cat food).

And Simon was specifically targeted this week – courtesy, we suspect, of his new haircut.

Val, the hormone-loaded new mum, has previouly launched pre-emptive strikes on unknown dogs and their owners (I do hope the scars are healing Carlos?), and it seemed she didn’t recognise that Simon with short hair was the same dog as Simon with long hair.

It’s one of the reasons cats will never take over the world...and why machines won’t either...for a long time at least...but I’m coming to that.

In the best traditions of the Pink Panther, Simon was Inspector Clouseau while Val was Cat-o, ambushing him when we least expected it.

We had to intervene. Is there such a thing a cat valium...Val-ium? If there is, she needs some. And so do we.

Of course cats continue to play an important role in The Rise of the Machines.

I honestly believe that if people stopped posting cute cat videos online, the whole internet would break, the Matrix would fall and a great dystopian cat conspiracy would be revealed surrounding their role as a social media entry drug.

While we fawn over kittens trying to back out of a paper bag, our data is given to predatory internet companies to use by Russia to sway elections or to sell to advertisers while all the time reducing our concentration span so we forget how recently the cats were last fed.

Sneaky animals.

It all began with their role in the development of machine learning in the early 2010s – the early building blocks of today’s media hysteria-storm over ChatGPT and how clever computers have become.

Stay with me while we descend this week’s rabbit hole, which has once again played its part in what has been a particularly unproductive week stalked by kittens and failing technology.

Thankfully the builders were cracking on, pouring more concrete for the infinity pool and the third building, and cementing a roof ready for tiling.

Having just about finished the first half of our Portugal wine podcast, but not launched it yet (see below), I’ve been totally paralysed by the fear of how on earth to distribute or even gain some meagre compensation…

At one point I wanted to do little else than eat chocolate and binge-watch Scandi-Noir police dramas.

But thankfully I was saved by obsessive strimming (as opposed to streaming) which provide non-fattening endorphins and a sense of achievement: when you’ve been cutting things down for an hour, you can see that things have been cut down.

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I met Stanford Professor Andrew Ng when I was making a fun half hour documentary for the BBC in California called What If? The Next Tech Billionaires in 2012, when Uber was a quaint new thing in San Francisco.

Machine learning was in its infancy, computers were being trained to recognise images by bottle-feeding them pictures associated with labels and Prof Ng’s development of artificial neural networks – loosely based on the human brain – had just made everything exponentially faster.

By making tens of thousands of computers watch YouTube videos 24/7 for a week they had developed clusters of similar looking things and recognised what a “cat” looked like...even if they had never had the pleasure of being stalked or assaulted by one.

It was a big deal – the beginning of machines learning by themselves.

Today we can go to the Photos App on our phones, type in “cat” and the algorithm brings them all up – try it and you’ll see.

But here’s the flaw – I did that and while quite a few cats do come up, so do pictures of an owl mask (don’t ask), quite a few dogs, including Simon the dog next to an owl mask, our neighbour Daniel (!) and a pot plant.

Your phone doesn’t know what a cat is...it’s never met one...it just knows that of all the billions of pictures it’s analysed and learned from, things we call “cats” look a bit like cats...or owls...or pot plants.

Terminator, it ain’t.

In fact, I asked ChatGPT to explain to me why when I search for cats, owls appear and its explanation didn’t explicitly say “we’re not that good at it yet,” but did suggest it was my fault for recently searching for owls (how very dare you, I did no such thing).

I was lucky enough to spend a bit of time learning about machine learning and artificial intelligence during my amazing journalism fellowship at Stanford, and the key take-away is: they might be coming for our jobs, but they won’t be replacing us for a while yet.

If this is a subject that interests or scares you, there are a few good people to look out for.

Andrew Ng posts various interviews with top computing brains like Fei-Fei Li who is another pioneer in the field and who runs Stanford’s Human-Centred Artificia…

Going Off The Grid means different things to different people.

One iteration is me living barefoot on the land, not washing my long hair and disappearing down disinformation rabbit holes: “Turn on, tune in, drop out” as Timothy Leary urged in the 1960s.

The resilience and persistence of Portuguese brambles and the spiky grass seed pods that drive Simon the dog to distraction keep my shoes firmly attached to my feet, and while I could do with a trim, the flowing locks ship sailed long ago.

My journalistic career has also inoculated me against the explosion of conspiracy theories that social media and the oncoming wave of AI generated lies will no doubt bring, and I’m happier with a wobble from wine that anything psychedelic.

Our version of off the grid is a bit more straightforward: living as comfortably as possible without being physically connected to any of the services most people take for granted.

We’re responsible for sourcing the basics like water and power, heating, treating the waste and keeping in contact with the outside world.

A robust car helps, and a second puncture in a week is a reminder of how much we depend on reliable transportation.

Helped by passing friends – and by a passing stranger – it was also a great reminder of the important role community plays in remote rural places.

Every day continues to be a school day and our big take-away is keeping the balance between what you’ve got and what you need to do with it.

With this in mind, I’m using my 101st despatch for an Off-Grid living 101:

1. Water

There are many things which keep us awake at night, but one of the most common is water - and the potential lack of it – especially with this week’s record-breaking temperatures in Portugal for April and talk of drought again after all that rain in December.

We have enough for us – for now – but our tourism lodge will need enough for up to 20 guests at any one time.

Conservatively we need 200 litres per person per day, but some people can be very liberal when taking a shower, so we’re looking at four to five thousand litres every day in the height of summer when evaporation counter-intuitively robs our pool and our lake during the night.

How do we nicely but firmly ask our guests to be frugal with water? Any thoughts?

Ana is researching shower heads that save water by either increasing pressure to provide the feeling of power, or adding air to give the appearance of volume.

We progressed from buying mineral water to filling up at a spring (once the invisibility cloak of a municipal dustbin was removed to reveal the terrible truth of how much plastic we actually throw away), and now we collect and drink (and carbonate) rain water.

Regular readers will know we decided to throw the dice and dig a BFH – a Big F***ing Hole – with the help of a twitching man and some divining inspiration.

The borehole diggers stopped at 205m, estimating it could produce 5,000 litres a day – not a lot in the water world, but enough to keep our guests hydrated.

But the big unknown was quality – why invest even more money in a pump and hundreds of metres of pipe and power cord if the water’s even worse than what we have already?

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But you don’t know if you need a pump until you have a pump – to clean out all the debris and then take a good enough sample – and so we put it in and set about wasting a lot of water.

With regular measurements of how long it took how much water to flow into the field we counted nine thousand litres on the first day and the same on the second...but it’s all about quality.

The new water is slightly salty, but doesn’t appear to have much iron in it (which would require a separate filtration system), but let’s see what the lab says.

2. Electricity

When we first moved in, it took a little while to balance what we wanted to power with what we had to power it with...and the answer was not a great deal.

Batteries barely took us through the night, and the system would trip if we ran a washing machine while making toast.

Our former Bavarian neighbours moved their panels by hand three times a day to track the sun and provide them with just enough power for LED lights and the bare essentials.

Talk about the perfect balance.

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Courtesy of our huge new system (and a significant investment), we currently have more electricity than we know what to do with, but that will soon change.

Handing our electrical engineer Bruno a list of all the things we’d like to install in the new buildings, he estimated we’d need a system three times bigger if they were all running at once.

So now we’re reducing ovens, rationing hair dryers and favouring efficiency over anything else. We could make it work, but our guests will not be so forgiving.

3. Waste water

By far my favourite job is unblocking the sewage pipes after fast-growing trees have invaded them in a wandering search for water.

That is top of mind as we plan the routes for the waste and the location of our new reed-bed treatment system.

The ideal spot is slightly higher on the hill, but we can’t have macerater pumps propelling poop willy-nilly, so gravity is our friend.

Recycling grey water from showers and sinks into toilets sounds great, but that water still needs to be cleaned and every house would need a separate filtration system.

Anything that needs power needs to be controlled and told to run when we want it to – when the sun is shining and we’re not slow cooking wild boar, washing clothes and making toast while I dry my flowing locks.

This week we had a visit from Debbie & Colin Davis who sought us out after hearing my From Our Own Correspondent despatch from the Valley of the Stars (listen here from 24’44”), reading the blog and feeling inspired enough to want to spend a week exploring the Alentejo!

It was great they could stay with us and give us some thoughts on water and building after renovating two buildings of their own - including a large barn conversion in France.

4. Heat

The current houses use thermal solar systems which work brilliantly – heating up large tank-loads of water by day with heat-exchanger panels on the roof.

But they need to be monitored, and this week I had to call on Boiler Master Guido to show me how to let air out and re-pressurise the system when it stopped producing hot water.

Our wood fire also heats our water tank and we have plenty of excess wood to burn and so we didn’t use any gas all winter.

The lesson is simple: keep it simple. The more systems there are, the more there is to go wrong, and so we’re installing heat pumps in the new buildings for hot water and underfloor heating/cooling through electricity.

We’re relying on photovoltaic power in the knowledge that the coldest times here also have the clearest skies and the new panels work surprisingly well in cloud.

If the sun ain’t shining it’s neither generating electricity nor is it heating water.

The only backup will be a generator that we hope not to need.

5. Clearing the land

We’d rather not call on the emergency services to save our house from fire (again), so it’s up to us to manage the land, keep it clean and invite in the good fire, as our pal Wade says.

While we await help in the form of sheep, goats or donkeys (still TBC), the gym work is going well and the heat wave is ensuring I am wiped out and dehydrated after spendi…

On the occasion of my 100th despatch from the Valley of the Stars I had hoped to share stories of success, of overcoming the odds despite a total ignorance and having reached some form of accomplished-DIY and self-sufficient level of consciousness.

Sadly it was not to be.

It was one of those days when something was clearly in retrograde.

You know, one of those days where everything you try to do just breaks, refuses to work in the first place, or generally doesn’t go your way...and then kicks you when you’re down.

I’ve blamed this astrological phenomenon before when satellite dishes mysteriously didn’t send lead TV news stories from frontlines, or when computers go into an endless “wheel of death” chug-mode and a hard reboot erases everything you’d spent the last three hours doing.

I had to double-check which of the planets it concerned, thinking it was probably Mercury, but could be Uranus.

I need to get better at identifying the stars, constellations and events like the Lyrids meteor shower this weekend...especially in the Valley of the Stars...but on the astrology front I clearly could not tell Myarse from Uranus.

And that infected everything I was trying to achieve on action day.

Action weekend had begun well.

I had dug out and brushed off the Stihl grass strimmer ready for the Spring strim-off when I clear land around all the buildings to protect them from fire in accordance with the law.

In a previous life the “Steels” was a pub in Camden...now it is the local machine supplier and repair shop...how things change.

I remembered the first year when I broke the strimmer which we inherited with the house (by not shaking the oil and petrol mix before starting it: who knew? I do, now) and had to invest heavily in a new Stihl.

I promised Ana I would pay back the investment in hours worked and shed pounds in the process...so at the €15/hour it would cost for contracting it out, it would take a while but would be worth it.

It’s my annual fast-track weight loss programme and last year it was very successful as not only did I lose lots of weight, but I also helped save the houses when fire unusually came our way.

So off I set with the confidence of someone who’s done this before – twice in fact.

Someone who doesn’t constantly power a strimmer at full throttle and risk “breaking its heart.”

Someone who knows to use the metal blade where there are fewer rocks and when to opt for plastic wire; someone with experience in these things.

Landscaper Carlos had reminded me we had until the end of April to clear all the land, but how did April get so far towards May without me even noticing?

It’s been amazing looking back at the pictures from last year when the land was so overgrown it took weeks of work and I became obsessed.

This year things are a little easier courtesy of the fire which did a huge amount of the clearing for us last autumn.

But rather than rest on my well-trimmed laurels, now is the chance to once and for all get in control of as much of the land as possible.

The hope is to get some sheep before too long...perhaps so they can graze away the first shoots of silves brambles and keep the grass even shorter next spring, but for now I need to crack on.

Three hours of self-satisfied strimming flew by, but it was day two of the strim-athon when things started to go wrong.

Firstly my beautiful new birthday pocket knife escaped a hole in my pocket. Every self-respecting Alentejano farmer has such a knife and would never be so careless as to lose one.

Then my incompetence of not loading the plastic cutting string properly (despite being Someone with experience in these things) led to the base flying off and the loss of a small but crucial part, without which my work here could not be done.

After an hour of small part searching and pocket knife despair I abandoned the exercise for other things.

We have a new word in the valley: “Kittenburst” – it’s the chaos unleashed when the cat cage is opened every morning and the little buggers scatter and start destroying everything we own.

I drove to the shops for kitten food, and after being distracted by other stuff, had to turn around and go back for the kitten food.

Irritation levels by this point rising, I arrived home to the sound of heavy hissing. Sadly it wasn’t Val the cat angry at not being fed, but it was my tyre – I’d picked up a huge puncture.

I sprayed in the can of stuff you spray into punctured tyres, but it seems you should wait until the air is out before putting the air (and stuff) back in, and so it sprayed all over me instead. Grr.

No problem, I thought, we have Siouxsie the Suzuki in reserve, and while a mouse nest had affected her performance a while back, that had been all sorted...but apparently it wasn’t: the battery was as flat as my tyre.

So I needed power from one of the extension leads...but they were all laid out across the hillside providing power for the new submersible pump which was draining the well in a wasteful experiment to open up the fissures in the water table (don’t ask).

Once the battery was awkwardly extracted from Siouxsie to be plugged in, it went on charge while I re-inflated the tyre.

By the time I discovered Siouxsie’s battery was officially dead, the tyre was leaking air again and it was a race against time (and the familiar hissing) to get to the garage before it was flat. Grr.

But what could possibly go wrong watering the new citrus trees in the bottom of the valley? Repeatedly forgetting things and having to walk back up and down the hill to fetch them.

What’s that military phrase again? Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Hmm.

I decided just to stop doing anything technical and to ride out the retrograde.

Cheers Mercury.

But despite the setbacks and the reminder that I still am Someone who still has no idea what he’s doing after 100 despatches, there’s much to be thankful for.

We had a wonderful Easter of guests: Ed, Rachel & Daisy joined Lotti and her three girls Sasha, Katya and Lina for a week of beaches, fabulous food binges and a couple of all-hands-on-deck planting power-hours.

And on Maundy Thursday we had Nick & Penny and our old pal Richard Sargent over for lunch with his sister and family.

The last of the olive trees went in – as did the plums, cherries and nectarines which have been loitering beside the house for far too long.

We’ve noticed a new little stream which was cute to start with, until we realised it might be a leak in the dam wall: not a torrent, but equally not something you can stick a thumb into.

The solution will be to use the water by planting some thirsty trees like avocados or almonds...but as the temperature here is rising, the planting window is quickly closing...

In the best efforts to no longer mix Mercury up with Uranus (this just never gets old to me), I did a little research on astronomy and astrology.

Being “in retrograde” relates to periods of the year when Mercury revolves around the sun slower than the Earth and although orbiting nearly four times faster, appears to be moving backwards in the night sky.

Now that sounds familiar.

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Each year – and for three …

There’s something I find very special about islands perched in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and this week’s despatch originates on one of them.

It’s a place known for its highs: we slept suspended 8m above the ground and breathed in bubbles of sulphur steam.

Do you know where it is yet?

We ate black pudding with pineapple, lodged in a windmill, ventured through underground tunnels to reach a hidden valley and almost swam in tidal pools (come on, it is April).

Oh, and we tried some new volcanic wines made from some unique island grapes.

You must have guessed by now?

My first time on an Atlantic Island was Tenerife as a kid on a family holiday.

The Canary Islands are so much more accessible than St Helena British Overseas Territory, where I went a few years ago for a story on the first commercial flight landing at a new airport blighted by wind shear.

It had cost DfID (the Department for International Development) a fortune and was closed immediately after it opened because of safety fears – the runway perched on a rock with a precipice either end was subject to strong, shifting and unpredictable winds.

Even Charles Darwin complained about the wind while he was there, as did Napoleon, but he complained about everything, which is fair enough...as he was in exile and ended up dying there.

Our fabulous producer and friend Firle came up with the idea and had set up the whole St Helena trip, but given her flying history (surviving three plane crashes and countless near-misses) we asked if she could take the boat and we’d meet her there?

Sadly the BBC couldn’t spare her for the six weeks it takes to sail from Cape Town and as it turned out the re-opening of the airport couldn’t have been any smoother courtesy of a new wind-monitoring system and some canny flying practices.

I also did some stories on the Ascension-islanders and their loss of the RAF air bridge and despite not managing to visit yet, have discovered a Portuguese connection.

When they discovered Conception island in 1501 (and then rediscovered it two years later on Ascension Day) they didn’t even bother claiming it.

Last year I took Ana on a surprise 50th birthday trip to Madeira which was amazing – you can read all about it below.

This year I somehow managed to pull off the same trick again with a surprise birthday trip to a different island: São Miguel, the largest of the Azores Islands (or Açores as I now know them).

Amid all the chaos going on around us in the Valley of the Stars and after a week in Lisbon painting the flat in time for the tourist season (thanks for coming out to help us Hugh!) we needed a break.

And when it comes to getting away from it all, a volcanic chunk of rock a third of the way across the ocean towards America – is definitely “getting away”.

The nine islands of the Açores autonomous region of Portugal span 600km from Flores in the wetter west to São Miguel in the east and are home to around 250,000 people.

They straddle the mid-Atlantic ridge, to which they owe their existence, at the meeting of North American, African and Eurasian tectonic plates: the building blocks of the earth which are slowly but surely moving apart, allowing molten rock to seep out and occasionally to create islands.

Iceland is the biggest, and both St Helena and Ascension were formed a similar way much further south – but perfectly located between them, the Açores are just a two hour flight from Lisbon, and tickets are extremely affordable.

It’s less than six hours on a flight from Boston, and RyanAir has also started flying direct from the UK.

The roads are amazing and the island is welcoming and accessible.

Visiting more than one island needs an extra flight or a lot more time for a ferry – we’ll maybe try SATA/Azores Airlines next time to reach Pico Island which is where most of the wine is made.

Now what was all that about highs that I mentioned in the beginning? Well, it’s a geographer’s dream this place...

The Açores High takes the name of the island, but its impact is far more widely felt – the anticyclone of high pressure which sits over the islands has been called “the gatekeeper of European rainfall.”  

Studies published in Nature Geoscience magazine have linked larger Azores Highs to wetter weather in the UK and drier times on the Iberian Peninsula...and discovered that the highs have been expanding since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Yup, climate change again...and an explanation for the increasingly frequent droughts we’ve had in our part of Portugal and across southwestern Europe.

The pressure system also impacts North American weather, and together with the warm waters of the Gulf Stream ocean current, has created a tropical paradise on these lumps of lava in the ocean.

The steep-cliffed uninhabited islands were discovered by the Portuguese in the early 1400s, even if there are some theories pointing to previous inhabitants.

Oranges were once the island’s fruit – a lucrative crop when European explorers were criss-crossing the oceans on voyages of discovery.

Wine grapes were also a hit with the sailors and the Catholic church until phylloxera and various other grape diseases arrived from America in the late 1800s and did a similar destructive job as they did in the rest of Europe.

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Pineapples seemed a good alternative.

The conditions aren’t perfect, but grown under glass (or plastic these days) they are very productive...and go unexpectedly go well with blood sausage which is known as Morcela com Ananas and is one of the island’s specialities.

Another is Cozido das Furnas – a Portuguese stew of mixed meats and vegetables but with an Açorense twist: it’s cooked underground in naturally hot volcanic soils.

We didn’t try the cozido, but we did try boiling ourselves in the hot springs at Furnas – the most famous lake and hot-spa town in the east of the island.

I love the smell of sulphur in the morning.

We enjoyed some amazing grilled fish, and although the limpets weren’t as good as in Madeira, the wine was great (more to come on that in the wine blog) and the accommodation – in an old converted windmill – was quite spectacular.

We climbed the spiral staircase every night and slept 8m up with ocean sights and sounds and enjoyed the novelty of compact living.

With a car for five days we toured the island, heading to the famous Sete Cidades caldera (collapsed volcanic crater) in the west of the island and walked around one of the lakes.

We hiked the Rota de Água through long underground tunnels dug many years ago for smuggling booze to the Janela do Inferno waterfall and hidden valley.

A coastal path completed our holiday hikes and we headed home to relieve Ray from his house-sitting and animal feeding duties – thanks so much for helping with my birthday surprise Ray.

Ana was blown away by the beauty of the Açores, I fell in love with another Atlantic Island, and the great thing is there are eight more of them to explore...even if I might not get away with the “birthday island surprise” trick next year.

Guess I’ll have to dream up something more imaginative.

There have been times since embarking on this slightly crazy off-grid existence when I’ve had the overwhelming feeling that things have been spiralling out of control.

Batteries have failed, machines have broken and the delicate balancing act of converting sunshine into heat and power has occasionally tipped us into darkness.

I’ve chased my tail, frantically doggy-paddled to keep my head above water and then finally felt I was getting ahead of the pack.

Things have become significantly easier with experience (and a massive new solar power station), but this week marked the return of that old feeling of control slipping steadily away.

While a graffiti artist electrician exposed our lack of preparation, it was the shifting of household dynamics which was mostly to blame: the animals appear to be taking over.

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The harmonious balance of Simon & Garfunkel has been hijacked by a highly hormonal cat and some kittens in a basket.

Simon’s always been in charge, but Val Kilmer has been launching herself at him – claws out –  when he dares to even look at her the wrong way, and Garfie is just disturbed by everything.

He fears change, and a bundle of squealing furry wrigglers along with the boss being battered by the new arrival classifies as great change.

There are many mouths to feed, each one considers itself the priority and all of them have started making more noise to assert themselves.

Whether it’s incessant scream-mewling, passive-aggressive food demands disguised as giant dog yawns or aggressive-aggressive assertions belted out as full-on barking, the decibel level is definitely increasing every day.

Mid-meow, Val prostrates herself at my feet every time I enter the indoor/outdoor room – or hurling herself at our bedroom window demanding...something...food, love, entertainment?

“Just tell me what you want!” I shout at her...but so far she’s been unable to explain precisely what it is, or why she’s constantly trying to sneak kittens into the house when we’re not looking and stashing them behind the washing machine.

She’s been tossing the smallest one around like a rag doll...I’m not entirely sure whether she’s ruthlessly trying to weed it out of the nest, or if it’s a cry for help.

But in the pursuit of answers I inspected its crustily unopened eyes to discover a nasty infection which two of the others also picked up.

But it was one of the other kittens which sadly didn’t make it.

We were meeting our new bank manager in Lisbon and were in full flow enthusing about our building/tourism/wine project when our phones began buzzing in our pockets.

It was Debi – our vegan, German, new-mum neighbour who was keeping an eye on Val and the progeny while we were away, and who was in floods of tears over the death of Moses when we finally got through to her after the meeting.

(If you have no idea what I’m talking about, and why Moses, please see last week’s post below).

Ana’s honest response that cats have lots of kittens to prepare for such an eventuality was met with upset that only intensified when Ana suggested how best to dispose of the body.

“Just throw it into the woods and the pigs will eat it,” led to a surge in sobbing as Ana tried to mitigate this extremely practical but seemingly callous suggestion with a word on the cycle of life and nutrition.

The ill-fated kitten had seemingly been born with an internal issue, and on our return all efforts were directed towards keeping the small one alive.

Bruce Wayne Batcat is definitely the strongest and Iceman/Icewoman (still TBC) weighed in at 285g – a little more than Jim Morrison but double the size of the yet to be named small but adventurous one (perhaps “Mark Twain” might suit?).

A reassuring trip to the vet later, and both bottle feeding and eyedrop application were added to the daily chores of litter-tray cleaning and advanced animal expectation management.

Thankfully we’ve been sharing the load with Ana’s brother Erik who is visiting from Sweden and has been taking his kitten responsibilities as seriously as his hole digging and tree planting.

Erik’s been experimenting with digital nomad-ness and extremely remote working, and so far it’s gone pretty well.

He’s a mathematical genius and software engineer who I’ve been trying to get to write in two sentences exactly what he does – beyond “computer stuff for Intel.”

It’s a massive over-simplification to say he creates software models that mimic new hardware before it’s built to test how it will perform once released, but it’s something like that.

The return of our neighbour Daniel to the valley – albeit briefly and with a clutch of guests – has kept Simon from under our feet as he’s been casually and shamelessly dropping over for begging expeditions.

And although Garfie is still struggling with a torn knee ligament – the treatment of which may require another trip to the bank manager to arrange a suitable overdraft – he’s been insisting on night duties to justify his existence...even though it’s bad for him.

He’s just happy not to be in scary Lisbon anymore...and to have some time to himself to take his frustrations out by barking at the wild boars and the neighbourhood dogerati while the kittens and their needle-paws mum are sleeping.

Despite some welcome rain which helped encourage the newly planted trees to grow, the builders have been laying bricks like men possessed and the villa is really taking shape.

The walls are mostly up now and so we’re wandering around visualising what might go where and whether we should paint, plaster and paint, or otherwise decorate the concrete ceilings which picked up a fun wood-look from the form-wood boards. What do you think?

We paid another visit to the stonemason’s yard to choose something appropriate in marble for the window and door sills (pinkish-green), and were on hand for the graffiti electrician who appeared on site with a spray-can of paint.

Our off-grid status means we apparently don’t legally need a formal electrical plan or project, but we’re leaning towards getting one anyway as it’s all quite complicated this electricity stuff...and the consequences of getting it wrong are not insignificant.

Electrocuted guests can’t leave bad reviews, but their relatives can.

The spray paint was to mark where on the walls of the main building the sockets and lights should go...and even though we’d done some planning we still don’t quite know how the restaurant kitchen will be organised.

As a result, we may have over-lamped and gone socket-crazy, but better that than reaching to plug in a corner lamp when everything’s finished, only to find there’s nowhere nearby and to leave it languishing in unpowered darkness.

“By the time you’ve finished building you’ll know how you should have done it,” our engineer José helpfully explained.

I’m suddenly feeling anxious...the kittens...the eye drops...feeding time at the zoo...and we haven’t even ordered the chickens, the sheep, or Vasco (the llama) yet.

Mais animais!