Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal

A surprising reaction to bagpipe music from the big dog Garfunkel from August 2022.

“This wasn’t an instrument the original Simon & Garfunkel were known for…the only connection is that some people prefer the Sound of Silence to the bagpipes.”

TRANSCRIPT…

Garfunkel was quietly guarding his radiator in the lounge as usual when his ears suddenly pricked up, he hauled his 65kg frame over to the table wagging his tail, and gave my arm a huge shove with his giant nose.

This can sometimes happen when I’ve forgotten to give him and Simon breakfast, but this was animated, it was unusual and it was because I was playing...bagpipe music.

This wasn’t an instrument the original Simon & Garfunkel were known for, and other than the occasional folk music cover of their hits, the only connection is that some people prefer the Sound of Silence to the bagpipes.

So why on earth would a pedigree Portuguese Rafeiro do Alentejo (Alentejo Mastiff) like the bagpipes?

Welcome to this week’s rabbit hole and the discovery that a tradition of bagpipe playing in Portugal goes back to the 11th century...and possibly even further if you consider the Romans also had a doodlesack fetish.

Stone carvings show shepherds with the instrument, there’s a Celtic connection, and from the 19th century it was popularly known as gaita across the north-western Iberian Peninsula, and the Bagpipe Society says it was clearly a thing.

The Portuguese name for bagpipe is Gaita-de-fole – the Spanish of Galicia call it Gaita galega – both were made from goatskin and wood.

It a mainly northern Portuguese tradition, but the Portuguese Bagpipe Society say it reached areas near us, where Garfie’s ancestors were bred to protect the cattle as the farmers drove the herds up into the mountains in the summer and back to the plains in the winter.

There’s clearly loads of this history in Garfie’s DNA: for instance he always works nights, insisting to be off-leash outside to protect us and the property from threats like wild boar (wild boar) and moonlight hikers.

Judging from the giant land mines he’s dumped literally right on the edge of our property he’s drawn a red line, daring any nest-making piggies to cross.

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By day he’s more like Ferdinand the Bull sleeping by the non-functioning radiator or under the shade of the cork oaks smelling his favourite flowers.

But take him to the beach and he goes into full-on protection mode.

Simon goes straight for the shade of an umbrella – and onto a beach towel whether or not one is free – whereas Garfunkel makes a point of sitting five to ten metres away facing outwards.

He stares at every passer-by intently and suspiciously, takes the high-ground if it’s available and scans all the approach routes: it’s stressful work, he never drinks on the job, and he’s knackered by the time he gets home.

Garfie is our security guard, our close protection, and despite his calm demeanour, his warning barks could accurately be described as spine-chilling.

Even Simon, who only keeps his top dog status through age and Garfie’s good nature, prances with annoyingly more confidence knowing the big dog has his back.

So with these instincts already running through his blood it’s not surprising that he likes bagpipe music, even if he’s not terribly sure why.

One question you may have at this point is why on earth I was listening to bagpipe music in the first place, and this brings us on to another close-protection gentle-giant who has sadly passed away far too young.

I first met Michael “The R” Rautenbach in Cape Town with our friend Roger who recently came to stay, and it was the video clip from his wake which featured the lone piper playing the lament Flower of the Forest.

“Rautie” was a legend: Roger’s business partner in the security business, an ex-special forces, anti-drugs officer in South Africa who Ana and I were lucky enough to spend some time with...particularly in the Cape winelands and occasionally at our Dog & Hound bar in Nairobi.

In the days before he died of a heart attack at 58 after years of heart trouble, Roger and he had been discussing an upcoming visit to see us in Vale das Estrelas.

It was such a terrible shame we didn’t get the chance to braai with Michael one last time and to share a Portuguese wine tasting or three.

Wine tasting is not top of my list this weekend after an amazing couple of days in Estremoz in the winelands of inland Alentejo.

One of our favourite wineries is Howard’s Folly in the centre of the historic walled city and the occasion was Howard’s 60th birthday – a two day party with hugely generous quantities of food and wine from hosts Howard & Susie.

We met an amazing group of weird and wonderful people from all over the world – including our old pal DC who was en route to another filming assignment in Ukraine – stay safe buddy (and that goes for everyone else working there, and that includes you, Q).

Dinner at the Folly Restaurant on the first night was very special with a modern and international take on Alentejo traditions, and the most wonderful amuse-bouche that exploded in the mouth like a xiao long bao soup dumpling...perhaps not surprising with Howard’s long association with Hong Kong.

As ever, the wines were great – the empty bottle inventory for the winery meal and Estremoz pousada dinner the following night was impressive.

If you ever find yourself planning a trip to the Alentejo winelands and Évora or Estremoz make sure you eat at Howard’s Folly restaurant and try some of his wine.

The head winemaker is David Baverstock: a giant of Portugal’s wine industry, a consultant to many wonderful wineries, who spent decades developing Esporão into an amazing vineyard: one name from Alentejo many people around the world probably know.

We were lucky enough to interview his successor, the brilliantly skilled and passionate Sandra Alves this week – despite the pressure of the harvest having started early courtesy of the summer heat wave.

There’ll be much more about her and about Esporão – one of the world’s largest wholly organic vineyards – on the wine blog in the coming months.

And speaking of grapes, we’ve just harvested our first bunch of table grapes from the vines beside the house.

I honestly thought I’d killed them when my Spring pruning was overenthusiastic to say the least.

I’ve torn off the odd diseased leaf and trimmed them back once or twice, to avoid mildew and given them absolutely no water at all.

But the mists that sometimes roll in did their work and the red grapes are sweet and juicy, the smaller white grapes also ready to eat...and this year we’re going to eat them all and not try drying them...which did little other than attract a load of flies to the valley last year.

And with our landscaping architect friend Wade Graham heading here from LA, and with Ray Morison volunteering to stay with us, decades after he first lived here in São Teotónio, the late summer focus will be plants, seedlings, and perhaps building a greenhouse...although I haven’t mentioned that yet!

An addiction from trying to get healthy and lose some weight, but I had no idea when I wrote this in May 2022 just how important it was going to be for our survival…

TRANSCRIPT…

I bear the track-marks of an addict.

Anyone catching a glimpse of my forearms at the moment may well wonder whether the drug of choice in the Valley of the Stars has switched from wine to heroin.

“Punctures, scabs and bruising...on the forearms, hands and legs...in the same area without healing time,” is how one drug awareness website describes the red flags for an intravenous heroin user.

And while the marks haven’t been made by needles, I am addicted – or perhaps obsessed – with my new workout routine based around extreme gardening.

The alarm has been going off earlier and earlier, and I’ve been hitting the fields with the strimmer from 6.30am to avoid the heat – thank goodness our recently-returned neighbour Daniel is an even earlier riser.

But I think you’ll agree, the workout’s working out...in more ways than one.

It was back in February when I broke the news of a little health scare on the occasion of my half-century MOT: high cholesterol.

The doc gave me a few months to tackle it and so aside from tucking into Ana’s amazing rye, oat, flax and sunflower seed bread, I’ve been focussed on doctor’s orders: popping a red rice yeast pill a day and getting my weight down from around 108kg.

Yes, that does seem a lot...but I did use to be a rugby prop forward.

I could of course lose a load of weight really fast – maybe 30kg – by either giving up wine or amputating a leg, but I’m not sure which of those is more extreme.

I was 118kg about six years ago when I did my big wheat cutting diet and got down to a hundred which demanded a new wardrobe.

And so that has been the aim over the last few weeks – to move from three figures into two and comfortably get into two particular shirts ambitiously bought on the dip and unattainable since.

I can honestly say...hand on heart...that I haven’t quite made it yet...but I’m close!

This week I clocked in at 100.8kg – after a three-hour strimming session and before rehydration – which isn’t representative, but it is encouraging...and it feeds my addiction.

It’s about €15 an hour to hire someone with a strimmer to cut back the silves brambles, whip down the long grass, mulch through some estevas rock roses and start dealing with the canas bamboo cane.

Of course it’s about aesthetics, but also a law to clear land within 50m of every building – there have been some pretty brutal wildfires in Portugal in recent years and this is a great way of trying to reduce their ferocity.

The sensible thing – which Daniel did this week – is to get a team of three of four guys in for a day and it’s all done.

But after breaking the strimmer which came with the house, we invested in a good but expensive piece of Stihl kit and I vowed to pay for the machinery in at least that many hours every year.

Finally we’re up on our investment and starting to reap the dividends as well as the wild lavender.

The track marks on my arms come from rocks, stones and sharp shards of woody stalks flying up from the metal mulching blade or the thick spinning plastic wire.

Each tool is better suited to a different foe, but there’s a deadline as metal blades and chainsaws can’t be used once it’s too dry – the irony of starting a fire while trying to prevent a fire is not lost on the authorities.

And while the obvious thing to do would be to wear long-sleeved shirts, it’s already too late for that and my track marks have become a badge of honour: if I catch someone clocking them and judging me, I kind of want them to ask.

It’s a dangerous thing, the countryside, and doesn’t Simon know it – especially at this time of year.

One weed with a terrible propensity for spreading horizontally and covering the land with thousands of small sharp spikey balls is a true bane in the lives of Simon & Garfunkel, but particularly for the little dog.

The “spikeys” get everywhere; to mis-quote Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels we “f-ing hate spikeys.”

They get into his beard and dig themselves in his fur so deeply that it’s uncomfortable getting them out – especially when he wriggles.

Spikey-time lasts for months, so we’re pondering a close-cut, GI-Si summer trim.

But this week the poor little fella got something in his eye and it swelled up like a boxer (weird, him being a terrier and that).

We had suspicions that Garfunkel was involved, given the Mike Tyson tattoo on the side of his face, or that it was a bee sting, but as soon as we got to the vet it became clear the culprit was a large piece of evil grass.

Carlos the landscaper knew straight away about the notorious grass with tiny barbs which works its way in but is a nightmare to get out – especially without opposable thumbs.

Ouchy. The moment the vet extracted it with tweezers Simon’s tail started wagging – even though he was pinned down on a vet’s examination table.

We all know that wonderful feeling of recently-cleared eye relief.

His eyeball was a little scratched, so he’s on the anti-inflammatory and antibiotic drops for a few days, but the patient is responding well to treatment.

As you’ll see from the photos, not only is the land looking neatly trimmed, but the building supplies also keep on coming.

“Novas obras?” (new construction?) people like O Rei das Vacas (The Cow King) have been asking with a smile.

The new solar system will soon be installed, we are finalising the water supply and treatment systems and can properly dream about how amazing it’s going to look and how stunning the view will be with a glass of fabulous Alentejo wine in hand.

Our project is happening: we will have a little tourist lodge, infinity pool and wine tasting deck.

There’s a lot more stress and pain and bureaucracy and frustration to come in the next year or two, but it is happening.

“S**t,” to quote what Ana said when we heard the news that we’d been offered the loan last year, “we’re going to have to do it now.”

With one final push to get the last of the strimming done – and to get the scales under 100kg for more than just a fleeting moment – we can embrace June, enjoy the summer and the visits of some fabulous friends.

How the city of Porto suddenly got closer, but still far enough away to ponder a big decision…to give up or to keep stressed and carry on?

I mention a blog on wine that I also write - it’s called The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure and is the precursor to a proper podcast on Alentejo wines. Sign up to join the mailing list for that below.

TRANSCRIPT…

The day began with Ana saying it was time to stop.

After putting so much time, energy and money into our big idea of building a little tourism and wine tasting lodge it was time to let it go.

I argued the other side – that we had come so far, we were so close to laying bricks and it was the key to our future in Portugal.

But by that same afternoon – on the drive back from Porto – we had switched roles.

I was the one who was driving – depressed and in silence – while Ana was making the case for why all was not lost and how we really should carry on.

It’s a rollercoaster I’m sure many people embarking on a new business venture experience, but it’s not being helped by inflation, war in Europe and relying on other people.

Our long drive was helped when Porto moved a lot closer to us overnight.

The day before I’d checked how long it would take to drive to the little town south of Porto that’s home to the world’s biggest cork manufacturer.

Seven and a half hours was a lot more than I expected; in fact it was a lot further than I thought it was possible to drive up or down Portugal without reaching that little strip of Spain, or the sea.

This was clearly not a journey one could do both ways in a day, but Firle was in town on a break from covering the war in Ukraine and so the dogs had somewhere to stay.

Daniel offered to put us up in his place north of Lisbon for an overnight stop and to meet his old friend – an Australian eye surgeon who’s found his own piece of paradise in northern Portugal.

Seven and a half hours? That’s more than LA to San Francisco.

I checked again and realised the “avoid tolls” setting was on: Cassie the Hilux gets hammered for being a Class 2 car in a size-ist world of vehicle taxation and so we save when we can.

Tinkering the map settings, Porto moved about three hours closer – four and a half hours at the wheel was much more palatable. Portugal is not too unmanageable to explore by car.

The Amorim cork factory was a thing to behold and about far much more than just the five point eight billion bottle stoppers they produce every year – yes, you read that right –  5.8billion...a year.

From flooring to fashion, and space rockets to fine art, cork is an amazing, carbon-negative material which Amorim’s scientists are making even more remarkable every day.

I’ll be writing the wine blog about cork this week and so don’t want to spoil the surprise about the secret of how they stopped wine bottles from even getting corked.

Please sign up below to head more about that and all our wine adventures.

The drive might have been a lot shorter than originally anticipated, but it was still plenty of time in the car to talk about our project, our ambitions, the current financial climate...and how everything seems to be going against us.

Each step has been moving so disappointingly slowly for so long, and now prices are going up every week and the cost of our build is wildly inflating.

It’s true of any building project, but just as we have felt good and in control, something new and unexpected has arrived to shove a huge spanner in the works.

The coldest part of the night is just before dawn, and we thought we were through it all when we found two builders we loved, chose one of them and believed we’d be starting this month.

But then we learned a new Portuguese word: Alvará.

It’s one of the two thousand or so Portuguese words to originate from the Arabic, and it’s a government-issued document authorizing a builder to work up to a certain size of project.

Our guys have level two...and they need level three...and it’s not quick, cheap or easy to get the next grade up...and apparently there aren’t any level three builders in our region.

I’ve no idea how we didn’t just know this was needed beforehand...but we’re grateful to our friends Vera and Joep for teaching us Alvará before we applied, waited and then had our building licence refused!

So now everything is in the hands of other people: our architect, the câmara (town hall), and the builder to get the project tweaked so we can start before prices have risen so much we can’t afford it any more.

We still have faith but it’s a race against time and it’s all pretty stressful.

It was hard enough to give up our jobs and learn to fend for ourselves off-grid in the Portuguese countryside, without the constantly evolving challenges associated with having a big, ambitious idea to create something amazing for us and for the region.

Vera and Joep are several steps ahead of us in building their own rural tourism based around the incredibly beautiful Lusitanian horses they breed. It will be amazing.

Vera’s encouraging words continually echo in our heads: “if it was easy everyone would be doing it.” And Joep added: “BUT, NO PANIC, Solutions are there to be found!”

We just didn’t know it would be this hard.

We were so caught up in the stress of forcing a round cork through a square hole we even managed to miss two of our wedding anniversaries. Thankfully there are three of them (a story for another time) so we get one more go at it in June.

Having friends here to share experiences, advice and encouragement is hugely valuable.

Having old friends from the UK making a surprise weekend visit and insisting on helping out is even more amazing.

Hugh Jennings and Matthew Price appeared unannounced on Friday afternoon for wines, braais and beach time...and to do more work in one day than I could have managed on my own in a week.

Hot on the heels of Ian painting the whole house and my power-washing of the roof, Hugh and Matthew got stuck into the scrapyard/tip which the back of the house had become.

We shifted around five metric tonnes of building materials that have been spoiling our view for more than a year, installed the new concrete counter-top and even had time for a game of darts.

As the holder of the Edna Leithead Memorial International Darts Tournament trophy – named after my lovely late mother and taking the form of a terrible family heirloom Toby Jug – Hugh was keen to get the board up and get playing.

After work, a working lunch and then more work, time was tight and it all came down to one head to head game to 101.

I got lucky with a double top; now where will we put that lovely Toby Jug..?

It was a well-timed visit which gave us some welcome reassurance and a boost to our mental strength to keep calm and carry on – to give it everything we can to make our project work.

Every day truly is a school-day – whether it’s being told about cork composites, meeting amazing winemakers, learning a new and important Portuguese word, or a bit more about ourselves and what we can accomplish when we put our minds to it.

Reflections on my new life and my old when a question is asked, from March 2022.

TRANSCRIPT…

Two things this week tell me that I have reached a new stage in my life: the first was buying my first ever 25kg bag of fertiliser; the second was saying no to reporting on a war.

I never thought the day would come, but it has.

It’s not something I decided without deep thought and weighing up all the options.

But the cork oaks are sick and we’re told giving their roots a boost with small amounts of powerful industrial fertiliser is the best hope of helping them through their battle with beetles and fungi.

You’ll be reassured to hear we took the organic route in preparation for the new drought-resistant lawn outside the guesthouse by shovelling three trailer-loads of horse manure.

Taking out frustrations on a deceptively large pile of poop and manhandling some very large pruned oak branches in order to feed the trees was perhaps therapeutic.

Those of you who know me might understand that refusing two weeks working in Lviv on one of the most important stories of our generation was also unusual.

I spent my BBC career cancelling normal life to jump on a plane to a war or a natural disaster.

It was the importance of the work, the challenge of living on the edge and the possibility it might make some kind of difference...to somebody.

So perhaps this week is a good chance to reflect on a big change of life.

Everyone with access to the truth sees the horror of Ukraine for what it is: a brutal humanitarian disaster created on the whim of a dictator, and a long-running information war that’s become conventional war in Europe, along with the “Stalinization of Russia” as the Economist puts it.

Everything has suddenly changed: its impact will affect us all for many years to come.

And to journalists who cover conflict, that is exactly why they drop everything, grab a flak-jacket and a sat-phone and head to the frontlines to ensure the horrors are witnessed and recorded and the terrible stories are told.

Adrenaline also plays a role – and however important the aims and the impacts of war reporting, it takes a certain kind of drive – and of madness – to run towards gunfire rather than away from it.

Of course most of us get to go home afterwards – unlike the Ukrainian people who were planning to go to an Oysters and Jazz Fest last week and are now fleeing for their lives to live for who-knows-how-long as refugees.

When I started writing this blog at least one journalist had been killed – now it’s up to three.

Stuart Ramsey and his team, as I’m sure you have already seen, got lucky.

Brent Renaud did not. He was caught in a similar type of ambush and was killed. Cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and freelance journalist Oleksandra Kuvshynova have also been killed. And there will be others.

I see and hear friends reporting from very dangerous situations, I know many of the fantastic people making up the teams behind the cameras and hope they all stay lucky.

It’s extremely important work, as this is also a war for truth.

Russia and others have been spreading lies and disinformation through social media for years now to try and undermine Western democracy - at least that genie is now out of the bottle. Look up Carole Cadwalladr.

Another friend and former colleague sent a photo this week which had randomly popped up on her Facebook feed.

It shows the time we had scrambled to cover the Japan tsunami and Fukushima disaster.

I pondered whether there might be something in their algorithm about the impending threat of nuclear annihilation...

War crimes are being perpetrated and we need people like my old BBC pals, and the many brave international reporters, producer, photographers and film crews who are currently risking their lives alongside the Ukrainian people.

They – we – at least have experience of war...unlike the male and female volunteers fighting on the frontlines who were teachers, graphic designers or engineers two weeks ago and are now bravely digging trenches.

One of the early enduring images of the war was taken by New York Times American photojournalist Lynsey Addario.

I first met Lynsey Addario a few years ago in Africa– this BBC Radio 4 profile of her from this week is a window into that strange world which I’ve now swapped for off-grid living in Portugal.

Lynsey’s sisters joke about how as the youngest of four girls, it was great training for her future career...growing up in a constant state of war with her sisters.

Their harsh and mocking humour about how they treated her as a kid is a great cover for deep fear and love.

“She’s savvy enough to know, hopefully, when it’s time to get out,” Lynsey’s mum said on the Radio 4 programme, somewhat unconvincingly.

I remember my mum using a similar technique when she saw me reporting on fleeing an ambush in Afghanistan: “your little legs were going and you were running really fast,” she laughed, covering up a deep fear I might be killed.

But thankfully I outlived her – and I made 40. Now I’ve made 50 and I’d like to make 60, which is when I’ve decided I’ll open the insanely good bottle of Portuguese wine that brother in law Pasi treated me to for my half century.

Having leaned more towards the classical music of BBC Radio 3 in the year and a half since I left, I’m returning to the news programmes and the Twitter feeds, finding it almost hard to imagine that was once my job.

I’m still constantly monitoring my phone for updates – but now it’s mostly to see when rain is forecast – in a place where the biggest risk we’re making is a business loan to build a tourist lodge.

Of course, post-pandemic and amid war in Europe, raging inflation and record-breaking fuel prices it is looking more and more risky, and at least if Putin reaches for the red button I guess we won’t be around to pay it back.

Where I am now is a long way from that previous life – mentally and geographically.

“I should go to Lviv,” I tell myself, “but there’s that hospital appointment on Friday and I need to get the car in for a service...and the podcast on wineries to produce. Oh, and the oak trees...”

For me there’s a weirdness about normality.

War reporting can become almost like a drug and the world gains from those extraordinary people who keep coming back for more, despite the impact of what it can sometimes do to those closest to them.

I was slowly weaned off war by a Los Angeles posting and by circumstance. I was lucky enough not to experience far worse horrors.

I don’t think I have any symptoms of PTSD – so far, at least – but black humour and the ability to share experiences with those who have gone through similar things cannot be underestimated.

Hopefully we can persuade some of our war-weary friends to stop by in Portugal for some decompressing vinho-therapy on their way home...to hear the stories first hand, to share those experiences and perhaps to live it a little vicariously.

And it’s not as if I don’t want to go to war any more.

If Ana’s 50th birthday weekend wasn’t a couple of weeks away maybe I would have ditched the car, told the oak trees to sod off, cancelled normal life and jumped on a plane to Lviv.

Or so I tell myself.

I’m calling this series of recorded despatches “Season 2” as it is the best of my blog posts in 2022 recorded and collated to be heard more conveniently as a podcast.

A summary of how we got here (and what went wrong along the way) can be heard on the six despatches in Season 1, also available on this podcast feed.

Season 1, Episode 1 is on the occasion of a landmark birthday and reflections back on the decades before, from January 2022…

TRANSCRIPT…

My wife and I will be reaching our one hundredth birthday this year and obviously when Ana again turns 29 – as she has done every year since even before we met – I will be celebrating my 71st this coming Friday.

On the basis that you’re as old as the woman you feel, that also works for me.

I’m not sure a despatch like this is the correct place to out my wife’s fib, but with daughter Oda soon to be passing 26, it’s becoming harder to convince other people.

So yes, this year we will both hit our half century, celebrate our golden jubilee - our golden birthday – we will become demi-centurions, although any talk of mid-points or “half-life” seems a little optimistic if not downright nuclear.

Of course, as everyone says with a shrug and a flap of the hand, reaching a big birthday is just another day...just another year...just another birthday...

But it is the big Five-O and these passing decades are landmarks for both reflecting on the past and pondering the future.

They stir up feelings of opportunities lost and opportunities taken, of time speeding up and of fading immortality.

I have always treated big birthdays as subconscious targets...to achieve a certain thing by a certain age.

I didn’t plan to give up my career at 48 to move into remote rural Portugal and off the grid with a still unfolding half-cocked plan for a new career as an entrepreneur developer, hotelier and wine expert.

But as a policeman might say, I do have previous.

Firstly I consider myself a risk taker rather than a risk maker.

And secondly while happy to regret doing anything, I’ve never wanted to be someone who regrets not doing something.

I’d much rather say “if only I hadn’t” than “if only I had.” Active regret trumps passive regret every time.

THIRTY came rushing towards me as I sat frustrated by a desk-bound news-processing job in London and decided I needed to be somewhere fun for the first big landmark.

Foreign correspondent jobs don’t come to those without experience, and so I gave up my job at the BBC to move to South Africa and work freelance for the...er...BBC.

“A big risk,” people said.

It was actually unpaid leave, so the worst thing that could happen was I’d be back at my desk in a year’s time with a bit of debt and my tail between my legs, so I took out a loan and – helped by a crashing rand – moved to Cape Town to be paid by the story.

I never looked (or moved) back.

FORTY wasn’t looking like a realistic expectation as my crazy decade of war and natural disasters started in Cape Town and ended in California.

It included years living in South Africa, Afghanistan, Thailand and twice in the US of A, while travelling to countless countries in various states of collapse.

My first war was Liberia and it was a madness of heavily armed drugged up cross-dressing teenagers.

But soon I was crossing front lines in Iraq, riding out Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and then living in Kabul with regular frontline forays embedded with British troops.

Having survived that, and with a fortieth birthday back on the cards, I made the strange decision of heading somewhere new and becoming Ignorant in Asia, but on the grid at least.

I knew it was an odd choice and I might have regretted moving there were it not for meeting and marrying to the marvellous Ana and becoming step-dad to the wonderful Oda.

Los Angeles was an even crazier decision – I’m far more comfortable in a flak jacket than on a red carpet – but I have my old boss Jon Williams to thank for coming up with that idea to ease me off the war drug.

My fifth decade took us from LA to Nairobi for four professionally wonderful years.

I discovered what it is to be a grown up: by discovering there’s no such thing as grown-ups.

Having done more journalistic embeds than any previous Afghanistan correspondent, I set out to do more safaris than any former Africa correspondent and knocked that one out of the park.

I found joy in deep dives, in making documentaries, in experimenting with new technologies like Virtual Reality and I was given the wonderful chance to spend a year thinking about it all at Stanford University on a JSK Fellowship.

Brimming over with ideas, I came back to a BBC that was in a turmoil of job cuts and savings and with little to offer than a desk-bound news-processing job.

With a strong Plan B in place I became an early adopter of The Great Resignation.

And so I’m Facing Down Fifty with a more accidental change of scenery, but comfortable in the knowledge that the easy option was to not do something – to not leave my old job.

Every day in Vale das Estrelas is a school day with so much to learn...from a little more Portuguese language each day to the fascinating history and odd quirks of a country that leaps out at the foreign correspondent.

And there are still some strong echoes of the past: visitors are still wowed by our virtual reality documentaries which I strap onto their faces after a few drinks.

I walk our hills and valleys pondering the metaverse and how this growing tech will soon dominate our lives and I wonder...

I’ll admit I have been pining a little for my old life at the BBC this week as great change is happening and the opportunities for innovation and experimentation appear to be returning, but realistically, just how transferrable are my new skills?

I mean, when next door neighbour Daniel’s water was disappearing and his internet went down I knew exactly how to dig up and repair his broken pipe, prime his filters and get the power back on...not exactly key requirements for a desk job in London W1A.

We sometimes question the risks we’re making to take on a big loan, build a tourist lodge and a business based around Portuguese wine, storytelling...and a great view.

But hopefully the experience of living in weird and wonderful places will continue to help us cope with the delays and frustrations of bureaucracy, the challenges of a pioneer life of self-sustainability, and weathering a lengthening period where we’re not making any money.

And at least it gives me plenty to write about, to think about and to podcast about...although that’s still a work in progress.

And what better way to move into my sixth decade with daily challenges way outside my comfort zone, with a madcap plan and with the woman I love as she turns 29 again?

A long lunch and a most eventful evening when we met new friends in the valley from May 2021.

TRANSCRIPT…

For once Millicent the Land Rover was the last car standing.

What began as a lunch with new friends ended as a dramatic escape out of a car window from a raging river, a car written off in a flash flood and a truck upended in a ditch.

Millicent lost an eyelash.

It was a night of high drama in the Portuguese countryside.

I don’t quite know who we were expecting to find when we gave up our jobs and moved off grid to remote rural Portugal, but what we have discovered is a fascinating collection of people.

Most have colourful backstories, many are seeking a closer connection to nature, and almost all feel there’s something very special about this little part of coast and countryside.

This whole region is a melting pot of locals and internationals: Portuguese who have lived here all their lives, others who have travelled and returned, or those who moved from big cities and feel as much of a stranger as an estrangeiro (foreigner) in Alentejo.

There are cooks and creatives, makers and tinkerers, artists and artisans; retirees who have never been busier, at least one self-proclaimed Californian refugee; and super-smart people who use physics and maths to create curious contraptions.

There’s a more transient migrant population from Thailand, Indonesia and south Asia – adding an extra layer of culture and experience and giving us amazing spice shops and restaurants.

Friends who visit ask to meet estate agents…and the way property is flying out of the realtor’s door the moment it’s posted, there are more people pouring into our melting pot.

This week our Swedish/Danish neighbours invited us to the longest and most eventful lunch so far…by way of introduction to a fabulous Swiss couple.

Ola and Merete’s house sits up on a hill you can see from our land, and theirs is a coffee table book example of how to live off the grid properly.

While we wait for sunny days to use our washing machine, they have so much solar power they could run a small town.

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s off grid network,” the saying goes – but it’s hard when the whole thing is run by a phone app, the backup generator starts automatically, and the wood stove feeds itself pellets.

Ola is a recently retired businessman and is currently focussing on project managing the house improvements, fine woodworking and impersonating a Michelin starred chef…and that’s where we came in.

It was a fennel-themed decorative lunch with a centrepiece of turbot.

They were the hosts, their place was the scene of the crime, but the protagonists in this story are Niels and Sibylle.

We’d heard a lot about the Swiss wine makers who once built a boat in their famously landlocked country and worked their way through scores of locks to navigate the Rhine and the Rhône and to hit the high seas.

After years sailing the world with their two young kids and then living in 1990s Silicon Valley where Niels worked as a programmer (when coding was known as programming) they settled in Portugal.

They are now living mostly off grid amid a menagerie of animals, ingenious homemade devices and vineyards overlooking the River Mira.

To Ana’s annoyance, the lunch conversation did lean somewhat in favour of my current rabbit hole of solar power and heating systems (apparently it lasted four hours…it felt like a lot less than that).

A dramatic thunderstorm and downpour did little to hasten our desire to leave, but after an eight-hour lunch we decided to head home to our respective animais.

That’s when the trouble started.

The only sensible access to and from Ola & Merete’s place is across a usually shallow ford, but an afternoon of rain had transformed it into a raging torrent.

By pure chance Niels and Sibylle were ahead of us in their Dacia Duster 4x4 and by the time they realised the stream was now more than 2m deep, their car was already in trouble.

Niels hit reverse, but the current kept the car moving forward into deeper water; the engine cut, they began to float, and that’s when water started pouring in.

They managed to get the windows open before the electrics went, and by the time I’d ditched my perishables and run down from our car expecting a swim, they were on the roof of their new Dacia submarine.

As Ana drove to the house for help, I joked “I knew you were missing boats, but this was taking it a bit far.” 

It was too early. Far too early.

The rescue party arrived, but in the chaos of the shock and the darkness, Ola reversed his Nissan into a deep ditch. 

Next thing it was up-ended and everyone had to climb out of another car all over again.

Amid the dawning realisation the Duster was probably a write-off – and that there was no other way off their land until morning – our host cheerfully said: “I guess we’re going to need dinner,” went back into chef mode and suggested gin as Merete prepared bedrooms for unexpected guests.

Next morning the water level was back down, and a digger with a skilful driver had both cars out in no time – just as the tow truck arrived…sadly with orders to deliver it to the scrap yard.

But I hadn’t seen a car like that since covering Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans – the whole inside of the car was covered in a thick mud.

So, lunch ended with breakfast and we were able to drop our new friends off at home.

A friend pointed out the irony that Millicent was the one car that actually needed a wash.

As a foreign correspondent, every day was a school day, and I’m pleased to say that’s continuing in our new life.

Our new Swiss friends have an amazing array of plants, pets and pet projects – far more than I can write about here, and plenty to fill a podcast on how to make wine in Portugal!

(I’m still working on that…but Derek Day has composed some great theme music…so watch this space!).

Sibylle uses a kiln to make jewellery and keeps exotic plants in her greenhouse – near the tortoise enclosure, not far from the turkeys.

(Small aside: Turkey in Portuguese is Peru – I wonder if there are any other creatures that are named after different countries in different languages..?)

Niels makes wine from his one and a half hectares of grapes, but also mixes ingenuity and alchemy to distil and blend his booze into vermouth and Mamajuana whilst also making some sake on the side.

While we had lunch of their own smoked salmon and sashimi followed by the Thai Isan spicy sausages made from home-hunted wild boar (wild boar), one of their sheep had a surprise lamb – news of the delivery was received as calmly as “pass the salt.”

I’m still reeling from the information overload associated with a visit to their solar power station, loved the device Niels is building to make charcoal and enjoyed his passionate hatred of labels that warn you to not do obviously stupid things (put yourself in a hay bailer, drink poison).

Sadly though, this week they are one car down, but this is the countryside…things happen.

What was it David said at Christmas when Millicent let us down about life in the countryside? 

“You can get vaccinated, but you’ll never be immune.”

The back-story to why, and how, we ended up moving to an off-the-grid house in rural south-western Alentejo, from a moment of reflection on New Year’s Eve 2020.

TRANSCRIPT…

The plan was always just to find a little bit of land with a ruined house to spend our summers fixing up: our piece of Europe as we wandered the globe, but it didn’t quite end up that way. 

Here we are ending 2020 with no jobs, living on savings and off the grid in rural Portugal (with two dogs) on a steep learning curve and even steeper spending curve.

It wasn’t what we had in mind when we first started drawing up the treasure map.

In the summer of 2018 we had a plan: a wedding in France, a visit to Ana’s mum at her farm in Sweden and a little Portuguese treasure hunt in between.

(Oh, remember when we could travel to places?)

We needed to set a boundary and decided on the borders of Alentejo, the largest and most rural province in Portugal.

Stretching south from the edge of Lisbon down to the Algarve and from the Atlantic Ocean across to Spain, it was where Ana’s father’s family originates.

I excitedly got to work, structuring the Google map around vineyards and the fantastic pousadas – old monasteries or castles converted into grand but affordable hotels.

On the map I marked the pousadas in purple with a bed symbol, the vineyards were cocktail glasses with a green background.

With dedicated attention to detail the shade of green deepened the higher up the must-visit list I deemed the wine estates to be. 

Hours were spent attaching website links, photographs and comments, and while I did that, Ana did the real work: trawling through hundreds of Portuguese real estate sites to see what might be available – and affordable – and where best to look.

After some experimentation I settled on a yellow-through-red property excitability scale and added them to the treasure map.

That’s when a few patterns started emerging. A few weeks later we were in a hire car heading out of Lisbon.

We’d thought that somewhere on the coast a little south of Lisbon would be nice, and

we dabbled in the expensive Setubal peninsula, checking out “Ruins Palmela” (deep orange).

It was a huge, ruined house with a very odd layout, but with wonderful views from the valley up to Palmela Castle – a pousada up on the hill.

Most places so close to Lisbon were well out of our price range, but this probably needed to be demolished and totally rebuilt.

We took photos, pondered the neighbourhood a while and then set off east towards the Spanish border and the heart of Alentejo wine country.

We stopped in Evora and Estremoz (great pousada), avoided “Farm too far” (light yellow) but checked out “Yellow Mansion” (deep red on the map’s excitementometer!).

It was amazing – a huge four-bedroomed house with a courtyard, a one bed flat, and positioned between two streets in a town just 20 minutes from the World Heritage City of Evora.

It even had three shop units with amazing vaulted ceilings – perfect for a wine bar, tasting room or restaurant.

It was under €200,000. We asked about permission to use the shop units and imagined how it would look and worried a little that we’d prefer to be nearer to the ocean.

I don’t think we realised it at the time, but perhaps it was then that we started to think a little differently about what we were looking for.

We stopped at Adega Vila Santa for a João Portugal Ramos wine tasting, we dropped into Casa Relvas with its amazing cork-covered building, amphorae for wine and the most incredibly three-hour tour of the cellar.

Then we headed south and west – back to the coast, and to the next cluster of orange and red-coloured house icons on the Costa Vicentina.

It seemed more affordable there, far less tourist-spoilt than the nearby Algarve, with some of the most stunning beaches and sea cliffs we’ve ever seen, and is where we marked the X on the map.

What happened next is a blur of disappointing ruins, followed by the discovery of an amazing off the grid German-built house in a seven-hectare valley of cork oaks and pine trees with its own little lake.

It was the view that took our breath away.

There were two houses, an amazing solar contraption, and oh…in retrospect…if only we’d asked a few questions about how it all works…

After that a random AirBnB choice led to a wine-inspired meeting at a Chinese restaurant, an introduction to an amazing lawyer, a beautiful stretch of coastline and a totally new life.

This year’s pandemic has become a defining time for everyone and it’s led a lot of people into big, life-changing decisions.

The lucky ones can do it on their own terms – and we count ourselves as firmly being among the lucky ones.

It’s hard, and it’s beautiful; it’s expensive and it’s frustrating; it’s challenging and it’s risky; but it’s brilliant.

And that view still takes our breath away.

But don’t worry…life is still far from perfect – stuff continues to keep going wrong.

It was a calm Christmas of three days without anything breaking, but you might be entertained to hear that a third boiler issue is now causing chaos, one house is still without hot water…and yes, the Land Rover is back in the garage with no power steering.

I finally got her MOT sorted…they passed Millicent…but with a warning that her transmission was close to failing.

BUT…

The Viessmann boiler people saved Christmas! The local service company came through after the vital part arrived from Germany.

Their amazing technician spent a big chunk of Christmas Eve (the main day for celebrating here in Portugal) fitting, testing and unwrapping a fabulous present of hot water and central heating!

Apologies for the emotional Academy Award-style speech, but I’d like to thank Paulo Correia and Dulce Russo from Loja Industrial, Claire Dumbreck from Propel Technology who does PR for Viessmann in the UK and passed on my complaint…and even Jürgen Gerhardt (managing director of Viessmann in Spain).

But most of all the amazing Antonio who spent his Christmas with his head up our old boiler.

Thanks for reading my despatches…and have a very Happy New Year. Let’s hope 2021 is better than 2020!

Our local foe and why they’re so good I name them twice. A musical dispatch from December 2020…

TRANSCRIPT…

I have a few songs permanently on my mind at the moment, and none of them are by Simon & Garfunkel.

The first is by Duran Duran and is sparked by any mention of one of the valley’s wild inhabitants.

The second is linked to a regular off-grid chore and comes from the original Jungle Book soundtrack.

And the latest addition is Dire Straits courtesy of some dusty 1980s technology.

So, what’s the connection? Any guesses to the songs? Here’s a clue: pigs, bore holes and hoarders.

Ana and I have both had some unexpected magical moments in the valley when a deer has suddenly popped into view on the hill across from the house. 

For Ana it happened early on the first morning we woke up here in our new home – the ninth anniversary of our second wedding (out of three…that’s another story).

It was beginning to dawn on us that we had given up careers and exciting globetrotting lives to live in the middle of the Portuguese countryside…and it was very quiet here.

A new life, new adventures, lots of uncertainties and a large beautiful buck with striking horns was checking us out. Ana took it as a good omen.

✓

A couple of weeks later I was faffing around on the front patio when I heard rustling and my deer encounter involved a quick eye contact as it picked its way through the undergrowth and headed down the valley.

But it’s the wild boars that have infected my brain with a Duran Duran worm.

I defy anyone beyond a certain age to say “wild boars” only once.

It’s not that these wild boars (wild boars) never choose this way. Far from it – our wild boars always do –did. 

t I meaere are a lot of pine tree scratching posts on our land, they clearly used to have mud parties in the lake, and they had burrowed out nests in our veggie patch (who knew they liked nests?).

Our Finnish brother-in-law Pasi and Swedish friend Mina both shoot and so we have an idea of how hard – and dangerous – it is to hunt wild boars (wild boars).

Rather than a shotgun, Mina recommends a rifle (.308) and you’re allowed to have as many bullets as you can fit in your magazine – because if you injure it with the first shot, the tough little barrel of horns charges you.

And if you think you’re good at picking up the smell of frying bacon, these guys can sniff out a human with a smoking gun from a hundred yards.

With apologies to the vegetarians, wild boar meat is fantastic – and they are becoming something of a pest across Europe.

And so, Ana plans to team up with our neighbour to learn to shoot with the local hunting club after having been re-invigorated by some clay pigeon shooting in California earlier this year.

It was a long road back from that surprise date I arranged some years ago at the concrete-box shooting range in downtown LA (my bad). It didn’t go well.

But it might be harder than we think…not just to shoot them, but to find them.

The mud-bath parties and the nesting seem to have stopped since we put our new bouncer Garf on the door.

“If you’ve got trotters, you’re not coming in.”

Talking of wildlife, let’s move on to the Jungle Book.

Full disclosure, the soundtrack to the 1967 Disney animation was one of my first albums and I know pretty much the whole thing off by heart – songs and dialogue.

My A-level results would have been so much better if I hadn’t spent all that revision time learning lyrics and teaching myself to juggle with pool balls. 

The whole “I wanna be like you” section where Baloo meets King Louie in his jungle palace to rescue Mowgli had to be written out phonetically word by word.

Less well known is perhaps the last song, where Mowgli stumbles across the man-village and spies Shanti – the girl at the river.

Her song “My Own Home (I shall go to fetch the water)” is not only fabulously dated with its sexual stereotypes, but is also now the theme to our fortnightly visits to the spring at the Boa Vista dos Pinheiros Aqua park to fill up our plastic water bottles.

Our borehole water is a little salty, and we haven’t had it tested in the lab yet, bottled water comes (unsurprisingly) with a lot of plastic bottles, so we go to a spring to fill up.

“Father’s hunting in the forest, mother’s cooking in the home…I must go to fetch the water, ‘til the day that I am grown,” Shanti sings.

With my rapidly improving Indian culinary skills, and with Ana’s new intention to pursue wild boars (wild boars), I think we’re successfully turning that on its head…and are both still going to fetch the water even though we’re well and truly grown.

Dire Straits indeed.

I learned to make radio on quarter inch tape: recording it on a massive two-reel Uher recording machine and then editing it using a razor blade and white sticky tape (I’m sure there are producers out there who remember that well).

Thankfully I discovered a computer audio-editing system weeks later, but it still has a special place in my heart.

So, imagine my excitement when we arrived at our newly-bought house and discovered among everything that the German hoarder had left behind was a quarter inch tape machine wired up to a 1980s stacking stereo system – with a pile of tapes.

This was top of the range 40 years ago and the sound quality of the quarter inch is amazing. Sadly, the amp was burned out by enthusiastic playing of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA a year ago and suffered irreparable damage.

We’ve been focussing on making the inside of the house look nice and have finally wired up our stereo system…and I managed to find the right connectors to get the quarter inch machine pumping it out.

Hence the Dire Straits – Walk of Life – which was the tapes I settled on once I’d worked out how to stop it playing backwords (you’ll be reassured to hear there were no Satanic messages).

It was the perfect soundtrack after a day of digging clay out of pipes to stop the drive from flooding in the rain, and while constructing the latest attraction at Vale das Estrelas – Ana’s “shoe solution.”

I call it the Imelda Marcos Memorial Wall, but that isn’t well received.

(Incidentally, Dire Straits has now been replaced with Pink Floyd’s Brick in the Wall, which serves me right for editing it onto a video of my brick laying exploits).

And just a final note on hunting. We both have mixed views on it, but broadly think that if it’s for food and for pest control then it’s kinda OK: a surprise bullet in the head trumps the torment millions of cows go through at the abattoir.

Having spent a lot of time reporting on African wildlife, it gets more complicated thinking about big game hunting…and also about the local hunting club…who killed a beautiful big buck deer the other week just next to our land. 

That’s where the romantic ideal and the reality meet.

An ambitious start to learning how to build with a lot of help and a few injuries in the process from November 2020.

TRANSCRIPT…

You know you’ve done a couple of good, hard days’ work with your hands when your iPhone no longer recognises you.

Even if I had a newer phone I’m sure the “wild man of Alentejo” beard would have flummoxed facial recognition, but now steel rods and wire have laid waste to my fingerprints.

In my dogged pursuit of learning how to do stuff I can happily, but stingingly, report that reinforced concrete has been added to my CV.

It’s all down to the fabulous Rui Dias of course who’s returned home to São Teotónio with his family after spending nearly 18 years in Australia…much of it in construction.

Ana and I had been hovering around a material supplies store in the nearby Boa Vista de Pinheiros (Nice View of the Pine Trees) for a few weeks now, window shopping.

It’s been a bit like going to a Louis Vuitton shop (I presume)…except the other way around.

We were exuding confidence and eyeing up purchases while having no idea how it works or how much anything is…whilst also not looking the part. 

The very friendly, no-nonsense chap we see each time has been very patient, but Rui’s little material list on the back of an envelope somehow translated into three delivery trucks arriving in the Valley of the Stars on a Friday afternoon.

There were cubic metres of gravel and sand with long lengths of steel rebar and accoutrements of metal squares and wire on two trucks, and a pallet of concrete and a pallet of bricks on another (with its own crane).

I think that was the point I realised I was actually trying to build a conservatory.

Utter madness you may think (I did), but we not only have planning permission, but also some drawings and code numbers plotted out by a structural engineer.

Part one is four columns protruding two-and-a-bit metres from ground level, all joined together by a 9m underground beam – a trench filled with reinforced concrete.

That will be the front of the conservatory.

Part two is a 4m concrete beam which will link the new front to the existing house and enclose a brick wall.

Then comes the “glass curtain” of folding doors, a sandwich panel roof supported by wooden beams and a couple of other off the shelf aluminium doors to fill a few gaps and create a room!

Oh yes, this training course includes brick laying, plastering, woodwork, roofing and professional painting.

Easy. Especially once Rui had decoded the structural engineer’s instructions.

The materials sat on their plastic sheets all weekend staring at me. 

The holes dug the week before with the help of a jackhammer, shovels and wheelbarrows of relocation were waiting.

I wasn’t entirely sure how the two were going to combine until Rui rocked up at 8.15am on Monday with an angle grinder…and then the fun started.

I’m sure there are far more informative YouTube videos on how to make reinforced concrete, so I’ll save the details for a highlights video (which is in production!).

In short, it involves a bit of steel bending, copious amounts of cutting and counting, some maths and measurement, and a lot of wire twisting.We cut rebar and connected rectangles at regular intervals – each corner joined by a bit of wire weaving.

I haven’t had so many puncture wounds in my hands since the last time I had so many puncture wounds in my hands (which was only about three posts ago).

We lifted and lowered, bent and boxed…and then unloaded a bright orange cement mixer from the back of Rui’s van.

The second afternoon was a blur of buckets: each mixer filling contained four gravel, two sand, one and a half cement…and an expert eye to pour the right proportion of water.

The wheelbarrow-loads were poured, the mixture shovelled, and I’m pleased to report stage one of operation conservatory is complete.

It hardened just enough overnight to repel the rain which put a pause to the work…and gave my hands a welcome day of respite.

Now, about those columns …

Thanks for reading! You can also follow us on Facebook @Vale Das Estrelas and Instagram @vale_das_estrelas

A foray into the bushes and a window into our new life of making and discovering in rural Portugal from November 2020.

TRANSCRIPT…

So. I could tell you about the mysterious bite – most likely from an angry centipede – which has left my entire left leg swollen and generating heat, four days after I didn’t notice I was bitten (while saving broad beans from the onslaught of the oxalis plant invasion). Or I could bang on about the cost of the new solar batteries, the generator and a gas boiler backup which we may need. Or just how much fun it is clearing a sewage pipe blocked by tree roots.

But no.

Today’s post is about love, marmalade and Henry VIII.

Love is, Ana tells me, delving deep into a thorn bush to collect marmelos for your wife.

They weren’t easy to reach – I had to fight off bramble (a local enemy known here as silvas) while balancing on a 2m high earthen ridge with questionable stability.

But she really, really wanted them.

Marmelos are quince: gnarled, yellow fruit, something between an apple and a pear, but a little smaller and quite furry while they are growing.

And there’s something very magical – and historical – about them.

I remember quince growing in the garden of the BBC house in Kabul and thinking that they were apples coated in the city’s apocryphal faecal-dust pollution.

I asked Bashi about them. He was the gardener – 70 or so at the time – and I was horrified when next he was level with me at the top floor window and still climbing up the tree picking them and throwing them down.

Sadly, they tasted terrible. Quince are bitter and fibrous – pretty much inedible raw.

But adding a lot of love, care, patience (and sugar) is how the magic happens.

Ana has developed something of an obsession with marmelos, or perhaps I should say marmeleiros – quince trees.

My Portuguese needs a lot more work, but I love the efficiency (explained by Ana to my great linguistic excitement) of replacing pear tree, or lemon tree, with a tweaked ending of -eiro (m) or -eira (f): peireira, limoeiro…and marmeleiro.

She has developed an eye for marmeleiros like a safari guide can spot a real lion from a lion-shaped rock at two kilometres.

She sees them as we drive through the countryside and forces me to turn around and stop.

I have stolen a lot of marmelos, but boy was is worth it.

If you love a slice of toast and some traditional English marmalade – maybe you’re even crunching down into a bitter-sweet chunk of orange or lemon peel as you read – then this story is only going to get better.

Portugal is where British marmalade originates and the Portuguese word for quince is where the name comes from.

Strictly, as Atlas Obscura informs us in a fantastic article that will tell you all you need to know, the word goes back even further from “the Latin melimelum, a derivative of the Greek word for honey apple, melimelon.”

The Greeks and the Romans were making preserves by boiling quince – known then as honey apples – at least as long ago as the first century BC.

It contains a lot of the natural solidifying agent pectin and so was poured into moulds to set. The deep red solidified cakes of marmalade were then sliced and served up originally as a medicine.

The explorers Vasco de Gama and Magellan apparently took a boatload on expeditions and the vitamin C may – by accident or design – have helped protect sailors from scurvy.

That’s how Henry VIII received some as a gift in the 1500s (I bet you were wondering how he was going to appear in the story), and how Britain’s interest in marmalade began to take its own steady path towards citrus.

And back to love. It’s not just the love of gathering them, it’s the love of preparing them.

Rather than going the hard-set, traditional Portuguese marmalade route, Ana opted for making quince jelly…in industrial quantities…and what an amazing process.

It was at this point she announced you could buy quince in the supermarket really cheaply and your legs wouldn’t be torn to shreds (through your trousers) on the way from the vegetable section to the checkout.

Who would have thought?

But the difference in taste was remarkable…the smaller, field-grown ones are far more tasty than the bigger and prettier store-bought ones.

Yes, the kitchen was very sticky for a couple of weeks and there were angry outbursts when one batch caught slightly on the bottom, but the transformation of quince can teach us a lot.

First they were diced and slowly boiled with pips and skin and all.

When the yellow and white flesh is boiled up with water it starts to turn a rich, rose-pink colour.

The fruit is then slowly mashed by hand until it’s the consistency of runny apple sauce.

Then it takes hours – sometimes more than a day – for the liquid to seap through a tea towel or muslin cloth.

The juice goes back on the boil with a load of sugar (and Ana adds a couple of our halved limes for a tang), and as the hours pass and the liquid gradually reduces, the colour steadily deepens to a rich, dark red and everything begins to clarify from cloudy to clear.

Gradually it moves towards solidifying. I was wondering why there was a side plate in the freezer, but apparently a drop of jam on a cold plate wrinkling at the touch of a finger marks the moment it is done. Magic (and a top tip).

After all the waiting, the love, the effort and preparation, it’s the final transformation of an ugly yellow fruit into a rich, sweet, clarified thick ruby red jam which is absolutely delicious.

Hopefully the story of quince jelly’s clarification, refinement and development into something truly amazing can be a positive analogy for our lifestyle choice of living off the grid! (Maybe we’re currently at the pulping phase?)

We have quite a bit of it, but you’ll have to visit to try some. The Facebook page for our farms is and on Insta is: @Vale_das_Estrelas

Oh, and Ana’s made lemon and lime marmalade too – yes, the traditional British kind.

I’m spoiled for choice at breakfast, and I love it.