Surprised, interested, shocked, concerned and intrigued all sum up our reaction to the massive power cuts across Portugal and Spain, but perhaps the most appropriate description of our mood was: smug.

When the traffic lights went dark, petrol stations closed and panic struck the ice cream shops of the nearby tourist towns on our southwestern coast of Alentejo, we could rest easy.

Our freezer-load of wild boar (wild boar) wasn’t defrosting, our water pumps were working well and our wine remained nicely chilled.

While the lights went off across the Iberian peninsula, a healthy hum was heard from our control centre as our 84 solar panels were piling power into our batteries as usual.

We have the storage capacity of a large electric vehicle – a BMW or a Porsche Taycan – and yesterday when the lights went out we felt very much at the luxury end of the market.

We were buying fruit trees when the plant nursery billing system went down.

People in Vila Nova de Milfontes were standing in shop doors and milling around street corners burning through the last of the mobile phone tower batteries for online information and updates to understand why the “apagão” or power cut, had happened.

There was much speculation at the coffee-less cafés over what, or whom, might have been responsible for the outage.

The explanation as to why the whole of Portugal and Spain lost electricity for many hours has to get a lot better for people to stop thinking it was Mr Putin, Mr Trump or a cabal of satanic paedophiles.

I do tend to lean heavily into cock-up over conspiracy, but I’ll admit my work countering Russian disinformation led my first suspicions towards a Russian cyber-attack.

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But we were fine.

After years of learning to live off the grid, the thousands of euros of investment, power cuts and teething troubles, our system finally came into its own.

From the early days when we moved into our new off-grid home in the Portuguese countryside in the middle of the COVID pandemic we’ve been playing catch up with power.

We have learned the hard way what a lot of people realised yesterday – just how much power we consume every day and how dependent we are on electricity

The off-grid system which came with our house provided a lot less energy than we were used to – even moving from Kenya where power cuts were common, but we had a generator in the garden.

Toasters and ovens are the biggest culprits – and I’ll never use my hairdryer while ironing ever again!

After failing to keep the giant Tamagotchi of a lead-acid battery system alive we installed new panels and lithium batteries for us...and then for the 20 plus people we can cater for at the eco-luxe lodge we’ve just opened.

Three phases, hundreds of meters of buried cables, a lot of maths and fuse boxes later and we are...smug.

Last week my mornings had begun with a nervous eye on the app, as 17 Easter guests and some pretty rainy and cloudy weather tested the system, which happily passed with flying colours.

But while the rest of the region was powerless to do anything, our batteries were at 100%, our satellite connection kept the communications going and we were one of the few restaurants still open.

We hadn’t planned on making a fish braai for our guests Robert and Kim – and we’re not even a restaurant – but in the absence of a mobile phone signal to even ask the best seafood places if they were open, we confidently offered a three course meal complete with electric light.

The candles were merely for effect.

And the country-wide shortage of internet connectivity led a BBC producer back to my WhatsApp and the offer of a chance to play at my old job for an afternoon.

BBC Radio 4’s PM programme in the UK was interested in “some colour” from Odemira so Ana and I headed off for a wander (hear the story 38 mins in here).

Our local Intermarché supermarket boss was almost as smug as we were – because their massive generator was keeping the meat and fish cold, the freezers below zero and the ATM cash machine running.

There was a touch of the early COVID days about it – even if the toilet roll stocks remained largely undisturbed.

We bumped into our friend Francisco from the A Terra glamping lodge – everything had gone off at his place and so he was at the ATM paying for 20 new solar panels.

“Because tomorrow the price is going to be crazy,” he told me.

“I should have bought them a long time ago, but now it needs to be done.”

Glenn Cullen who with his wife Berny runs a beautiful tourism lodge called Paraiso Escondido was also at the supermarket stocking up on water to help guests flush.

“The power cut’s a bit inconvenient...to say the least,” he told me.

“We rely on pumps for the water, electricity as we’d expect for the power, so cooking – breakfast, lunch, dinners. We do have gas in one of our kitchens, so we have got a standby.

“It’s a bit of a worry and something we have to think about for the future. Already we’re talking about getting generators to have backup. We have solar for hot water, but all the other things we take for granted: every day you turn the tap on, you flick a switch and communication – the WiFi is down. We rely on it so much.”

I do care a lot about ice cream – and was keen to volunteer my services to stop large amounts of it going to waste, so next stop was beach-front Zambujeira-do-Mar and Rita’s Restaurant.

Nuno Rita explained the gelato was straight into the freezer as soon as the lights went out and the door would remain shut until it came back on again.

“It will be fine as long as the power comes back within a day,” he explained, as much to my disappointment I realised my ice cream eating sacrifice was not going to be immediately required.

The Sunset Café was packed – André had his sleeves rolled up and was washing dishes while hikers on the long-distance walking trail Rota Vicentina were fuelling up on lunch.

“Traditional work – no lights, washing glasses with my hands, salads, sandwiches and Portuguese bifanas,” he said, talking about the traditional bread rolls filled with thin pork steaks he was dishing out to walkers.

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I’m pleased to say it was a mere 17 hours that our region was without electricity.

Our neighbour Daniel was up before dawn as usual and spotted a distant glow from the nearby town at around 5.15am.

Now is a great time to talk about community micro-grids rather than national grids, and how renewable energy can be better managed at a local level...however much the giant power providers may protest.

Solar panels have never been cheaper, but integrating small systems into national grids are not as easy as the “sell your renewable power back” offers suggest.

Our friend Niels discovered it was costing him money to sell his excess power to the grid and so invested in large water tanks and heaters to create different types of “battery” instead.

And our neighbour Jeff in Lisbon had taken steps towards energy independence by installing panels, but because he is connected to the grid he couldn’t use them when the blackout happened.

While conservative newspapers say the Iberian power cuts prove renewable energy can’t work at scale - because of the huge steps Spain and Portugal has made towards running on green energy - we have to remember that it must.

It’s perhaps more down to the traditional systems and the big, rich power companies which need to change and adapt.

And it’s also a good reminder that come the next zombie apocalypse we should be fine – all we need is a couple of extra shovels to hit them with and maybe a shotgun.

For more than three years now there’s been a loop of thinking, building, pushing and waiting...but we’ve finally opened our doors to a flurry of guests.

With thanks to friends – and friends of friends – for booking in advance and betting we’d be ready, we had our biggest test so far this Easter holiday week, with six of our seven units filled and a peak of 17 people staying.

Despite all the fears of the whole thing descending into a terrible Fawlty Towers epsiode – particularly when two of the visitors were German – I think we managed pretty well.

We barbequed porco preto black pork, served Portuguese arroz de pato duck rice, braai-d some sea bass alongside Ana’s amazing moules and introduced our guests to some top Alentejo wines.

If only the weather had stepped up and given us a helping hand.

It’s the one thing we can usually rely on, but the glimmer of Spring which followed the reservoir-filling deluge of March evaporated into more heavy rain.

Whether it’s meteorologically correct or not, I am convinced that in these epoch-changing times of isolationism and authoritarianism...that Britain stole our sunshine.

It’s not the kind of behaviour Portugal should expect from the world’s oldest alliance.

As far as I can see, the weather doesn’t feature in the 1386 Treaty of Windsor, but in an age of re-interpreting old documents...things like the American constitution for example...I wouldn’t rule anything out.

It’s what I believe and therefore it’s true – it’s my truth and you just try to prove me wrong! Opá. As they say around here: oh boy.

Truth or not, it was certainly a reality for our guests from London who gave up an unseasonably warm Britain for an unreasonably chilly and disappointingly damp Alentejo Easter.

I’m very pleased to report a typically stiff-upper-lip keep-calm-and-carry-on attitude from guests and proprietors alike took us all through.

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Apologising, however, by suggesting they stay another week as “it’s going to be beautiful from Tuesday” is straight from the Basil Fawlty playbook. (Note to self: don’t ever do that).

Without the lure of constant sunshine, our Clubhouse became the Clubhouse it was meant to be: where people hung out around a roaring fire, chatted around the dinner table, and where younger guests played cards and started learning to play the guitar.

The rainy March didn’t give the pool much of a chance to get up to a good temperature, but that didn’t stop many people from giving it try...some of them every day.

We’re so lucky that cold water swimming is a thing.

But the ocean proved to be surprisingly warm for the surf lessons, and on the occasional beach days the sun forced its way through with enough potency to sizzle unprotected skin (guilty as charged!).

Our neighbour Daniel kindly patched up some of the bigger holes in the road for Ana’s birthday, but the holiday and the continuing rain means it will be next week before the proper repair work begins.

The horse riding was a great success, the secret beaches a big hit, the local restaurants proved popular and most importantly the off-grid power and water systems thrived in their biggest challenge so far: lots of people and lots of weather.

We’re still tweaking our water dilution system for automatically mixing rainwater with mineral-salted borehole water, but it’s got off to a great start.

I’ll be writing more about the long range WiFi / Internet of Things LPWAN technology we’re using soon as I finish editing a BBC radio programme I’m making on the topic with some really interesting Portuguese examples.

The tech is keeping our swimming pool flowing for infinity and beyond (hopefully), watching over our tanks, keeping our drinking water perfectly palatable, and will soon be managing the fabulously nutritious water emerging from our treatment plant ready for irrigation.

My maths surrounding our whole power grid was always shaky, and with many showers testing water pumps and heat pumps, and lots of induction hobs being used, there were some nervous early morning checks on the batteries, but the system held up really well.

Gamifying the shower experience with “beat the egg timer” hour glasses attached the wall seemed to generate some interest and some competition.

The guests were the Jennings family from Yorkshire...Sarah, my godson Atti and Hugh who has been many times before to help out and was lured into the occasional odd job despite being a paying guest.

Dedicated blog reader Jeremy Grant surprised his partner Siobhan with a trip to Alentejo and landed amid the chaos of people with delight over the view...after having followed our progress almost from the start.

The other families are friends of my old pal Matthew Price – adventurous London professionals with a love of exploring with their brilliant young teenagers – who he strongarmed into coming along to an Easter excursion on the coastal Alentejo.

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The German couple were early adopters on Booking.com who stayed for some comfort at the start of their long Rota Vicentina hike down to the Algarve.

Different dietary requirements got us thinking about how to make the perfect dinner, I started developing some breakfast skills...and there was some troubleshooting running roof repairs in high wind.

It was a fantastic start to our new venture and adventure – thanks so much to all four families involved for visiting Vale das Estrelas.

We are realising that there are two sides to this job: attending to guests while they are here, and working even harder behind the scenes to find new ones to come and visit in the future.

“It’s marketing, marketing, marketing,” our friend Vera told us, and she and Cam have already made a thriving business out of their tourism resort Quinta Camarena a bit further north of us in Cercal, so it’s good advice.

Our own website and booking engine has been at the heart of it and despite the urgency, we’d been waiting for a break in the rain and the return of a little sunshine for our talented interior architecture photographer friend Cia to take some proper photos.

She spent hours working with the light and the angles to edit together an amazing set of images.

It’s always going to be hard to properly capture the scale of our views and the feeling of calm here through photographs, but @ciajansen (check out her Insta) has done us proud.

We’ve fussed over the photos, tweaked the text and agonized over the pricing strategy, but finally can unveil our new website www.valleyofthestars.co.uk or for those in Portugal www.valedasestrelas.pt

I hope you like it – please have a look through it...if only to search for the glaring mistakes we’ve made in our prices which will allow bargain-bucket bookings.

It’s our soft-opening year, so we have lower prices than similar properties in the area to give us the leeway to learn.

Ana’s new mantra is that every visitor’s expectations must be exceeded when they arrive – rather than the other way around.

Please help us out by sharing it with all of your networks – and if anyone wants to rent the whole property for a retreat please get in touch directly and we’ll make a plan.

This journey is going to continue having its challenges – first with our workload as we learn to do everything ourselves and then bring staff in to help us in the most important places.

And that’s also a challenge for us here where staff are in short supply.

We’ve been so lucky that our fabulous friend Lotti – a former deputy Swedish ambassador and top lawyer – used her Easter vacation to come here and help us wash up!

We couldn’t have had such a successful week without her (thanks Lotti!)

And on that note, I’m turning to you again…wonderful readers...if you know anyone looking for some paid summer work, we’re looking for people experienced in the hospitality industry, working in wine, or restaurants to help us out.

It’ll be hard work, but there’ll be time to enjoy this wonderful coastline. Let us know welcome@valleyofthestars.co.uk

Today I’d like to start with an apology.

You’ve been very patient with me as I’ve bumbled and grumbled my way through the past few months, mostly moaning about DIY, crossing the Valley of Death, Losing Perspective and treating my despatches more like therapy sessions.

You didn’t sign up to be armchair psychiatrists, so I’m sorry...but thank you.

After a bit of self-reflection and a little “enough already” advice from people whose opinions I trust, I would like to announce the official end to my searing negativity.

I’ve been leaning this way for a little while, but a piece of important news this week has lifted a heavy weight from our shoulders.

Like the magical morning mists that sometimes shroud our valley, the doom and gloom has been steadily lifting – burning off to reveal the blue skies.

And of course they were always there – I just couldn’t see them.

But now it’s time to stop looking down at overwhelming to-do lists and obsessing with the small things, and to look up and see the big picture – the picture we fell in love with when we first came to this valley.

And it’s also time to stop looking backwards, but looking forwards to the next step in our career transition through builders to proprietors.                 

Our friends and VIPs (Very Inspiring Proprietors) Vera and Cam went through a similar construction project and have quickly grown a really successful tourism and retreat business up the road at Quinta Camarena in nearby Cercal.

“Oh, the building work,” Vera told us, “I remember that – it sucked,” she said...just six months after their hugely stressful race to get everything finished.

Of course the pressure has mostly, but not entirely, been self-inflicted.

Years in journalism have left me obsessed with deadlines and the desire to throw myself into something, get it mastered, get the story told, and move onto the next thing.

But of course not everything works like that.

Since the building work began a little over two years ago we’ve had a singular aim in mind: to get the lodge finished and open to paying guests this summer.

A year ago we were confident that we’d be ready by May, and even after the winter rain we still thought June was do-able, while the builders, engineers and every artisan in earshot said: “what, you’re planning to open this year?”

“August for sure” we told ourselves, each other and anyone else who’d listen.

But it wasn’t just a hope – it was a need.

We’ve taken a big loan to do this project, and although most of it is zero interest courtesy of the tourism authority – to promote growth in remote and traditionally poorer parts of the country – it still needs to be paid back...in just 10 years.

The capital repayments were due to start next month – just in time for the winter tourism lull – but thanks to our bank manager’s confidence in our project and lobbying on our behalf, Turismo de Portugal have agreed to postpone payments.

We don’t yet know for how long, and this certainly doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels (or the succulents we are busily planting), but it gives us a bit of breathing space.

In a few short weeks, even the dreaded DIY has been transformed into a series of “craft projects” and thinking about it that way has completely changed my approach.

I’m not sure why it all became so overwhelming, but I’ve done a full 180 and have started really enjoying tinkering with some wood, creating a couple of coffee tables and pondering how to turn railway sleeper screws into coat hooks.

Thanks to both Niels and Ola for their advice on proposing a solution to attach the heavy metalwork into the wall.

I’ve had so much encouragement and advice from my crowd-sourced therapy – thank you one and all – but as I sat down to write this despatch, Bernard from beautiful Marvão up in the Alentejo hills, made some time between his own DIY projects to send me a note:

“DIY is a skilled undertaking and like gardening requires a lot of attention and organisation and you get better and faster at it. In rural Portugal it's there for life,” Bernard noted with a smiley-face.

He put my moaning into perspective – remembering a time before my mate Leroy (as in Leroy Merlin, the French B&Q/Home Depot) had even made it to Portugal...and how much harder it was to find the things needed to do the job back then.

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“DIY is underrated, regarded as trivial, especially in Britain, so you may think it's a frustrating waste of time, especially when in competition with seemingly serious tasks like getting stuff through the [town hall].”

Well that process does continue – we’re still wating for our licenses, but each we we get (hopefully) a step closer.

My decision to embrace “craft projects” began with two planks of our fallen cork oak tree, some epoxy resin, an electric sander and a pot of varnish.

Rather than rushing to finish and move on to the next job I did a little every day – filling in the cracked wood, carefully rounding it off and sanding it smooth and I now have two beautiful benches for the mezzanines for guests to drink at or to work over.

The next job is only harrowing because it involves two old Portuguese wrought iron ploughing harrows which need feet and a glass top to become coffee tables.

I can’t wait to get stuck into the wine label project, and my new relationship with wood makes The Clubhouse bookshelves sound like an adventure.

But the clearing mists have also made me realise we’re coming to summer a little late this year.

The whole point of this crazy adventure was to design our lives so we could live here – in the beautiful Portuguese countryside with our amazing views and the wild beaches and golden sands just a short drive away.

We love the fresh fish – I’ve spent a long time perfecting my grilled fish, butterflied and braai-ed – and we’ve not been to our favourite seafood restaurant in a while.

We haven’t even dropped by the Crabstraunt (as Oda calls it), or tried wine at our local Vicentino winery’s beautiful new tasting room

Part of that is due to what our friends in the Algarve Richard & Pauline call the “Agostinis” – the tourists who rock up with their outsider demands every August (but also perhaps could be the name of a noble and serious new martini cocktail).

The beaches are already starting to thin out, the ocean water is warming and our summer sidles onwards while everyone else goes back to the office.

We have managed to sneak out to the beach once or twice for planning meetings, and the occasional working lunch picnic.

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Alongside the ongoing craft project, our office currently includes Ana’s series of rockeries under construction, experiments with LPWAN technology for monitoring and automating our water supply, and gradually getting everything ready for a photoshoot for our website.

The pressure over opening may have been released a little, but we still need to make some money – attract some late summer visitors and try and run our first retreat.

Our villa will be toasty all winter thanks to the underfloor heating and my mind is already wandering into water collection for when rain eventually drops by.

In the last couple of weeks I had another countering-disinformation trip to Nairobi (we now officially have enough Maasai blankets to keep a full house of guests nice and warm in the evenings), and I’ve just finished narrating our friend Joanna's book for Audible...it was the first one I’ve done and it was tougher than I expected!

It’s an amazing book for western CEOs though – Chinafy by Joanna Hutchins: Why China is Leading the West in Innovation and How the Rest of the World can Catch Up.

Once the audio book goes live I’ll post a link, but it is a brilliant insider’s account of just why China’s economy will soon be top of the world.

I’m not sure our little business is going to change the world, but it’s certainly changing our world, and with the challenges, the things we’re learning to do...and about ourselves...it’s certainly change for the better.

Especially now we’ve emerged from our summer of stress, newly invigorated to take on the bureaucracy battles which will allow us to open, and with a nice number of craft projects to work away at.

With all the talk about gender at the Olympics I’ve been reassessing how I identify.

I’ve spent the last few years trying to move towards something approaching the Oxford English dictionary’s definition of handyman: “a person able or employed to do occasional domestic repairs and minor renovations.”

I’ve slowly being moving towards the “Mr Fixit” label my mum used to have for my dad when I was growing up – I’m actually still using some of his tools from the 1950s box with his initials on it.

But my attitude towards our project recently is making me reconsider.

Now I think I identify as “unhandy man” or a “Mr Fixit-NOT”

I am so totally done with D-I-Why. I’m so over it. I don’t want to Do It Myself anymore. I’d like someone else to do it.

Hours spent trying to work out how to do stuff has allowed me to ponder the alternative meanings of this TLA (Three Letter Acronym):

* Died Inside Yesterday

* Dammit. Idiot. You!

* Done? Isn’t Yet.

* Drilling Incomplete. Yawn.

* Daily Incompetence? Yes.

* Don’t I Yearn...to do something else? Darn It, Yes.

Hopefully this is just a passing phase...given the amount of tinkering time, drill-skills and general knowledge about our solar and water systems I am going to need to keep this show on the road.

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But right now I really can’t face putting up any more lights, filling the remaining gaps between the skirting boards and the wall, or faffing about with wood and hinges.

I’ve thrown everything at a long running battle with the kitchen sink, hopefully have found the final solution to a leaking industrial dishwasher, and we have secured all the headboards.

But then there are the coffee tables and the wooden benches to make and varnish and fit and finish....

I make almost daily trips to the nearby agricultural supplies store and the hardware place because I haven’t bought enough nails or the right sized pipe or the correct tap.

But a lot of what we need involves a day trip.

The local DIY superstore down in the Algarve is Leroy Merlin – pronounced in Portuguese with an odd fake French accent: Leh-roh-ah Mare-lahn.

But I’m now comfortable just calling him Leroy – not even Senhor Merlin, or O Leroy – we’ve spent so much time together we are definitely on first-name terms and converse in the tu form.

I almost know what all the different silicones are for, what kind of paint you use on what and where everything is in most stores.

I even felt let down when one of his people refused to let me buy an air conditioning unit for the adega (wine cellar) because I didn’t have the name, licence number, date of birth, mother’s maiden name and inside leg measurement of the person who was going to install it.

It’s the law apparently...presumably thanks to a well-connected and strongly lobbying AC Fitters’ Union (perhaps known as the “AC-FU”?).

The car happily drives itself the hour and a quarter cross-country to visit the Holy Trinity of IKEA, Leroy and Makro.

I’ve overdosed on Swedish meatballs and hotdogs and burned hours pondering different sized parafusos (screws...up there on my list of favourite Portuguese words with rodapé or skirting boards...why use two words when you can do it in one?).

We’ve bought so many flat-pack things which need assembling, that we have spent hours just putting waste cardboard into recycling bins.

The annoying thing is that after all this I am still rubbish at it.

Lists of things to “just finish off” take hours – many of which are spent walking from one building to another searching for missing tools or drill bits which I’m sure I left somewhere.

The place is looking great – and every day it gets a little closer to being “finished” – a technical definition indicating “the placement of essentials allowing the rooms to be habitable” while other things are gradually added and finessed over time.

Of course to be officially habitable we need a licence...and little happens here once you hit August.

Businesses close, people head off on holiday and the town hall kicks the can down the road by asking for some additional signed piece of paper which we were categorically told by our architect we didn’t need a month ago.

Endless regulations, high taxes and several six-month long delays – which have twice been resolved with the official response of “oh, I forgot” – have left us financially and emotionally drained.

Both the town hall and key professionals have been unresponsive for months throughout this process. The lack of accountability from all sides is far more exhausting than we could have imagined.

Ho-hum. Let’s just hope the tourism authority are generous when they read the letter our bank manager sent on our behalf asking if we could put off payment of the loan capital until we are actually allowed to open.

We were hoping to make money this summer to get us through the more fallow winter months so are hoping to put off repayments until next Easter when tourism picks up again.

After all, compared to others in the area we’ve done things very quickly for Alentejo, but so very frustrating to spend so much time and effort to do things above board, when many people here take the approach of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. It’s often faster and cheaper.

Friends and visitors are generous with their praise for what we’ve achieved in the four years since we arrived here in the Valley of the Stars.

That’s quite an important number for me, because for all the years spent bouncing from country to country I have never lived in one place for more than four years since the 1980s when I left school in Newcastle.

Breaking an adult-lifelong nomadic habit hasn’t been as hard as I might have thought, probably because we’re so busy I suppose.

But I am happily settled in the place where we have settled and am looking forward to the next four, by which time I hope we will be running a successful business...ie one that brings in more money than it spends (very much against the current trend).

A thousand boxes of linen arrived the other day, the cutlery is on the way, you can never have too many vacuum cleaners and Ana hitched a lift north with our generous neighbour Daniel to order the crockery which we picked up a day later (at 6am) at one of the monthly markets in the area.

We’ve had a few friends road testing the facilities this weekend and while we grabbed a bit of downtime.

Ed, Rachael & Daisy were back for a week...officially our best return guests (we think it’s nine trips so far); Tim & Trish came with a camera...but we aren’t quite ready for the glamour shots just yet.

Their water was cold – but that’s just because I forgot to turn on the heatpumps – and it smelt a bit plastic-y, so I need to run a lot of water through the system.

But the pool was “amazing” and the clubhouse has the seal of approval as a great place to hang out.

And we had the first visit of our sommelier/acrobat/dancer neighbour Candace and her husband Geoff, who arrived generously armed with some wonderful wines for us to throw into the mix for a lovely wine tasting dinner with endless views over the hills.

For those of you wondering, yes the wine podcast has been on hiatus in lieu of all the other stuff we’re trying to do...but the next episode is almost finished and is coming soon. If you haven’t heard the first half of the season check it out:

I just keep remembering things and panicking about not getting them done...the LED lights in the bathrooms!...the website!...the fan system for the adega...the woodwork!

We have achieved a huge amount against the odds: out lack of experience of building, of Portuguese bureaucracy, of knowing how to do things...but we are so nearly there.

While the place will never be finished, it will be nice to be able to have time to think again...and to plan the vineyard, the marketing, the retreats...and learn how to run a lodge.

But for now, I suppose I need to haul myself up the hill, try to gather all the possible tools I could need today into one shopping bag and try to spend more time doing it myself than looking for missing tools myself.

“Well, now you just need to get through the valley of death, don’t you?” was the unexpected message of encouragement from one of our recent guests.

I met Professor Eric Lambin at Stanford University in northern California where Ana and I spent a fabulous (albeit COVID-interrupted) back-to-school journalism fellowship year.

He might be a world-renowned geographer, a member of the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors and a Blue Planet Prizewinner, but he was also one of the three students rocking up for beginning Portuguese classes every weekday morning.

All of us wanted to learn European Portuguese, but with more than 200 million Brazilians out there, that wasn’t an option and so we were learning to say the word city (cidade) with a swagger as “sid-AD-gee” rather than “sid-ad” and speaking virtually “shush”-free.

There’s quite a difference between the two versions of Portuguese and every evening Ana would make me rewrite all the verb tables adding the “tu” form (second person pronoun) which is largely ignored in Brazil, where você is favoured for everything.

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And the letter S is often pronounced as a “shh” in Portugal at the end of a word or before a consonant – it’s why it sometimes sounds like Russian...and while the Portuguese can understand spoken Spanish it doesn’t work the other way around.

You’ll get a better idea if you listen to the audio version of this despatch, but here’s an attempt to explain what I mean through a few words and a Portuguese tongue-twister:

Three plates of wheat for three sad tigers (Três pratos de trigo para três tristes tigres) is pronounced Tresh prAT-osh duh TREE-go pah-ra tresh trish-tesh tig-resh)

Festa meaning party is pronounced FESH-tah

Ratos meaning mice is pronounced RAT-oosh

Oh, and hashish is spelt haxixe!

But I digress...

Eric’s disturbing talk about death in the Valley of the Stars was taken from his knowledge of Silicon Valley and a pattern which leads many startup companies to fail.

As a geographer myself, graphs and maps always help illustrate a point, but Investopedia describes “the Death Valley Curve” as “the span of time from the moment [a company] receives its initial capital contribution until it finally begins generating revenue.”

In other words having spent almost all our money we need to keep going and finish everything until we officially open and guests start providing us with income to pay our costs and pay off our loan.

Now, I know this is not world-changing tech we’re developing: we’re not trying to train drones to swarm, or reinvent The Facebook (interestingly pronounced FacEY BOOK-ee in Brazilian), we’re just trying to build a few houses to rent out.

As regular readers know, there’s a bit more to it than that – building a totally solar-driven off-the-grid eco-luxe lodge is very challenging – although the only world we’ll be changing if we don’t make it through death valley is our own, but you know what I mean.

We’re nibbling away at the to-do list a bit slower than we’d hoped, but every little thing left to do by the builders needs to be done by us...and there are still a lot of projects.

Connecting the new Starlink to our ethernet network was a nightmare – I mean have you ever tried to wire up a fiddly little ethernet plug? Madness. Is it A, is it B...there must be an easier way of doing it?

Skirting boards remain un-fitted and un-sealed, headboards aren’t putting themselves up and the remaining furniture is slowly being assembled.

Next is to rename our buildings in a snappier way. For two years we’ve been using the arbitrarily labelled names from the architectural project: E, F and G.

Building E is the “main building” or the “pool house,” F is the villa and G is the row of en suite rooms. Maybe we need to name them after wine grapes...or stars...hmm.

Senhor Manuel the builder returned for a final run through of what still needs to be finished or tweaked and he brought an unusual warm glow and broad smile on his face...which could be either relief or perhaps pride?

After nearly two years he’s transformed this hilltop from a tatty, overgrown eucalyptus plantation into a stunning tourist lodge...and the only big part of the job left to finish now lies with the electrician who hasn’t been well.

What’s the problem with the occasional live wire sticking out here and there?

Hopefully he’s feeling better and will be back this week.

We’ve been helped hugely by the surges of activity provided by visiting skilled friends, and hosting our first sardine and wine dinner at our main building gave us a real boost.

Our Portuguese winemaking friends Mauro and Rita stayed with their kids for a few days, road testing the pool and bringing a small lake of their own wine and some much needed help and advice.

They make amazing wines and are just starting on a similar tourism project in Cuba, Alentejo which claims to be the original Cuba.

They’re naturally putting natural wine at the heart of that project and I’ve written about them in a previous wine blog – it’s in the Vidigueira region famous for Alentejo white wines and talha or amphora wine made the way the Romans made it.

They’ve put us in touch with someone who might help us navigate these last crucial stages of the project, and have proposed a little arrangement that will allow us to have our own house wine this year...watch this space.

Ana’s old pal Joanna is the third person we’ve lured to buy a house in this still-undiscovered part of Portugal, and she was here to get to grips with what needs to be done to the new place.

She has a Wine and Spirit Educational Trust (WSET) diploma in wine as well working in Greenland (I mean how cool is that...quite cool apparently...well actually pretty chilly, but stunning)...and so we’re trying to persuade her to run wine training courses at Vale das Estrelas.

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Her partner Paul also arrived from Shanghai to take a first look.

Paul’s very handy. As well as working on their place he spent some time helping us out, creating an amazing storage space and daybed headboard for one of the mezzanines (in just one day), and helping bring an added bit of Irishness to some sports watching.

He could have been slightly more sensitive during the final of the Euros, but did put in some hanging lights above the bar while Ireland beat South Africa in the rugby and stepped in with a drill when the new braai inexplicably needed installing.

It was chaos in the kitchen as Mauro and I tried to fit the taps and U-bend before people arrived (ultimately unsuccessfully) and it took an age for the coals to fire up.

But with the pink sky of a sunset over the valley, a mountain of sardines sizzling on the table, and with Mauro and Swiss winemaker friend Niels’ wines flowing we began to realise that we really have created something special.

This was just the first of many fun-filled al fresco evenings of wine and stories ending under a dark sky crammed with stars and the Milky Way flowing across the valley.

It was a great reminder of that first night here when we decided on the name Vale das Estrelas, or Valley of the Stars.

Maybe we’ve climbed up the steepest side of the valley of death, or maybe it’s a false summit...but as I never used say at the end of a BBC report (because it’s a terrible cliché) “only time will tell.”

We’ve decided that encouraging people to visit with a lure of a package, or some form of retreat is the best way forward.

Prof Eric may have scared us a little using the phrase “Valley of Death” in the Valley of the Stars, but he and his wife Régine also greatly inspired us with their project in central Portugal.

They bought an estate house, spent a few years doing it up beautifully and now run a successful business at Qunita da Marmela and run cultural tours and horse-tours...packages of things to do...reinforcing our idea this is a good way forward.

They wanted to hike some stretches of the Rota Vicentina long distance trail and loved it – despite the summer heat.

Rather than walking to a new guesthouse each day, they used our place as a base and balanced time on the clifftops and beaches with the pool and the serenity of our countryside.

“This could easily be a five day package,”  they agreed.

So there’s the first idea...then there’s the wine...and perhaps a painting retreat...and something involving exploring Europe’s last wild coast.

* And if you have any ideas about “content” to fill a week while enjoying an undiscovered part of Portugal - or experience of leading retreats - and would like to explore a collaboration...do let us know!

I’m sitting on a plane in the skies over Africa trying to put everything we’re doing into perspective.

It’s silly o’clock in the morning here, but recently we’ve been no strangers to sleepless nights, recurring dreams about buried pipes bursting and cold sweats over finances and licencing.

Big things are happening in the valley, but they’ve been wearing us down.

I lost perspective last week on one of the most difficult days on this crazy journey so far.

Another no-show from our architect and another week-long delay was the final shove towards the realisation we weren’t going to be fully open this year.

There have been many challenges, pressured decisions and self-reflections on whether we would ever have started this madcap scheme if we knew how it would unfold.

Now there are even deeper doubts about what we can do before the debts are called in and expenditure starts to spiral above the lower autumn and winter income.

But landing on a sunny June evening in Amsterdam after a short hop from Lisbon, traversing the chaotic airport terminals and now sitting here in the dark, wedged between the two other biggest blokes on a flight to Nairobi, I hope some of that perspective is returning.

At the very least it’s giving me some quiet reflective time to think about what we’ve done, how far we’ve come and what we’ve still got left to do.

The workload has been relentless – my precious early morning thinking hours to get podcast episodes published and blogs written have been cut short before 8am when workers and machines arrive and the firefighting begins.

The days are long and we have been using the light and the time; bedtimes are early, but bodies are sore and minds are busy.

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Planning...we try...there are pages of re-written and slightly updated to-do lists in notebooks, but something always comes along like a water leak or an unexpected artisan to throw a spanner in the works.

Extra screws for the patio covers, materials to order, emergency trips for vital components...more things to do than we have time for in a day or even to get through in a week.

I’m good at the firefighting, but not so good at the big picture; I push things through by force of will, but don’t properly prioritise; I immerse myself in the technical details, but am overwhelmed when faced with an onslaught of competing demands.

Thank goodness Ana is better at that...if only she could have more space to do it.

Ana deals with all the angry conversations in Portuguese and the old-school mansplainers, and has to manage the pressure of me pushing demands to the brink of destruction.

It really is one of the most difficult and stressful things we have ever done, but the hardest part is all the things that are out of our control.

And the process of licensing – the town hall bureaucracy – is certainly out of our control.

Our architect has been absent for long periods and different people are telling us many different things about how a changing process works – what we need and what we don’t need.

Expensive acoustic inspections, energy certificates that could take a year, six months or just a couple of weeks...depending on who you ask.

We pushed hard for our final architecture project to be submitted, but it wasn’t accurately done. Now it needs to be withdrawn and then re-submitted.

The topographic survey was done quickly to keep us ahead, but now we’re told our recent spurt of landscaping also needs to be marked on the map and the survey needs to be redone

We’ve done some extreme gardening before, but the last couple of weeks has been all about landscaping – cleaning up after the builders, levelling the land and putting in a few degrees of slope here and there so rainwater flows between the houses and down into the valley.

We know water lingers in the clay at the top of our valley, and as soon as the soil is saturated, any little indentation can become a lake.

Hopefully it will be managed by the long drainage trench cut between the future vineyard and the houses, and the new roadside ditch filled with drain pipes and gravel.

We bought many cubic metres of material – carefully calculating the cost of different colours and qualities to try and stay within our trimmed budget.

With the builders’ cabins gone the area in need of prettification required before welcoming guests, was a lot larger than we expected: hundreds of square metres.

Thankfully we had Helder from the material supplies and plant hire place up the road – he smooths and levels piles of gravel using the tractor buckets like extensions of his own hands, flicking here, patting down earth there.

The list of things left to do is overwhelming, but with Alan & Margery Gledson staying again we got the final building’s concrete floors sealed and all the wooden bathroom sink tops and bowls installed.

The marble kitchen tops arrived – they’re beautiful – and slowly but surely the electrics, the metal safety railings and the water system are being completed.

The beds will be the last things to go in...once the workman boots have moved on.

Even a beautiful Portuguese paradise can become a millstone of pressure and worry.

But retuning to Africa, meeting some Ethiopian journalists who live their lives in fear of the police knocking on their door in the night, helps bring some perspective.

I’ve been doing some work on the side countering disinformation and that’s what brings me to Nairobi – our old home – for the first time in five years.

A vast concrete overpass – the lauded Expressway – now flies above the city.

It took just a few years to build...a little more than our lodge which pales in scale.

High-rise buildings have sprung up, development is everywhere...but so is protest – five years on, different voices are now being silenced by the same water cannon, riot police and teargas that were so familiar I owned a gas mask.

These are the voices of the youth facing down a tumult of new taxes.

Maybe it’s time for me to mix the morning classical music listening with a little more news again, to read those Economists, to re-engage in that big world beyond the valley.

There are books waiting to be read, there are beaches ready to be visited, there’s calm to be restored and chaos to be tamed.

Balance needs to come back into our lives – we need to be running this, and not letting it run (or ruin) us.

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It’s time for a reset, a plan, a strategy...to be ready for guests as soon as we can and to get ourselves rested and ready for them

After all, this is just the beginning of something that will never be finished, but will just get better and better.

Spread the word, help us get this soft-opening year off to a good start.

In the end they left with a whimper rather than a bang.

Almost un-noticed, things on the building site gradually started disappearing until suddenly there was nothing left – except for a large pile of building rubbish and some unfinished digging work.

We’d agreed to pay for some of Justo’s digger time by the hour, and just as I was stressing about which work we needed him to do in what order he started loading it on the back of the truck.

“Broken” he shrugged and headed off to the mechanic.

He came back with an empty truck and as if by magic the last builders’ cabin disappeared. We haven’t seen them since.

I suppose that’s when we realised it was up to us now, and that all the things that still needed to be done...need to be done by us.

And there’s quite a long list.

The gradual departure of the builders passed us by because we were just so busy.

Cleaning the land with a strimmer within 50m of every building needed to be done by the end of May, and having prioritised other things I found myself facing quite an uphill (and downhill, and uphill, and downhill again) task.

With huge thanks to volunteer helpers John Rourke and Hugh Jennings who took some good chunks out of the work, I have been rising at dawn to get out on the land before the heat really hits.

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(Although I wonder if there’s a connection between John’s Scottish roots and the propensity of remaining thistles? I do hope you’re recovering well John!).

Summer has arrived and strimming after 11am quickly becomes a very energy-sapping endeavour when there’s so much else to do after the work out.

Weed-whacking might be a great weight-loss programme, but it steals my thinking and writing time.

This is the longest I’ve left between delivering despatches from Vale das Estrelas since I began, and the early morning exercise along with the bi-weekly podcast episodes have nipped my creativity.

By the way, if you haven’t started listening to the podcast yet please go over to our other Substack page – or search on Spotify or Apple Podcasts for Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure. We’re up to Episode 5 already!

Help us, part 1…

The first way you can help us is to rate the podcast and leave us a review to get the algorithm working for us…and getting more people listening.

The other big deadline was saving the lives of our 250 olive trees, scattered citrus and newly planted rosemary and lavender bushes in front of the new houses.

They were all starting to seriously sag and even though we started the process of replacing a broken irrigation pump early it was a close call.

We decided to install a submersible pump in the lake to provide all the irrigation water for now – until we have a full house at the lodge and the waste treatment plant starts providing us with ample nutritious agua.

The brilliant Cristiano and his brother Eduardo built an island out of an old pallet and four second-hand blue barrels bought for the occasion, but sadly the island sank and we had to switch it for a bright orange buoy.

The guys laid out the 300m of pipes in the blink of an eye, because they are experts in what is an undervalued, but hugely valuable skill.

Then the thief of time became the drippers.

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You can buy ready-to-install systems with a connector to the main pipe, a tube and then a spiked dripper which you push into the soil near the tree or plant to deliver water directly to the roots.

My decision to buy the constituent parts rather than the whole thing, and then put them together ourselves was meant to be time saving not money saving, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

It took us hours and at the cost of blisters and holes in our fingers which have still not recovered.

And then after Ana connected them all, they didn’t work - water was just flowing out and not reaching half the plants.

We realised we were supposed to have installed regulators as well so each plant receives a certain amount of water and everyone gets their share.

That took hours more of blistering bother.

Irrigation systems do need regular care and attention and there’s a lot to monitor, but despite a few losses they’re broadly doing well.

The calçada guys know all about working under an unforgiving sun – it took four days for the white limestone blocks to all be carefully chipped and placed by hand and tightly tesselated. The result is stunning.

The pool, the deck and the calçada all look amazing, we put some wooden poles in to stop people falling (the protective glass is under construction), and after weeks of looking at the water we finally found the time to take the plunge. Lovely.

The lack of Sr Manuel’s builders doesn’t mean everything is finished – a long line of his and our contractors are still coming and going as the deadline for “finishing” drifts ever into summer.

The electrician occasionally drops by with complaints about his worsening gout while his mate takes up the slack; Rui the water guy pops in for a few hours here and there to keep our plate spinning while he juggles 70-plus other jobs; and the carpenter, plumber, glass people and metal work guys still have a few things to finish.

We’d brought in some help in to hammer in wooden posts, cover the pergolas with willow and waterproof roofing, and to make our old water tanks drinking-water ready by emptying them and scrubbing them clean (much harder than it sounds).

Then things need doing NOW:

* get LED ceiling lights after the Amazon delivery never turned up (drive to the Algarve, realise later we didn’t buy enough)

* pick up finished handmade sink basins from Monchique (drive to the Algarve, realise later the plug holes aren’t big enough)

* fight with angry cork furniture delivery guy (he actually knocked me over with his van as he left)

* pick up new Starlink dish because the old line-of-sight internet providers unexpectedly pulled the plug and left us on EDGE (rather than fibre or 5G) pretty much overnight

* deal with a dramatic water pipe leak here, a demand for a big decision there

But all efforts are currently focussed on the landscaping – the literal moving of mountains...of earth and gravel.

The removal of the construction cabins revealed just how huge an area we have on the top of the hill behind the houses. We need trees, but can’t now plant much until the autumn, so we need ground cover to beautify our eco-luxe lodge.

The process involves breaking up the already baked-hard soil with a giant tractor, then moving and levelling and rolling it with enough of a slope to help water runoff next winter.

At least three truck loads of 23 tonnes of white tout venant were delivered – a mixture of gravel and rock dust which compacts well and will surround every building, make paths and the pétanque court.

Grey tout venant will follow with some gravel, wood chips and mulch...and felled pine trees and white stones for edges.

And with every machine hour - and truck-load of material - our landscaping budget has a big chunk excavated out of it.

The payments have been flowing out as the spending curve accelerates to the end of the project, and amid it all the tourism authority who has given us the loan blocked our final (and pretty significant) block of funding.

“No money until the work is finished” they said.

“We can’t finish until we get the money,” we replied.

After weeks of back and forth, our legendary bank manager Wilson worked some more of his magic and secured an agreement...the cash should arrive this week.

Even with the rest of the loan, we were worried about whether we had enough money to make it over the line.

We’ve thrown all our savings into this, and I’d been putting off the full audit because I was scared about what I might find.

But with a strict landscaping budget to define, we needed to know how much money is left.

I’m glad to report that despite some big and unexpected hits like a broken borehole and spiralling water system costs, the figures just about add up. It’ll be tight, but we should make it...as long as we can welcome guests this summer.

Help us, part 2…

So, for those of you who couldn’t make it here to volunteer...please help us by coming to stay.

With our last burst of helpers expected soon, everything should be open-ready by the end of June, and while the online booking engine is still on the really-must-do-now-but-haven’t-got-time list, please let us know when you’d like to come and stay as paying guests.

It’s a soft opening year, so the prices will be good! Come and visit and claim your free bottle of Alentejo wine...with a story.

“So when do you open?” is a common question as everything on our hillside starts to look a little more finished.

“Last Saturday” is my current response – because that was the original plan.

Great friends of ours from our Bangkok days...and their friends...had booked last year to come and stay when the finish date on the building contract was optimistically set for the end of February.

“Yes, this February,” was my common response (often to the builders) while we prepared for a group of 28 people – half of them children, but we felt that even if it slipped a month or two we’d be all set by May.

It was a very generous offer to help us with a soft opening – to give us the practical experience of running a retreat for a large group with varying demands – safe in the knowledge they are friends and would understand...and give great feedback.

As the year began, and the combination of heavy rain delaying the construction and the growing realisation that we are not super-human led us to suggest they book the larger and more established Pé no Monte hotel nearby.

We are so pleased they did.

Their slimmed down early-arrival group of 20 came over to see us for a tour, a wine tasting and a sardine supper.

The ratio was the same: ten adults to ten children.

Obviously diggers make great climbing frames, rock dust is perfect for sandcastles and “don’t go close to the precipice by the pool” translates into child as “we must go over there.”

The electricity is now connected to all the buildings and the spaghetti water system is working – including to the toilets and showers – but the sinks aren’t quite there to help the water to its final destination.

All but one of the outside doors and windows are now in, the interior doors are ready to hang and the metal safety railings for the mezzanines will go in this week (they could have plunged off those precipices too).

The wine tasting went well, the sardines feast was saved by our friend Adam Cooper’s quick intervention and we ended the day having learned a lot of lessons about hospitality...and health & safety.

Our wonderful daughter Oda has been staying with us – en route to managing the emerging American indie rock artist Taylor Sackson for her first UK tour.

Check out the dates and if you’re local, drop in and show some support for Oda and Taylor (she’s got an amazing voice).

Oda knew it was going to be a busy time in the Valley of the Stars, but none of us anticipated just how manic the last couple of weeks were going to be – it was a proper case of spinning plates while juggling (or a combination of the two).

She arrived in the middle of our filling-the-pool water crisis which I wrote about last time, a task made much more difficult by a broken borehole.

After trying everything he could first, the ever impressive Cristiano and his brother Eduardo set about hauling the pump 120m out of the ground to discover it needed to be replaced...along with its cable, pipe and rope.

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It was another unexpected cost which merely contributes to my active avoidance of checking the accounts to see if we actually have enough money left to finish our project.

My former BBC colleague and audio-genius friend Peter Emmerson helped us through the first two weeks of the podcast launch.

Episode 2 went live yesterday – please head over to the wine blog and sign up if you haven’t already...or just search for Ana & Al's Big Portuguese Wine Adventure where you get your podcasts or have a listen here:

You’ll remember our friend John Rourke from my last despatch: the Scottish strimmer and cork floor fitting fiend who dragged his pal Tony over to cork click-floor our mezzanines.

John said he’d be back to finish the job after a short trip home, but decided to have a heart attack in Scotland instead...I mean, as far as excuses go that’s a pretty good one.

Thankfully he was just 10mins away from Glasgow hospital and out a few days later struggling more with the regime of enforced rest than anything else.

Wishing you a speedy recovery John – all that strimming made him as fit as a butcher’s dog which should help – and in terms of places to keel over I’d certainly choose Glasgow over the hills of Alentejo for speedier emergency care, rather than the scenery.

Most items on our post-it wall of ambition are proving stubborn to shift, but my old university pal Hugh Jennings was also on hand this week to help us make some impact.

“Finish the cork floors” was high up on the running order, and Tony insisted on coming back and giving us a masterclass in click floor installation as we fussed around him trying to help.

Hugh and I moved a lot of heavy things around, unpacked the entire restaurant kitchen, assembled some furniture and conquered a lingering gutter which has been staring at me for weeks, begging to be installed (just in time for the next drought).

And we certainly couldn’t have prepped our sardines and wine tasting day without him...thanks so much again for coming Hugh!

I dropped Hugh off at Faro airport and picked up another old friend Ciaran for the return trip.

Our Algarve adventures always involve big shops and pickups, and after negotiating Cassie the Hilux and a trailer through the narrow streets of Faro, Ciaran was treated to Leroy Merlin DIY store (twice), Makro, a large metal factory, and although spared Ikea, was dragged to the irrigation pipe place.

The sudden arrival of summer means all the trees we have planted need regular watering – all 300 of them.

The irrigation pump failed last year and so we’ve upgraded to a submersible pump for the lake to feed the citrus and the olive trees down in the valley and up on the hill.

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This requires 500m of pipe, scores of fiddly drippers to install and the construction of a small island out of wood and plastic barrels to support and power the pump in the lake.

Then there’s Ana and Oda’s dresser re-decoration job to finish, sealing material for the concrete floors to buy and spread, skirting boards to install, more interiors to order, bills to pay, accounting to put off...and that’s just today.

It really has been one of those times when a week feels like a month...when there’s not enough time in the day or space in my brain.

There’s not even enough space to cram it all into one despatch (but I’ll keep trying).

Oda, Ana, Ciaran and I did all enjoy a night away at the stunning Tróia Design Hotel on the sliver of Alentejo that points at the Setúbal Peninsula just south of Lisbon.

It was work rather than play, as I’d been asked to do a couple of turns at a conference known as the Sleeper Sessions – a high-end networking event for top hotels and international designers.

Matt Turner, editor in chief of Sleeper Media which publishes the influential Sleeper Magazine (among others) invited me to run a couple of their “Sustenance Sessions” after hearing the radio pieces I did for the BBC on off grid living (which you can listen to here and here).

It involved hosting a tasting and talk about Portuguese and Alentejo wines, some background on the kind of madness required to build an off-grid eco-luxe lodge with no prior experience, and stories from my previous war-reporting life.

It was great fun – thanks to Matt and to moderator Guy Dittrich for the invite and for giving me the chance to meet so many real hotel and design people. Hopefully a few of them might even come and stay.

It also inspires me that perhaps the wine tasting/live storytelling part of our business plan might just work…

There have been occasions when I’ve strolled up to our building site expecting a hive of activity, only to discover the Mary Celeste.

Perhaps that’s an apt comparison, given the abandoned ship was found drifting somewhere between the Azores islands and the Portuguese coast in 1872 with no crew – what happened to them remains a mystery to this day.

Tumble weeds don’t even grow here, but I’d swear I’ve seen them in the corner of my eye on those days where a sprinkle of drizzle or an ominous weather forecast has kept everyone away despite a daunting list of deadlines.

Inoculated by past disappointments I wandered up the hill this week with low expectations, only to stumble into rush hour at Paddington Station.

I struggled to find a parking space among the various sized white vans, piles of newly delivered limestone cobbles, and rumbling trucks.

There were electricians and carpenters, gutter fitters and pool people, the plumber, the water guy, delivery drivers, and...drumroll please...the door and window installers!

Our hopes and dreams, our wishes and requests, our letters to Santa Claus...had all answered by the arrival of the PVC people and their large truck of fabulous frames and gorgeous glass.

We’re finally getting somewhere after the many months of transforming a scraggy eucalyptus forest into something approaching an off-grid eco-luxe resort.

And as the workers are seemingly focussing on the finishing line we’re hitting the buy button on chairs and tables, lamps and loungers, umbrellas and bedside tables...to get all the finishings – at least – in the post.

I wondered the scene with my mouth open. I love it when a plan comes together.

But what’s truly amazing is all our wonderful friends who have been dropping everything to answer our call for help.

“I’d like to help with some strimming,” John Rourke messaged a few weeks ago.

With the fire regulations deadline fast approaching for clearing land 50m from every building that is not something you say no to.

Our Scottish friend who lives about 45 minutes away in Cercal arrived with a car-load of strimming machines, all fuelled up and ready for action (he even brought his own water bottles to keep hydrated through the job!).

I’ve been putting off the annual weight-loss programme as long as possible and this was just the kick I needed to get things started.

I should know by now that strimmers emerge from their winter hibernation with missing parts, wobbly fittings and absent essentials which always require at least a couple of trips to the local Stihl shop.

John’s already been strimming his land for weeks and so was totally in the rhythm on the hillside while I was spending ages getting up to speed.

He stayed the night to get an early start and had sorted most of the land above the house before I’d really got anywhere in the citrus grove – moving all the dead agave flowers from last year and trying not to get too tangled up in the ancient un-irrigated grape vines and left over electric fence.

I’d patched up a dodgy wire-strimming fitting which lasted right up until it didn’t – when the whole thing flew off in every direction…including towards the side window of our neighbour Daniel’s car.

While I can’t say for sure that the exploding strimmer was responsible for his shattered glass, it’s probably more likely than a toad with a catapult.

While John strimmed ever onwards, the Stihl shop was sadly awaiting a delivery – providing me with just the excuse I needed to focus on something else for the time being.

And there has been plenty to focus on.

The post-it wall has remained stubbornly static as the daily demands of project managing the workers and keeping power humming and water running has required regular shuttle runs up and down the valley.

Pumps and the various workmen’s tools all running at once tended to trip the fuses, so it required careful management and repeated visits to the fuse box.

Filling the pool without a grid connection was always going to be ambitious, but we’d been told it had to be filled as soon as the final pebble and cement layer had been applied to protect the concrete from cracking in the sun.

A little rough mathematics rounded up to the unlikely figure of 70,000 litres needed to get the infinity pool overflowing, but the cost of bringing in fresh water was prohibitive (to say the least).

We’d stored about 180,000 litres in a pillow tank at the bottom of the valley, and water consultant Rui Faria had the solar pump all connected and tested, but it only runs in the sun.

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We filled our new tanks with 30,000 litres ahead of time, but that was just a start – the key was going to be the boreholes which provide good, clean water and the slight saltiness ideal for a salt-water pool.

But right on cue – after years of working brilliantly – our main borehole dramatically failed and even the brilliant Christiano couldn’t get it going...despite his efforts on the national holiday – the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution.

The only solution was using our neighbour Daniel’s solar system to power-pump water up the hill, but unexpected cloudy skies drained his batteries too...plunging his house into early morning darkness.

Overcast skies have slowed the pumps, but have also reduced the threat to the pool from the sunshine and it is now well on the way to being full.

It really has been all hands on deck – our daughter Oda has arrived from LA to bring a much needed creative touch to the interiors – and we’re hugely grateful to artist Ed for dreaming up the idea of our new logo and to Tim for his design genius in jointly producing something very special. We hope you like it.

We’re tweaking the stars which form the constellation of Cassiopeia and will be recreating the same pattern on our limestone deck of calçada cobbles in front of the main building.

Ex-BBC audio whizz Pete Emmerson has been staying with us too – editing and mastering the first few weeks of our wine podcast which we’ll be launching really soon – and lending a hand on the building site and with the landscaping.

But above (and beyond) the call of duty...John Rourke returned, swapping his car-load of strimmers for click-floor partner-in-crime Tony...and the two of them set about one of the biggest tasks to be keeping us up at night.

I’ve dabbled with click floors for the guesthouse bathrooms, but the cork boards for our mezzanines required another level of skill and dedication.

I’d say they nailed it, but they actually hammered it...and levered it, and tweaked it and fiddled it... and created beautiful floors that we are hugely proud of.

They’ll be back to finish the job next week, and I might push my luck and ask about skirting boards! Thank you sooo much guys.

Everything is starting to take shape, but as April ticks towards May...and more volunteers are preparing to arrive to help...we’re confident we can get this thing done and get this lodge open.

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The only problem – and huge concern that fills us with fear as well as frustration – is the licensing part of the project.

Our architect has joined the crew of the Mary Celeste and left us drifting in our hour of need...three weeks of ghosting has left us panicked that we won’t be able to open for the summer and raise the income we need to start paying back our loan.

It’s a good time and an energising time...but we’re not completely out of the eucalyptus woods yet.

The first sign of summer is when planting a tree turns from simply picking a spot and digging up a bit of soil...to battering through concrete.

It took just two days of mid-20s Celsius for the ground to turn from being soft and simple to dig, mix in with compost and happily plant, to needing a medieval throwing spear to break the surface and leave us longing for a pneumatic drill to finish the job.

It’s also a sign it’s now probably too late for us to do much of our planned landscaping.

Half the lavender planted in front of our new villa is thriving, while the other half is struggling...the difference being three days and one light shower.

Thankfully our great friends Ed, Rachael and Daisy were visiting – they brought along their great pals Medwin and Emily – and we roped them all into a little plant-off to get in the fruit trees, a few olives, figs and medronhoplants...and even twisted Ed’s arm to design us a new logo.

We have so many more trees and plants to place, but delays to the building work and so much rain lingering in the clay has limited our planting window.

For our first season we will do what we can by laying a lot of gravel and mulch, starting on a cactus garden and mixing in all the cover crops on the vineyard area to improve the soil before we plant next March.

After so much rain we almost got sick of it (we didn’t, of course), but the sudden arrival of ample sunshine and high temperatures also brought a rush of workmen bursting back on site like a field of daisies.

Once the Easter break was out of the way, our hilltop was filled with cars as on one extraordinary day we enjoyed the company of the builders, carpenters, electricians, painters and our water consultant. All on one day.

The pool preparation people even arrived a day early...brilliant, but it created another layer of complication requiring a wild goose chase to track down our plumber whose attendance was courteously requested.

The post-it note wall is back and is as packed and full as ever...but the order of achievement priority has been recalibrated from “quarter one” through “quarter four” to “today”, “tomorrow” and “yesterday”.

Things are certainly happening...I had to go through photographs and the diary simply to remember all the stuff which has been done since my last despatch...and that’s a very good thing.

We have stairs in both apartments and the metal handrail makers will be back on Monday to measure up the safety barriers; the cork floors have arrived; the pool pump is in, and its concrete structure has been prepped for its final pebbly layer which is due next week.

The discovery that our infinity pool overflow tank was too shallow required some quick cement-block action, but that ended well.

The water infrastructure has taken a couple of major steps forward towards flowing – even if our key borehole has for some strange reason stopped working right now and our house supply is dwindling (well, I did want the tank empty in order to paint it with a drinking water seal anyway!).

The solar pump, on neighbour Daniel’s land, is now bringing irrigation canal water hundreds of meters up the valley to mix in with our salty borehole supply (when available); and the house and panel rainwater capture system is almost finished...just in time for the summer drought.

We need about 60,000 litres of mixed and treated water by next Thursday...but that requires electricity to run the pumps and the softener...and clean tanks to store it in.

I messed up on the tank front by asking for soil to be piled onto the sides without properly reinforcing the tank first needing some extra bulldozer hours to undo and redo that job.

And the power grid appears to require the kind of focussed attention not supplied by the occasional drop-ins by the electrician checking on his worker.

At least we found the electrical cable that connects the current guesthouse.

You may remember months of random digging, detective work and the unsuccessful deployment of Niels’ 1980s metal detector to track down the power cable before it reaches the house...and save us a huge rewiring job.

Some carefully selected hand-digging uncovered the illusive little blighter...to great acclaim and relief all round.

That means we can now seamlessly integrate everything into the new system.

Ana celebrated yet another 29th birthday and her morning birthday sandwich illustrated the gift we both want...in fact it’s the same thing I wanted for my birthday...oh, and it’s what we both asked Father Christmas for as well...DOORS AND WINDOWS.

It’s a small thing to ask. No, actually it’s a large thing to ask...and require before anything can be effectively done inside the new buildings...but we did order them last year.

The promised deadline keeps slipping...please, please, please can it be this week??

While our daughter Oda has introduced a new family rule that birthday sandwiches need to be edible, I gambled on the current intermittent fasting regime of “no food before midday” to get away with mixing cheese and corn tortilla, fishpaste, carrot and cucumber with cake decorations.

After two consecutive years of proper surprise trips to Atlantic Islands (Madeira and then the Açores) I totally blindsided my wife this year by not taking her anywhere!

She didn’t expect that!

It wasn’t that much of a surprise...given that we have so many things on the Post-It note wall, but thankfully dinner was more palatable than my sandwich.

We’ve been meaning to go to the fine dining experience place nearest to us – the Michelin mentioned Näperõn in Odeceixe – and at least that was something of an unexpected element of a birthday which also involved a visit to the aptly named Birthday Beach.

It was great...carefully thought through and created “moments” with a great wine list.

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Of course the absence of doors and windows hasn’t stopped us cracking on with the interiors...we haven’t got time to waste.

We finally managed to wrestle the cork oak planks – heft from our ancient fallen tree – from the local carpentry shop.

After weeks of waiting it was a pretty disappointing job, but we transported them down to Ben in nearby Aljezur for him to weave some magic and turn these scratched and scraped, slightly warped planks into a stunning 2m long bar and some fabulous bathroom vanities.

He selected the best of the bunch – the rest will be a possible wine rack and a couple of tables which we will turn our own hands to.

We still have to work out a good solution for the countertop legs, but the stunning wood will be an amazing addition to all the bathrooms and we will mount handmade pottery bowls as sinks.

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Our most recent acquisition trips to the Algarve took us to the workshop of Leonel Telo Cerâmica up the mountains of Monchique.

Leonel was so enthused about the project he started making the first sink before we’d even left the shop!

I made a little video of stage one of the process: do check it out!

The Facebook Marketplace runs also resulted in the collection of two huge electrical cable spools which we’ll convert to dining tables, old iron farming tools we’ll turn into coffee tables and a beautiful old crockery dresser for the main building.

Slowly, slowly we’re collecting some beautiful things and Ana is spending hours poring over chairs and poolside furniture, umbrellas, crockery and décor.

In the race against time that is our hillside, everything we plant from here on in is going to be a challenge, but with water on its way and power coming for the pumps soon we will be turning our attention to irrigation once again.

Hundreds of metres of drip-pipes and a new submersible pump and floating platform for the lake will hopefully help us keep our hedge of two hundred olives alive...and the ones on the hill...and the lavender...and the fruit trees...and...

...and why am I still writing when we have sooooooo much to do.

Até proxima as they say here...see you soon.

We’ve worried about water for three years now – since we started our crazy off-grid adventure – but had no idea we’d be dealing with too much rather than too little.

Nevertheless, we are still happy to see the heavens open, despite months of above average rainfall – thanks to El Niño – and a massive storm system that’s been sitting off the coast of Ireland and hammering the Iberian peninsula all week.

Lisbon’s steep and narrow streets briefly turned to rivers, a video clip of a rare water spout near the Vasco de Gama bridge in the capital made headlines around the world, and building work here in The Valley of the Stars has pretty much ground to halt.

Of course it’s easier to live with when the temperatures remain in double figures and the sun shines between squalls, topping up our solar system and keeping everything running.

As the climate changes, more extremes are expected, which is why we’ve invested in 200,000 litre pillow tanks to collect all the rain and save it for our guests during the long hot summers.

Sadly, neither the gutters nor the tanks have been installed in time to make use of all the water now overflowing from our lake into a new river which is flowing down the valley.

The system for harvesting rainwater from our house and the solar panels got one step closer this week as we placed and buried the tank and all the associated pipes.

The land also keeps sliding in various places – this week part of the hillside around the lake collapsed – and we do wish our doors and windows had been installed before this latest inundation.

At least the builders invested some time in an innovative, gale-proof construction of wood and insulation foam to block the doors and windows where the kitchens have now been installed.

The delay to this key part of the project has slowed everything down on the building site, but we did get a few things done despite the rain.

The unpolished concrete people were back between showers to try another way of improving our floors (we’re still disappointed in the way they look) and the metal workers installed one of the two staircases,

Heat Pump Paulo connected everything up for the water and underfloor heating – as much as he could until we get all our utilities online (while also providing us all with plates of his famous fabulous rabbit and rice lunch).

We’re being drip-fed a water treatment system, and the absence of an electrician is perhaps expected given the poor relationship between rain and electricity.

At the very least we look forward to the years ahead when the rainwater has soaked through the ground and eventually reached the level of our borehole.

Of course the combination of rain and sunshine is fuelling some pretty impressive springtime sprouting.

We marvel at the green hillsides, the flowering estevas (rockroses), the revived and fast-growing grape vines and the colourful weekly additions to the pointillism painting that is the Alentejo spring.

It’s yellow time at the moment as everything bursts into life, and it’s weird to imagine all this vibrancy will be baked away in a month or two when summer sets in.

And for every day that more power and water is piled into the vegetation, my strimming workload grows.

Areas 50m around every building need to be cleared by the end of April to protect from fire, and three new buildings broadens my Spring fitness regime quite significantly.

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We’re taking advantage of the sodden soil to pull out the tall and woody esteva which needs to be removed every few years as the combination of dry stems and oily leaves burn like little torches.

Fortunately, the large area of eucalyptus plantation on the other side of the hill has been chopped down and dug out, providing a vast fire break if the unlikely was to happen this year.

Everything is so easy to weed when it’s this wet, and so we need to take advantage of it while we can – cleaning up the gravel and planting the trees we bought on a rainy trip to the Monchique mountain nursery Viveiro Denis.

Justo and the builders had managed to get some basic landscaping down before the latest storm and so we are now turning our attention to transforming our building site before we open.

It’s not going to be perfectly manicured straight away – the delays have stopped us from planting as much as we’d like before the summer – but the seeds we planted in the future vineyard have sprouted well and we will be ploughing the greenery in once we get a few dry days.

Our soil sample results came back with uninspiring levels of most things, but grapes aren’t that fussy...and hopefully our half hectare can grow some wine-able grapes in a few years.

We aim to plant next March – and have a couple of weeks left to register our land and mark out where we will be planting what kind of grapes.

We were lucky enough to meet winemaker and viticulturalist Miguel Mimoso through our friend at the nearby Vicentino winery, and popped down to visit his project in the Algarve for a tour, some tips and some wine tastings.

Arvad is a beautiful winery producing some amazing wines and I’ll be writing about them and their Negra Mole grapes soon on our other blog The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure where we’ll be launching the podcast series next month. Check it out!

We’ve also been back to Vicentino to see their amazing new winery and have recorded an extra podcast episode there.

Miguel has already visited our land and we’ll see what he says about the most suitable grape types when he sees the soil sample results.

Today we’re tucking into an Easter lunch of Niels and Sybille’s finest lamb – born and bred roaming free: lots of amazing days and then one really bad one...the first instalment of half a sheep been slow cooking since yesterday while the rest languishes in the freezer.

We’re welcoming our neighbour Daniel (whose landscaping vision of his property is really starting to bear fruit) and our friends Tim & Trish who have moved into their new place (which needs a bit of good weather work) and have been battling a leaky roof and an exploding shower.

The lamb will be spectacular, but the party of the week has already been and gone.

On Good Friday our builder Joaquim invited us to a gathering in his village. We thought it was a traditional Easter event, but it turned out to be his 78th birthday.

Joaquim has been the bedrock of our building project – bounding up and down scaffolding, skilfully bricklaying our curved wind-break wall, sharing his lunch almost every day with Albie the dog and injecting a wonderful mischievous energy to our building site.

He and his pals were dressed in their Cante Alentejano best - periodically breaking out into traditional song throughout the lunch.

His whole family were there and we were honoured to be his guests.

As we left, he told us his work was finished at our site and he wouldn’t be coming back. He’ll be missed...but hopefully he and his choir can come back and help us open the lodge...once the power’s on and the doors and windows are in.

All the best Joaquim...and thanks for everything...here’s to 78 more!

We love having friends over – especially the ones who haven’t been to our place in a while.

“Wow...you’ve done so much! It’s amazing...it’s almost finished,” they all say and we breathe out a little, smile and nod to each other acknowledging the reminder of just how far we have actually come in such a short time.

Blessed by the reassurance we aren’t complete idiots we can relax into a nice lunch and present a little Alentejo tell-and-taste wine story, imagining a day when we’re finished enough to open and do this for strangers.

Then all the worries start flooding back in.

But before I plunge into the long list of sleep-sapping challenges, something else lifted my spirits this week...something that reminded me of the way the building started.

It’s all about the small things, and it first happened when this whole crazy project hung in the balance, when Ana and I took turns telling the other why it was madness and when the loan was about to time out without a single receipt being filed.

Despite having no builder under contract, no construction permit and no deposit paid, a large pile of steel reinforcing rods turned up one day.

They weren’t invited, they weren’t expected, they hadn’t been paid for, but yet they were there – maybe ten thousand euros’ worth – on the bit of flat land that used to be a eucalyptus forest.

That’s when we realised it was going to happen.

This week it wasn’t an arrival which marked a milestone, but it was the departure...of a machine which has fascinated me since it first landed.

The giant red cement mixer on wheels scoops up ratios of sand, gravel and cement by the bulldozer bucket.

It churned out foundations, pillars and beams...and now it’s gone.

Wooden boards, building materials, scaffolding have all slowly been melting away and everything starting to look a bit less like a building site and a bit more like an off-grid eco-luxe countryside lodge.

Maybe we are almost finished?

The heat pumps have finally migrated from sheltering under plastic on the hillside to taking up their positions ready for installation, and our focus has firmly shifted towards the interiors which Ana has been hammering away at for months now.

Malcolm Gladwell argues you need 10,000 hours to attain true expertise in anything and Ana’s not far off when it comes to developing the style of our interiors.

The beds are ready for delivery, the leather sofas and beautiful headboards are here, one kitchen is on its way from Germany, two more are coming from nearby, we have fridges, a stove, cork flooring on order, marble tables being made and are investigating lighting.

We have to find the perfect wine tasting glasses, the right crockery, bedside tables, wardrobes, chairs, patio furniture...the Excel sheet is long and sprawling.

It’s a lot of shopping: sourcing, chasing, finding, thinking, researching, calculating and delving for discounts.

An unexpectedly speedy car service date gave us a day in the Algarve to wander and ponder in shops and factory stores and with the new-found confidence to spot a deal and go with it.

It was an expensive day but a fun day – we found ourselves smiling quite a lot – and it was punctuated by our regular Algarvian sushi lunch.

It’s curiously calming to spend large amounts of borrowed money, knowing that every single thing we buy is one less thing we need to buy.

The receipts are piling up and I’m desperately trying to keep up with the accounting: are we over budget (yes), is it by too much (hopefully not).

Should we have invested in the two stand up paddle boards for guests to rent out? (Probably not). Are they a good addition to the business and what we are offering? (Probably).

Sadly we missed this month’s auction, which is probably best given what we picked up last time around (a fruit machine was not on the Excel sheet).

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This week’s hugely welcome visitors were our pals Richard and Pauline who run a lovely café in the Algarve called Earth and brought visiting Dutch journalist/photographer couple Jaaruen and Eline to see our project.

“Congratulations,” Richard said...which stopped me in my tracks: that’s the kind of thing you say when something’s finished.

The floors are still a mishmash of colours from yellow to greige and our unpolished concrete people have gone very quiet on us since trying a new treatment which failed to solve the problem.

Oh, and the big concrete poop remains a defining feature.

There’s the obvious absence of doors and windows accompanied by builder’s shrug and the concerning ease at which “beginning of March” became “beginning of April.”

Electricity cables loll against walls and the water treatment station is still a work in progress, but “will we get the licence in time?” is still our most common refrain.

It’s not a baseless fear.

Our engineer keeps telling us of another tourist lodge that still hasn’t been licensed more than a year since it was finished...and we have been trying to get paperwork for our guesthouse for almost three years now.

We’ve been throwing everything at it – the surveyor has already been to precisely map out where all the buildings ended up – and we are on the town hall’s fast track programme...but that really depends on the track: dirt roads are a lot slower than tarmac.

Our dirt track has been particularly slow recently because of all the rain, and a gaping cavern had opened which Cassie the Hilux was increasingly struggling to navigate.

I may have passed my Portuguese exam last week, but I still didn’t quite follow the Cow King who I bumped into at the building materials shop a couple of weeks ago when he announced something about rocks.

It was all good, I just didn’t know exactly what he meant, but I did understand his phone conversation with Ana “your husband doesn’t speak much Portuguese” he said, “but I have a load of rocks which you can have to repair the road.”

And so we had a workout, and I think it worked out.

We also have the Cow King to thank for our lunch, along with a failing freezer, which led Ana to reach for the bottom drawer and something meaty from the hunting club.

It’s always worth having a bit of freezer space for when O Rei das Vacas drops by with blood-dripping blue plastic bags of wild boar (wild boar) or venison.

With the clock ticking on the lifespan of my mum & dad’s old John Lewis fridge freezer (which must be at least 25 years old), the javali was released and slow-cooked by Ana to perfection.

Slow cooking also sums up my experience with DHL Express, which is expressing no real urgency in delivering my original birth certificate and a new officially stamped one from the UK so we can take the next bureaucratic step towards Portuguese longevity.

Ana has Portuguese citizenship and now I have my shiny new A2 language qualification we just need some stamped, translated, stamped again, re-officiated, and double-authenticated paperwork and we get new passports.

Toda a gente adora um novo passaporte.

Please keep watching this space...but I do have temporary residency until 2027, so we should be OK.

I thought the whole learning a language thing might be the hardest – and it has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done...and this is just stage one...but hey...just like this whole crazy adventure it’s all aboot surprising yourself, eh? (IYKYK)

Well, that was easy.

After years of waiting and hoping, begging and pushing, of sleepless nights and stressful days our reaction was...understated when the email came through.

We’d roped in a trade organisation to help us bother and worry the town hall decision makers and were told everything seemed on track and a decision would be delivered on Friday or Monday.

Friday nervously came and went as a warning that unrequited expectations can put a cloud over a weekend.

But on Monday morning the letter from our local câmara – or town hall – dropped into our inbox, and as usual was written in a way that needed translation, interpretation, further consideration and expert reassurance before we could believe what we thought we could see.

“Regarding the above-mentioned matter and for all due effects, I am obliged by order of the Councilor dated March 14th 2025...”

Yes...do go on...

“After a classification audit, a copy of Report No. 25/25 of which is attached...”

Yes, yes..?

“To inform Your Excellency,” yes-yes-yes, that’s definitely me, “that the Tourist Enterprise called Vale das Estrelas...meets the conditions to be classified as Tourism in Rural Areas - COUNTRY HOUSES.”

No need to shout. Wait, what? So that’s it then? Has anything else been slipped into the five pages of ifs and buts that says in some convoluted way how this will only come to pass after we have provided x and y additional documents?

No? Really?

OK.

In this way, played out in real time, was the anatomy of an anticlimax.

“The number,” we both remembered. “Now we need the number.”

We’d like to think we’re not just a number, but in terms of opening to the general public...of getting the quantity of people through the door we need to pay back our loans and pay staff we haven’t yet got...everything is about the tourism number.

We are just a number.

How many weeks, we wondered, would it take to get that?

Monday afternoon was rainy and not packed with optimism as we dived into the Turismo de Portugal online portal and started filling things in.

We called a few times for guidance...and a woman called Maria João picked up pretty much straight away...every time.

But the last call to Turismo irritated the person who picked up.

“Yes...of course,” she said sternly. But we repeated the question anyway: “So that’s our number? Our actual tourism number? The number we need to open to the public, to list on AirBnB, to run our business? So what do we do now”

“Well rent out your rooms of course! Is there anything else?”

There wasn’t.

There was just a number. One. Two. Five. One. One.

Not the snappiest, nor the most symmetrical, but it was ours and it was beautiful. Our. Own. Number.

Finally, licensed...to bill.

We reached for the champagne as we had some other numbers to celebrate.

It was St Patrick’s Day – and the 15th anniversary of Ana and I getting together.

1, 2, 5, 1, 1; 17, 3, 2010…15. Pink Portuguese espumante. Nice.

And then the work began…

It’s been a stormy March here in Portugal, and we’ve been using the time to get our new website firmly under construction.

As four named storms pummelled the Portuguese coast, we’ve been pulling together years of photographs and months of thoughts and ideas about how to best describe our property, and do it justice.

As I said last month, all we’ve got to do now is make sure all those people who will love the calm, the serenity and the undiscovered beauty of this place will find us.

As storms Jana, Konrad, Laurence, and Martinho rattled our windows, scared our dogs, tested our dams, filled our water tanks to overflowing and gorged out a river down our valley, we sent Word files full of copy and folders packed with pictures to GuestCentric’s designers.

They’re a website and booking engine company for small-hoteliers like us (I like the sounds of that), and will hopefully take the pain out of listing properties, prevent double bookings and encourage as many direct enquiries as possible.

But while they work away finessing and finetuning we plunged straight into what is the hell of AirBnB and Booking.com profiles to put ourselves out there ASAP.

That was a frustrating couple of rainy days in our life that neither of us will ever get back.

Why is adding photos to room profiles so difficult? How do we navigate the different included or excluded fees and taxes to set prices that match our expectations but aren’t too much for the visiting public?

Why are there so many sections that need to be filled in?

As the squalls of heavy showers are becoming more scattered and infrequent, the sun is shining through literally and figuratively as our room profiles have gone live.

So here they are – finally – links to our AirBnB profiles.

Taking their name from stars and constellations the three suites are called Sirius Altair and Vega; the Bungalow’s one-bed place is called Aquila and the two-bed apartment is Lynx; and the Villa has Andromeda and Cassiopeia.

Spread the love, my friends...please spread the love.

Our website works for now, but will be shiny and new very soon.

But also bear in mind AirBnB add fees on top…and contacting us directly works better for everyone ;)

Back to the weather and it really has been quite remarkable.

We always say we never complain about rain as we need all the water we can get, but I have an admission to make...enough already.

I know the aquifers continue to love it, and although the massive Alqueva Reservoir was half a meter from being full a week ago, our local reservoir Santa Clara is still only at 55% and it would really help our region if it filled up.

Four major storm depressions in March is a first and although the rainfall hasn’t overtaken levels of 2018, the year 2000 or the more historical averages, there have been 100mph winds along the west coast and quite a bit of damage caused in Lisbon.

There are trees up and flood damage all around our region too.

“Unusual...but not unprecedented,” is how the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and Atmosphere or IPMA is quoted by Portugal Decoded.

It’s a great news site in English which I’d heartily recommend. They have an obsession about making a carefully crafted infographic every week...and who doesn’t love an infographic.

The winter weather has certainly become a personal obsession as we need to balance our power use on those rare weeks when sunshine is at a premium, and so keep a close eye on the Apps: Weather Underground and Ventusky are my go-tos.

And I learned early on that it’s the Azores High which is the most important influence on the Iberian peninsula.

When it’s a little weaker and further away from the Iberian Peninsula, as it has been this winter, some of Britain’s weather ends up here. Imagine.

“Rising ocean surface temperatures suggest climate change may be playing a role,” Portugal Decoded add, with North Atlantic sea temperatures 3 or 4 degrees Celsius above average in places.

But proper Spring is now most certainly on the near horizon.

Despite the high winds, the cuckoo is back...somehow it made it through storm Martinho!And I’m sure I heard a Nightingale the other day.

And the medium-range forecasts are no longer packed with precipitation and the temperatures are going up into the 20s Celsius next weekend.

As soon as this rain stops and the temperatures soar we’ll get out planting and prepping the land before the mud turns to concrete, and get started on clearing all the rapidly growing brush to protect us from fire.

But the main priority right now – as our finances reach pinch point – we have to learn how to run this place properly...and fast.

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Some of you reading this despatch will have followed our progress for years, others a little less, but it’s a major milestone to announce we are finally open for business.

Thank you for your support...it’s really helped...and if you or anyone you can think of might like to come and visit to see what all the fuss is about, please share this post.

I’m pretty sure there’ll be plenty more to write about as this journey continues to unfold!

I don’t remember a week like it. It lasted a month, but was gone in a flash. The emotional rollercoaster was so steep the cars barely stayed on the tracks.

A powerful storm brought thunder-flashes and torrential rain, battered the valley with hailstones and scared Simon the dog so much he bolted from just outside our front door and fled into the darkness on the worst of nights.

We imagined him drowned in a ditch or gored by a wild boar, we searched the land with flashlights, drove the muddy tracks, and barely slept as our little Los Angeles dog had to learn survival in the wild at 12 years old as the storm raged on.

At first light we drove the surrounding countryside shouting his name wondering why he hadn’t come home.

We picked through mudslides and dredged pools hoping not to find his body, we put those awful missing dog posters up around town and asked everyone we know to spread the word in their WhatsApp groups knowing more bad weather was on the way.

Our dam was leaking – in at least three places – the waterlogged clay wall slipping down the steep slope, and we started to think it might actually break and send millions of litres of water and mud sweeping down the valley.

After three months and two attempts to ship an Australian-made dam sealer from The Pond Specialist in the UK and hundreds of euros more spent importing it twice (thanks Brexit) we’d finally scattered the “Damit!” on the lake surface, but honestly didn’t hold out much hope.

Our road out of the valley was blocked by a slipped timber truck, then a vast cavern was carved out by the flood so now it’s only just passable...and I had two Portuguese exams to get to and get through.

The to-do list was speculative rather than realistic...although everything on it really needs to be done...

But here we sit in a moment of calm on our rollercoaster ride at the top of a hill with clear skies, waiting to see what’s coming next: how many dips and climbs we have to barrel through, how many hoops we need to loop until we get to stop for a bit.

The month-long week all began with a Plasma Party.

Our pillars of stability in this extraordinary week were Alan and Margery Gledson – our great friends for whom nothing is impossible.

Anything that needs to be done can be done...but a missing dog is either alive or dead and there’s nothing anyone can do to help you cross that uncertain canyon until you know which of those it is.

But before that chaos began and with a storm still approaching we’d got straight into the to-do list.

“Container plan” was top of the list and that involved converting our rusted yellow shipping container into a beautiful, functioning new building.

The 12m long metal beast will be the water treatment plant, a winter-storage area for furniture, and potentially a place to put a couple of chest freezers...once the proper power network is done.

I’d bought two off-the-shelf PVC windows, to fit along with the €20 one bought at the Wheel of Fortune auction, and neighbour Daniel had donated his old basement door.

Alan had ground off the rust, we had sandpaper, large pots of paint, the ever-willing Ray Morison in town to help us out...and we had Niels:  Prince of the Plasma Gun.

And we had a plan for how to make it work this time.

Our first attempt to plasma-cut a couple of slots in the container for the water pipes to pass through had ended in disappointment and the use of a backup angle grinder.

The chain of power cable extensions running from a dodgy socket through a series of muddy puddles wasn’t going to cut it...or cut anything with a power-hungry 10,000C plasma gun and its compressor in crime.

For Plasma Party part two, Alan and I hauled the generator into the back of Cassie the Hilux and up the hill.

Once the first hole was measured, marked and prepped we realised it wasn’t going to be all smooth cutting...old and dirty fuel was probably the cause of the stuttering start.

Only when we split power consumption with the dodgy power cable did we start to get somewhere, and while Niels gave me a 101 in generator maintenance the rest of the gang were furiously painting.

Niels accurately cut small metal tabs which could be drilled and bent back to secure the wooden frames made from recycled planks from Joep and Vera’s now-finished and fabulous-looking building site. Great job guys!

Two days later the door and windows were in, the gaps were sealed and the job was nearly done.

Next up will be jamming together a wooden frame on the inside walls to fill insulation and investing in some sandwich panel roofing to handle the heat of the summer sun...oh, and repainting the white walls washed away by the weather.

At least Alan & Marge had made it to the beach a couple of times before the storm hit – we were inland on a wine podcast recording trip at the remarkable Adega Mayor winery and stayed overnight in a pousada in an old monastery we’d not been to before in Vila Viçosa.

I’ll be writing all about our time with CEO Rita Nabeiro and winemaker Carlos Rodrigues on the wine blog The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure, and featuring the trip in our upcoming podcast series on Alentejo.

While we’d been living it up in the interior, it had been a terrible night back in the valley – Garfie had been outside barking at the thunder and lightning (to keep it away) all night...right outside the guesthouse door...and Simon had been shaking under Alan & Margery’s covers.

When we got home nobody had slept and there was more weather on the way – but “dig out plants and clear up behind the house” was on the ta-da list with huge thanks to Ray and the Gledsons.

Our fire was lit, the weather had arrived and Simon popped out for a quick pee when suddenly a huge clap of thunder struck and spooked him so much he raced off into the dark...in a second he was gone.

I returned from my second Portuguese exam of the week to join the search party but after hours of looking we came inside hoping he would be strong enough to make it through the night.

Simon’s a city dog – born in Los Angeles – he’s travelled the world with us for more than 12 years but has never spent a night outside on his own.

When I met and married Ana I was lucky enough to become Oda’s stepdad and we decided not to have any more kids. Nine months after our first wedding Simon arrived.

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I’d suggested a cat, but the girls found a little dog called Simon in a rescue place in LA called Bark ‘n’ B*****s.

(It’s how we are related to Drew Barrymore...she adopted her dog from there the following day, so we can say with full confidence that our dog has sniffed the butt of Drew Barrymore’s dog).

The “Dog Dad” hat that Daniel gave me certainly fits even when I don’t wear it.

Simon’s been a part of our life every step of the way, from LA to Nairobi, to San Francisco (via Sweden) and here to Portugal where countryside living has grown on him.

Garfie’s the guard dog, Simon’s the lap dog getting grumpier and more assertive as he ages gracefully.

I’ve been preparing for the day when he will no longer be with us...and I know just how hard that is going to be...but both of us felt this wasn’t his time just yet.

We used the hours before the incoming storm to do everything we could to find him...and then did something we had done once before in the face of trauma...we went to the beach.

When we had watched fire consume our valley and thought our house and everything in it had gone – and there was nothing more we could do – we went to the beach...and then the phone rang telling us all was OK.

Amazingly the same thing happened again. The call came just as we arrived in Odeceixe for lunch with Alan & Marge.

Thanks to our neighbours Margarida and Vitor – and our fantastic WhatsApp support group of surrounding friends – we discovered Simon had fled to a neighbour’s house, had fought their dogs and spent the night under their car.

And it turns out Vitor has built a radio studio in the valley...in view of our house...to help him relaunch Radio Odemira...now wouldn’t you believe it? A new project on the horizon!

Simon was very shaken, cut by brambles and dog bites and had developed a thousand yard stare, but he was alive and he was back home and we could breathe again.

Stupid dog. Stupid animals – why do we have animals? Because life’s a little sadder without them.

The storm has now passed, but the lake overflow pipes are still being tested to capacity as a river now flows down the hill.

But the dam doesn’t appear to be leaking – it seems the Damit! who did what it said on the label (thanks Ben and co at The Pond Specialist) – and the Cow King has offered us rocks to fill the hole in the road.

Alan & Margery are back home in Northumberland (sadly, for them, they took the weather with them), out to-do list is shorter, and England beat Ireland unexpectedly in the rugby...so I guess things are looking up.

Let’s see where the rollercoaster take us next...

It was my first live auction and despite being online it was still very exciting.

Exciting enough for me to keep on asking Ana if she was sure she didn’t want to bid on that too-small corner cupboard or a dining room table which she’d already dismissed as being not our style.

We’re trying to find unique pieces of furniture and create our own interior décor, and so agreed to bid on a few bedside tables, a Chinese cabinet, a “possible dresser”, three camel seats and some candlesticks...oh, and a fruit machine.

We had started the online bidding for these a few days before – along with an old framed map of Portugal, a Japanese painting, some clay pots and a patio furniture set.

But a flurry of emails informed us we’d been outbid on pretty much all of them by the time the live auction began.

Being an Auction House in the Algarve, it’s a long way from us in the Alentejo, and so we opted for the live streaming option from home rather than being in the room.

The next four hours were spent watching the lots come and go while learning phrases like “fair warning” which was usually said before the gavel was finally swung.

It was addictive and it was fun and Ana mostly protected me from myself.

We began with the very best of intentions, but when the final lot was sold and the fantasy world of the bidding bubble burst, we were the proud new owners of a box of brass candlesticks, two Thai coffee pots, a second-hand PVC window...and an Italian Job movie-themed fruit machine.

What a bargain.

Candlesticks aside, flashing minis and Michael Caine in full cockney are a must-have for any self-respecting Portuguese wine-themed eco-luxe lodge. Aren’t they?

Ana’s excitement over the slot machine quickly faded when she realised it wasn’t a pinball machine...and then there was the small matter of transporting it from the Algarve.

Having checked it was OK to move the thing horizontally, I attached the trailer to Cassie the Hilux and Simon the dog and I headed to Faro for a little adventure.

On arrival, the auctioneer overruled his colleague and advised we went vertical...with early 2000s electronics and no guarantee it would make it home in good working order.

A full hour of faffing later and the fruit machine was riding the Toyota like a 50-cal gunner on a Somali Technical battle car – strapped upright to the cab, head poking over the top – and the hardtop was bouncing around in the back of the trailer...along with the PVC window.

Avoiding motorways and low bridges Simon and I slowly wound our way back up to the Alentejo and despite a light shower we all made it home in good working order.

As soon as Ana and I had managed to extract the thing from the truck and hauled it inside, Michael Caine started shouting about “it’s a big job lads” and chastising us for doing more than blowing bloody doors off while lights flashed and Rule Britannia blared out of the back.

Cor blimey. Take i’ fro’ me lads, ‘e aint arf laird.

Thankfully the sellers were thoughtful enough to include a bag of old one pound coins and 50p pieces, and once again we found ourselves spinning the wheel of fortune.

Please indulge me for extending the metaphor, but everything we’re doing here for our building project does feel like a bit of a gamble even though we’re still backing ourselves with reasonable odds of success.

The to-do list is so long it often paralyses me when I try and work out where to start.

I sometimes fall back on digging weeds out of the gravel, or pulling up tall and woody esteva rock rose plants (a fire risk best dealt with by uprooting when the soil is soaked)...simply to see progress and feel like I’m doing something.

There’s obviously a secret to getting everything in line – whether it be cherries or water infrastructure – but just like my new relationship with Michael Caine...it’s probably going to be a while before we hit the jackpot.

There are just so many tricks to learn: knowing when to go high when the odds say you should go low and guessing when to hold or what to nudge first.

The answer to that is the plumber...who still hasn’t replaced all the 90 degree bends in the water pipes emerging from the buildings.

The great thing about owning the keys to a fruit machine is you can’t lose...and that’s where the reel life/real life parallel ends.

We have a lot to lose – we’ve ploughed all our savings into this crazy off-grid project and it’s reaching a crucial stage.

And that’s why today – in my 125th despatch from the Valley of the Stars – more than three years into this off-grid adventure, I’m asking you to help us to do what we need doing right now...if you can.

If you don’t have the time to volunteer, but think you know someone who can, please share this post

This blog isn’t just personal therapy, it’s an amazing support group, it’s the source of comforting messages, of advice and assistance.

But with just a few months to go before we need to get our place open, now is the time to act: come and stay, roll up your sleeves and help us get it over the line.

I’ve been having recurring landslide nightmares – mostly because we have had a real life landslide nightmare where the heavy rain and our post-fire extreme bulldozer gardening to shore up the dam caused a pretty dramatic collapse, but it’s also perhaps a deeper metaphor for our precarious project.

According to our contract, the building should be finished this month, but amid additions and delays our pursuit of fixed timelines for the various threads of jobs have been brushed off with a nasty case of builder’s shrug.

We don’t know when the PVC people will come and throw the bloody doors in but we’re told it’ll be soon and then we’ll have space for volunteers to stay.

I realised just how important it is to get help when I received a phone call from Northumberland which gave me a rare moment of calm – it was Alan Gledson and Marge offering to come out again for ten days and help us out.

They are a force of nature. We need forces of nature to inspire us, encourage us, motivate us and work with us.

So if you are strong and active, up for a challenge, have a week free and can get over here, we can offer you free lodgings and time to explore Europe’s last wild coast in exchange for donating time and experience to us.

We need help with the following:

* Aggressive tree planting

* Digging and seeding land so it’s green by May

* Painting walls

* Reconstructing a footpath

* Building things with wood and concrete

* Transforming a shipping container into storage rooms and water filtration station: insulated, painted, en-roofed

* Creating a car park with grow-through concrete bricks and sand

* Landscaping gravel and wood chips

* Turning a concrete box into a wine cellar

This crazy schedule isn’t for everyone, and of course the alternative to grafting is coming here to relax once we’re open and supporting us by staying in our lodge!

If you’d like to come and see us please drop us a line but also fill out this form...we’ll get an idea of what you have experience doing and when you might be available.

Thank you so much...I’m sorry to ask, but it would really help us right now.

And if you come we’ll provide free access to the fruit machine...once I’ve found the volume control...but as Michael Caine keeps telling me: “Cor blimey...it’s a big job.”

Oh, and if you have any pre-2017 pound coins or post-1997 fifty pence pieces do bring them when you visit for the machine...we trade them for wine.

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Like most of us, I’m glad January’s over...but not for the usual reasons.

There wasn’t anything particularly dry about it...neither in terms of rainfall nor alcohol (but it is my birthday month and so the no booze thing never really works out to be honest).

I can’t really blame the cold darkness either...there’s been bright sunshine for the last two weeks, we’ve had a couple of unseasonably warm days over 20C (sorry)...and we even went to the beach for a dip and a clifftop fondue party.

But the stress caused by challenges on the building site, boring bureaucracy and a particular pipe intervention have made it one of the worst few weeks of off-grid living so far.

And that’s despite the fantastic birthday celebrations, which were extremely cheesy, cakey, sandwich-y and soaked in sunlight, sauvignon blanc and single malt.

So what am I complaining about?

The heavy rain not only ground everything to a halt around our three new buildings, it also created even more work...and messy work at that.

The flooded holes and trenches gave a classic “First World War movie set” vibe and the overwhelming sense it was going to take a very long time to get everything finished.

The newly repaired submersible pump (with thanks to German Paul) was working hard to empty the trenches and holes in the clay, so pipes and cables could be laid.

But the whole place was a mud bath, with grumpy builders swearing out hundreds of metres of pipes and rolls of heavy electrical cables.

Nudges from our engineer about another newly-built tourist lodge nearby whose owners have been “waiting more than a year for a license to open” didn’t help our growing sense of doom and January gloom.

José’s intention was to warn us that not prioritising bureaucracy could cost us dearly.

But with a relatively simple part of the process already trapped in the town hall, it sent us into a spiral of negative thinking: “if we can’t open, how do we start paying back our loan...”

I discovered another landslide on the hill in front of our house courtesy of the heavy rain, and our biological treatment plant remained a pile of upturned tanks languishing in a hardening mass of mud, while we waited our turn for bulldozer time.

Various workmen were occasionally dropping into the site and thanks to some good advice from friends, we discovered the plumbing outside our buildings had not been done to code.

All the out-coming water pipes had 90 degree bends in them – meaning that if they were ever blocked we would never be able to clean them and the floors would flood until we could dig everything up.

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Normally the maximum angle of a bend in a pipe should be 45 degrees, so that a drain cleaning wire can be pushed through and any blockage cleared.

Our contractor Sr Manuel didn’t think there was any need to change them, despite us pointing this out.

But our water consultant Rui was due on site to plan the tank refit and so we thought we’d ask his opinion.

An opinion which was very much in line with ours, but one expressed surprisingly aggressively...by shouting down the phone, grabbing his angle grinder and cutting through all the pipes so they would have to be replaced.

This was our first major diplomatic incident in the Valley of the Stars!

Although Rui made the point, there were no doubt going to be consequences and so that led to sleepless nights of searching for the appropriate paragraph in the building code to be prepared for a confrontation.

The 15 working day town hall deadline was also ticking down for us to submit an unknown document signed by we weren’t sure who...something else to lie awake worrying about once Ana found the right section of official drainpipe building code and discovered we were right.

And when I did eventually get to sleep it was only to enjoy the recurring nightmare of me having forgotten about something in the infrastructure plan (one which may still come true!)

All of this came alongside a lack of water flowing from the canal into the new 200,000 litre pillow tank, silence from the unpolished concrete people and our continuing inability to find where the current electrical cable enters the original guesthouse...to integrate it into the new system.

So it was a great relief to see our architect Gonçalo on site to talk documents, and hear about his plan to start applying for permission to use the buildings well ahead of them being finished.

Individual frustrations piled up on each other, but the daily ups and downs translated into a weekly line graph heading kind of up and to the right.

Our friends once again stepped in to help advise us and keep us sane.

Vera & Joep with advice on pipe angles, Ola on how to diplomatically approach the builder (“is it worth upsetting him?”) and Niels and Sybille through a 1980s metal detector, a pan of Swiss cheese bubbling on a clifftop, and a tide clock which tells us the best time to visit the beach.

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The surprise birthday clifftop cheese fondue picnic accompanied by Portuguese Brut and Niels’ hand-crafted sauvignon blanc made for a fabulous day which blended seamlessly into an entertaining night with new friends Tim & Trish.

Just like me, Tim used to run around with a camera getting shot at for a living...but he would spend months embedding with rebel troops or the under-reported sides to a story, freelancing for all the big news networks.

An American, he decompressed in New York State through wood & metal working and boat building before meeting and marrying Trish and deciding to move to Alentejo.

They’ve bought a place not too far away from us, sensibly On the grid, and are looking forward to moving in very soon after months of house hunting and living out of a suitcase.

The detectorist intervention came as Niels and I tried to find the centimetre thick cable linking the solar control room to our guesthouse which is buried up to a metre deep.

Some old Northern rugby club friends in a “Banality” WhatsApp group made many suggestions, including turning to Twitching Justino or one of his ilk – the guys who found us water – for more divining inspiration, but I think we’re going to take the classic prop-forward “route one” and search for a cable with a bulldozer.

A line traced out by the feint hum of a metal detector and some creative thinking has given us the best-guess place to try, and what could possibly go wrong?

I shall report back...and yes, I’ll make sure the power’s off before letting Justo go mad with a large metal bucket.

But with a large intake of breath while taking a couple of days away from the madness, things went pretty well in the end.

The expected confrontation over sawn off pipes fizzled into brought agreement, the carpenters put in the hours to install the pergolas, the electrician started drilling boxes to everything and the pipes and cables were buried with sand and clay.

The war is over and the trenches are covered and levelled – it all looks sooooo much better – and while I’m sure there are other minefields ahead, in one big bulldozer day we managed to remove, clean up, refit and bury the bio-treatment tanks ready for the next rain.

The towering 15 cubic meter water tanks were lowered onto sand in a deep pit behind the container/water treatment station to be and the pebble-pool people agreed to a more realistic installation date than two weeks’ time.

This was never going to be easy, and while we’re still loving the lifestyle we’re hoping this is the last big bump on the race to the starting line...for the next stage of opening our doors (when they’re delivered) and welcoming guests.

All in all we’ve ended the week very firmly up – still having the nightmares and worrying about the timeline, but at least not overwhelmed by it all.

But sadly the best laid plans to get Albie, the Little Black Dog, some training at Dog Whisperer Emma’s place in the Algarve were dashed by my efforts to get him into a harness which sent him heading for the hills.

Albie gone again, but sooner or later – hopefully – Albie back.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” is a question I’ve beaten myself up asking many times in this odd new life when the latest thing to go wrong has gone wrong.

And it’s one I ponder while looking at a landslide, a flood and a jumble of upturned tanks on the hill below our building site which just before the storm was an almost-finished water treatment system.

I make a lot of mistakes by rushing into things, not preparing properly and thinking stuff can be done in an impossible period of time...but I can’t take the blame for everything.

In 2002 the then US Secretary of Defence, Ronald Rumsfeld, explained the lack of evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in a speech referring to “known-knowns, known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns.”

Like Secretary Rumsfeld, and given my lack of experience living in this self-reliant way, it’s the unknown-unknowns which often get me.

“If only I’d thought about that thing I didn’t know might happen, before it did,” makes me feel better when I say it out loud, but it doesn’t mean the whole water treatment tanks aren’t now trashed.

It wasn’t always like that: in my job as a BBC foreign correspondent, I learned to make risks rather than take risks and do a pretty good assessment about whether or not they were worth the reward.

“Flying into Ebola and active insurgency-land in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?”

Yes, it was worth it, but it took me ages to persuade the bosses back in London I wasn’t insane, and to apologise to Ana afterwards for not telling her I was going.

I’ve learned a lot about how to do stuff off the grid, but I often get really frustrated when my own stupidity or lack of properly thinking things through means I not only fail to achieve the thing I set out to do, but actually make it worse: more difficult and more expensive to rectify.

This happens a lot.

I was never terribly good at DIY before, so why should that change with practice? (it really should change with practice, shouldn’t it?)

The “unstoppable force vs immovable object” approach I took in my previous job for getting that interview, that access to a place to tell a story and then get it on air doesn’t work with installing a solar water pump kit without instructions.

I mounted the solar panels onto the aluminium rack ahead of installing the pump (having received the missing parts), but the whole insanely heavy thing somehow flipped over in the gale force winds in this week’s storm.

Force of some wind vs badly secured object.

It doesn’t look like the panels were smashed, as they toppled into a pile of sand, but we’ll see if it still works when it all gets connected up.

If only...I’d secured the struts, or weighed it down with rocks, or left it face down to start with...given the high winds forecast.

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As a reporter for a big organisation it was a lot easier getting hold of people who want to get on the telly and have their perspective heard than it is being the annoyingly pushy foreigner in rural Portugal who should know by now that things take time.

The energy and tenacity to push to the point of obsession (or destruction) – whether it be in South Sudan or post-earthquake or hurricane - once led an editor to nickname me “the Duracell Bunny” for my persistence and determination, but that approach clearly isn’t working with one of our key people.

He’s harder to speak to than some African presidents.

We’ve had a lot of rain recently – our lake has never been so full – but the combination of large amounts of surface water on clay and the presence of newly dug trenches for our pipes and cables is not, it turns out, a good one.

I wrote last week about the giant mole holes for the infrastructure which have turned into swimming pools and waterlogged trenches.

Our building site currently looks more like a First World War movie than our vision of an eco-luxe lodge.

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But things took a turn for the worse this week in the absence of our builder and what I would have expected to have been a “known-known” to him.

We’ve placed the water treatment station on the hillside – a sealed large three tank system, followed by two open tanks for reed bed biological cleaning and then a final tank so that every drop of recycled water is used for irrigation up on the future vineyard.

The holes were dug to precise specifications, sand was bought, delivered and then levelled by our good selves before the bulldozer carefully lowered them into place.

We were just waiting for the digger to return, load the reed-bed tanks with gravel and backfill everything – job done – but the wet conditions haven’t been ideal.

While waiting and to protect the system from rain I cut a couple of channels to divert water around the tanks to stop them from being inundated, overturned and generally trashed...but sadly that is exactly what has now happened.

The deluge, combined with the new trenches not being diverted into the lake, created a landslide which has flipped and buried the biggest tank in wet mud and clay, floated another up out of a 3m deep hole and smashed all the pipes linking the system together.

It’s a total mess – it’s going to cost more to undo and then redo than it cost to do it in the first place and the work will eat up vital time. It was the worst of a series of setbacks we suffered this week.

Angry letters from the town hall about unsubmitted documents, continuing fighting over the unpolished concrete people and the unrequited pursuit of our African president.

We should of course “be careful what you wish for” – even if more rain is what this region really needed.

I’ve covered enough massive storms to know there’s not much you can do about big weather in big nature...but I wish I’d thought about diverting the trenches...and I wish our builders had as well.

When the downhill trench to our solar house was finished earlier in the week and I realised it bisected a stream and a swale that usually bring a lot of water to our lake, it got me thinking.

In the absence of our contractor on site we took things into our own hands and pushed reluctant builder Justo to block his new trench and lower some ground to encourage the water towards the lake.

If we’d left it, the solar house would have been flooded and all our solar batteries would have been destroyed. That’s a known-known.

If only he – and we – had thought about the impact of the other long-drop trench on the other side of the hill...directing thousands of litres of water into our thousands of euros worth of tanks.

The rain has stopped, but the rivers and streams continue heading into our lake which is almost overflowing – as is our downstream neighbour Daniel’s.

I’ve cleared the overflow pipes, placed some rocks and boulders to slow down the flow and we will wait to see where the deluge goes...we’ve warned friends further down the valley, but the rain may have stopped just in time.

No more rain is forecast for a week, once it’s drier we can bring back the machines, dig everything out and start all over again.

I’ve learned a lot from friends and from experience, but sometimes I wish I didn’t have to.

There are great parts to living this life, but sometimes I wish it wasn’t just us with all the responsibility for guessing what might happen, what might go wrong, before it does.

And having to coordinate everything ourselves leaves gaps of plausible deniability where people with greater experience can make excuses for not thinking ahead and acting appropriately. Oh well…

We have a mole problem – a big mole problem.

I went up on site the other day and the monsters had eaten their way through our whole building site.

Not just a few little hills here and there, but trenches...metre after metre of them...and some of them really deep.

I mean check this out...

I suspect the Mole in Chief to be Justo – maestro of the machines and digger of the ditches – but in truth, I’m delighted to see his little valleys criss-crossing their way between our buildings and up and down our hills.

Operation Infrastructure is now well underway and the emphasis is firmly on me to come up with a creative way of helping our contractor Sr Manuel understand the design of our complicated water system and place all the right pipes in the same trenches as the electrical cables.

I’m not sure what qualifies me to make such bold decisions, but I suppose I have spent far too much time over the last year or so playing with coloured pencils.

(I knew that Geography degree would come in handy one day).

I do claim to be something of an expert in such things if you listen to the BBC World Service: the two radio pieces I made went out on Business Daily on January 1st and January 2nd.

And I even turned my hand to Instagram and The Facebook for a vertical version of our off-grid story (do check it out...if it gets liked enough the Beeb might ask for another one...apparently off-grid posts are popular these days!)

Back on the building site Sr Manuel asked again: “so it’s three different types of water into each building?” with the roll of his eyes, as I unravelled the latest iteration: a large A1 sized electrical map layered with acetate sheets stuck together with tape and coloured scrawl.

“The blue is the 40mm pipes and the green is the 32...” and as I began, I realised my Portuguese wasn’t up to it...and even if it was, this wasn’t really going to help.

Being the water-bore that I am, I will hold myself back by summarising for new readers that we have tried to future-proof our supply by accommodating different qualities of treated water (toilet, showers, drinking water) in case we have shortages ten years down the line.

Outside on the building site in the chilly dew of the morning, wasn’t really the time or the place to show off my artwork, and anyway I need Water Rui to approve it all before the pipes started being rolled out, cut and connected.

“Let’s try it again over coffee at the meeting tomorrow,” I added. The words cafezinho (little coffee...I love the diminutive form) and amanhã de manhã (tomorrow morning) were greeted with a nod which was unusually clear (for Sr Manuel) by way of indicating his agreement.

It’s been a long journey reaching the point where we not only know where our water is going to come from, but where it’s going to be treated and how it’s going to get there.

It takes a complex system of tanks, pipes, pumps and treatment scattered across the property and I often wonder if it’s actually going to work.

We’ve already used a couple of kilometres of the 6.2km of pipes we bought and hopefully we’ll have enough to get it all flowing.

But for now it’s all about the logistics of getting the moles to dig the right holes and get the right pipes and cables into the right places and all covered up before more rain comes along to flood them again.

The problem with clay is that after a big downpour the water doesn’t go anywhere fast, and so the much-larger-than-needed hole for one of the tanks (our fault apparently!) was transformed.

I commended Sr Manuel on a nossa nova piscina as we finally had a swimming pool deep enough to jump into...and weeks before we expected it!

At least the lake benefitted from all the water being pumped out and down the hill – we are getting some good rain this winter, interspaced with nice sunny days.

But as I write the rain is falling again and the moles have knocked it on the head for the day…or maybe the week.

I can’t possibly wish for less rain…only that it falls on days when we’re not digging massive trenches!

It’s the interiors which are taking most of our time right now – trying to decide on the right sofas, furniture and finishings for all the rooms.

We’re thinking of something along the lines of this new place which has opened up in Alentejo a little north of us:

The houses aren’t sealed yet as our almighty row with the unpolished concrete company continues.

They asked us to pay, we asked them to come out and explain how they’re going to sort out our “50 shades of yellow” floor issue. Watch this space.

Doors and windows will only arrive when they are finished...whenever that may be...but I suppose it’s better than them arriving un-finished.

I’m imagining Santa’s little helpers already bored with dry January and trying to recreate the adrenaline of the rush before Christmas by offering to help put them all together while singing jolly songs.

It may be a different scenario at the PVC place in Cercal, but that’s what I will keep imagining for now.

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We had a whistle-stop trip to Lagos in the Algarve to visit the IKEA design studio in a supermarket and finally pin down the apartment kitchens.

I’m not saying we’ve been there a lot, but Adriana the very patient and helpful designer recognised us and our project straight away.

We tried to design the restaurant kitchen at IKEA as well, but rules suggest we will need everything to be in stainless steel – or Inox as it’s known here – and IKEA only have limited choices.

Our pals Richard and Pauline run a fantastic restaurant in Carvoeiro called Earth Shop & Café and have been advising us.

One of their best suggestions so far is a German company that delivers stainless steel kitchenware for half the price we can buy it second-hand in Portugal (why is it so expensive here?).

So we’re shopping online for extractor hoods, ovens, sinks and inox furniture...trying desperately to keep control of the budget.

As the moles will soon (hopefully) be heading down the hill towards us, I’d like to renew our appeal for help to get everything finished this Spring.

We’ve already had a few folk fill in the form expressing an interest in lending a hand in exchange for a bed and digestibles.

But if you know anyone who might be able to help at some point in February, March or April, we have some specific projects which will need some willing and able hands.

Thank you for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal. We need help, so please share it.

Top of the list are a shipping container conversion, an entrance wall, a bit of click flooring and a load of landscaping.

Please spread the word (and the love). Here’s the link to the Google Form. Thanks!

While I’m not really the New Year’s resolution type, I do like using the ticking over of another number to reflect on the 12 months past and ponder the year that’s yet to come.

I’ve scattered the last despatch of 2023 with some of the most viewed posts of the year for some tough - and some not so tough - reflection.

In the words of this blog from exactly a year ago:

“We will plant our trees, landscape our valley, launch our wines podcast, design and finish our interiors, build our water and power infrastructure and finally (hopefully) understand heatpumps.”

Not so many of those have made it to the ta-da list.

All the very best for 2024! Thanks so much for supporting us and please share this blog with a friend.

We planted 46 olive trees in hardened clay (thanks Dom) and nurtured them through the summer with fiddly drip irrigation, then after the rain planted 200 more in a vast hedge in half the time.

We struck water, but it was salty water; but then we struck lucky and scored a connection to an irrigation canal and something to dilute our salty water with.

There were highs and there were lows: the blog Hitting the Wall prompted a huge response and so many wonderful and kind words…and it led a week later to a reflection entitled Don’t stop this train. Thanks to you all.

We have been blessed by so many fabulous friends visiting us this year...thank you all for your support, your enthusiasm for what we’re doing, and for helping us to dream big...come again soon!

Stress levels peaked and troughed roughly in line with the appearance or otherwise of our largely unpolished concrete people.

The infrastructure is a work in progress, heat pumps remain a mystery, but above all we took big steps towards finishing our construction work largely on time and only slightly over budget.

And with the help of a Christmas surge, the podcast is progressing well and we are planning the 2024 roll-out of episodes very soon. You’ll find it here.

Here’s a piece I did for Monocle Radio on a show called The Entrepreneurs which features a favourite story...the trend of talha, or amphora wines in Alentejo.

In the year ahead our biggest fear is bureaucracy and the damage long delays to licensing could cause.

We need money coming in and so our top priority is to stay ahead of the curve, sort the paperwork early and get everything submitted as soon as we can. The big digging continues, starting as it did with The Rise of the Machines in September.

Landscaping is also going to be a challenge...once the building ends we will have large areas to plant and pimp up.

And as we accelerate towards opening, we have to budget everything extremely carefully as we invest in interiors and exteriors but keep a close eye on not running out of money!

Pondering the year ahead, there are a lot of things I didn’t expect to be doing in my life, and I expect that list is only going to grow in 2024. Here are a few of them:

1. I never intended to be an expert on off-grid living. I say “expert,” but the proof of the power will be in the heating.

Too many heat pumps can most certainly spoil the plot.

The nerve-wracking moment will be when all the buildings are finished, the appliances are all plugged in and we find out whether my Excel sheet of estimated electrical demand is matched by the actual supply of solar power.

Until that proves (as it most likely will) to be terrifyingly mismatched, I am peddling myself as an expert – at least for the purposes of a two-part radio series on the BBC World Service.

Please tune in on New Year’s Day to hear our neighbours Daniel, Medronho Jorge and Ola & Merete explaining why they decided to off-grid in Portugal.

(Thanks so much for being willing victims guys!)

And on Tuesday 2nd you’ll hear from Water Rui and Solar Iain – folks that regular readers will already know – as we ponder the challenges of scaling up an off-grid system to a higher-end eco-luxe lodge.

(Do you like that? “Eco-Luxe” – Ana came up with it and I think it’s brilliant).

And given that we’ll all probably be doing something else at 8am GMT on January 1st it’ll all be on the Business Daily podcast once it’s broadcast.

And I’ll be spending the first couple of days of 2024 with a clutch of colourful Sharpies and some acetate sheets creating layers of electrical wire and water pipe maps to superimpose on a landscape map to help the builder get the right things connected in the right places.

2. I never intended to have three cats and three dogs – it is clearly excessive – but I still don’t feel we’ve reached peak animal.

Albert (aka Albie, aka LB, aka LBD, aka Little Black Dog) – the stray with half a tail who rocked up on the building site one day and never looked back – seems to be settling nicely into his place at the bottom of the pack.

Suitably curtailed into roll-over submission every time Garfie harrumphs, he’s been accepted into the circle of canine trust even though he still doesn’t dare enter the house.

We do need to spend some time in 2024 training him up.

The kittens are neutered and fears of exponential feline growth have now abated.

Val Kilmer’s five new February arrivals sadly, but quickly were reduced to four and then down to two as we found a good home for Batcat and Jim Morrison at Quinta Camarena where they now happily harass dogs and humans in equal measure at our friends’ rural tourism lodge.

Inspired by our Christmas retreat in suitably snowy Sweden at Ana’s parent’s farm surrounded sheep – either busy in the barn, languishing in the freezer or lazing flat on the floor – we are leaning towards some ovine assistance for weed clearance and fire protection.

Ana likes the idea of donkeys, and I still dream of Vasco the Llama, but perhaps one new breed at a time is best...and maybe we should begin some paltry poultry.

Our neighbour Daniel has been master of the menagerie while we have been recharging our batteries (mostly in the dark), and I get the feeling he’s looking forward to us getting home...and that we may need to find an alternative zoo keeper for the next level of animal ownership.

3. I never thought I’d own a shipping container. I’ve rented a few as we relocated around the world in our previous lives, but owning one was never really a consideration.

Turning the yellow metal mass into an elegant water filtration station/store room/garden centre is another item on the growing to-do list of things we need help with.

It currently includes:

* Paint and insulate container

* Build roof over container

* Install doors, windows and electricity in container

* (wonder why we bought a container...because it was a lot cheaper than building a small house)

* Building an “entrance wall” to the property out of cement and stone

* Planting trees & hedges & plants

* Landscaping by spreading ground cover

* Laying cork click floors

* Building a pétanque court

And that’s without considering the usual Spring Strimming weight-loss programme, installing the water tanks and gutters and keeping the construction show on the road.

So while you ponder how much you ate and drank over the holidays and make resolutions to be more active and do things outside...please consider coming to the Valley of the Stars and helping us with some of the heavy lifting.

We have had a few volunteers stay over the last couple of years, but as we accelerate towards getting the place open enough to accept guests, February, March and April are a crucial time for us and we could really do with some help.

Ideally we need strong and willing hands, and those with experience of building, landscaping, painting, planting...all that sort of thing...so please, please, please get in touch if you’d like a workout in the Winter sun...or know anyone who might.

With any luck we should have more rooms available...and those very specific jobs in mind.

Here’s a link to a Google Form which we’ve updated, so please spread the word and you not only shed a few pounds, but help us get our eco-luxe (see, nice huh?) project over the line.

And of course as soon as we’ve learned how to build we need to learn how to run a hotel...many more school days lie ahead.

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4. I never wanted a large pile of concrete poop…and I still don’t. I do, however, hope our unpolished concrete company come back and sort out the mess they made...and that also includes some of the floors...before I out them on the blog and risk defamation. (They have, objectively, made an arse out of it).

Finally. I suppose I should finish by making some predictions of things I/we should do but probably won’t have done this year: open the eco-luxe lodge (and learn how to run), learn how to plan and plant a vineyard, think about podcast series two, get better at Portuguese (free classes continue) and start some doing some live storytelling…around wine.

ALL THE VERY BEST FOR THE NEW YEAR!!...and we hope to see many of you in 2024!

Al & Ana

Hasn’t that last week before Christmas been such a rush to get things done?

Writing cards, last minute shopping, bulldozing holes, lowering septic tanks and digging pipe ditches.

It’s just one thing after another, eh?

That familiar shovelling of freshly fallen sand to make sure the tanks are level, spaying a few kittens, and writing letters to Santa asking him to bring us doors and windows for the new buildings as soon as he possibly can after the festive rush...please...that kind of thing.

But the typical Christmas morning scene of a dad struggling to construct that amazing but flat-packed gift before the kids get bored with it, came early for me this year with a solar water pump kit.

It was an exciting present to unwrap: there was a wooden box to prize open – with a cardboard box inside – and lots of solar panels and metal struts to play with...and loads of strange looking pieces.

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Imagine Ikea meeting Meccano with the extra excitement of live electricity...but with no instructions. What could possibly go wrong?

Despite the common grumble “there’s obviously a piece missing” there were actually a couple of pieces missing.

That’s one thing to kick off my Christmas list and into the long grass until the remaining aluminium struts make it here from Spain some time in 2024.

It’s a stressful time for everyone, but I think we hit peak stress on the shortest day of the year...or perhaps I should call it the longest night.

Last week’s Bad Day rolled into a week and seemingly unresolvable problems started piling up.

Bureaucracy, a bloody-minded builder and the continuing saga of the unpolished concrete people (and their poop) generated the majority of the hassle, but there were plenty of other things besides.

We had grand plans to take the black plastic covers off the Big Bar on the hill and serve mulled wine to the neighbours while talking them through our building project, but we had to bail out of that one as our Christmas to-do list overtook everything else.

Getting the kittens done was a high priority because there are a lot of storks around here (if you know what I’m saying) and we had the jitters about two new litters courtesy of Senhor S. Claus and his delivery.

We took them down to the Algarve where that kind of thing is a lot cheaper, but then achieved very little during our race around the shops except for a nice lunch and for Ana to lose spectacularly at Wham-ageddon (I mean it was a particularly tough year to get through the whole festive season without hearing Last Christmas at least once).

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We did manage to pick up a few gifts for our favourite workers and the best present ever for our neighbour Daniel.

Daniel loves wine in a box – and there are some great box wines in Portugal – but none of us had ever seen anything like this before.

It was a TWENTY LITRE box of Amália red (named after Amália Rodrigues, the famous Portuguese fado singer), and as Daniel’s eyes widened, we insisted this wasn’t some sort of Christmas challenge.

Sr Manuel the contractor received a bottle of Comendador (meaning commander...we felt it was appropriate).

Last year we gave our builder Justo a bottle of good red wine and he thanked us, saying he didn’t really like red wine and preferred to drink medronho, the powerful locally-made firewater.

This year we got him some whisky for a change. He thanked us, saying he didn’t really like whisky, but loved medronho.

Next year I suppose we’ll get him some medronho, but then he probably only really likes his own medronho.

Ana explained it was my dad’s favourite tipple and we suggested he try it with water com or sem gas, but it’ll probably go in the cupboard with last year’s red wine.

With everything very much getting on top of us and time fast running out, we were delighted to accept a lunch invitation from friends Niels and Sybille to deliver some of Mauro and Rita’s amazing wine we’d agreed to carrier-pigeon for them from Lisbon.

It was a “quick lunch” but what an amazing lunch. Wild boar cured ham followed by pulled wild boar sandwiches with homemade sauces, home-brewed beer and hand-crafted wine were just the antidotes we needed to survive the shortest day and prepare us for the longest night.

We’ve slipped into the annual pattern of heading early to bed with the darkness closing in, and early to rise with some spectacular sunrises.

(Although I must say we are lucky in southern Europe to have more sunshine than those up here in the north).

Exercise has taken a bit of a back seat, which also contributes to the stress of course...but we did manage a walk to see this year’s display of daisies.

We had far more luck getting Simon the Hollywood dog to pose among them than we did with Garfunkel, who just didn’t understand that we wanted to feature him on our Christmas greetings card.

Herding the cats was never going to work, so we decided it wouldn’t be fair on the others for Simon to take all the glory, so this is what we decided on...

Yes, that’s blue sky; yes, it’s been 17 or 18C (and perhaps a little more) all week; and yes, this is the nearest we’ll get to a white Christmas in the Valley of the Stars.

But in Sweden to see Ana’s family and for more...erm...cosier times...amid the darkness, the cold and the crisp, shiny white snow…for now at least.

It’ll be a nice change to enjoy a northern European winter and we’ll be back soon enough to relieve Daniel of his animal sitting duties and to see in the New Year with some sunshine.

The shortest day/longest night was probably the lowest point of our year, but it’s only going to get lighter from here on in...and that’s a lovely thought to ponder over some pickled herring, as the building site falls silent and the digging machines all go to sleep.

I do hope Father Christmas brings you what you asked for – whether it’s doors & windows or a build your own solar pump with instructions manuals in clearer Spanish.

We’ve certainly got large enough chimneys for the big fella to climb down next year, but for now:

May your days be merry and bright,

And may all your water tanks be right…

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AND FINALLY...with a nod towards Shane McGowan (RIP), here’s the Portuguese version of the Pogues song Fiesta...courtesy of Despe e siga from 1994.

For those non-Portuguese-speaking listeners, Casal Garcia is a well-known brand of affordable vinho verde wine...

Sitting on the sofa chatting through the best place we could build a car park, we knew it was going to be a crazy day.

But after slurping down a mug of coffee and heading up the hill a little after 8.15am we had no idea of the level chaos that was already enveloping our building site.

We arrived to find a shipping container semi-suspended from the bucket of a huge bulldozer, one end pile-driven into the ground, the other scraping the edge of the mountain of dried cement known locally as the concrete poop.

I immediately went into “I told you so” mode.

Having spent the last week trying to get someone from the digger company to come out first to have a look and plan what to do I immediately went for our engineer José: “I knew this would happen – it’s like a slow motion car crash,” I wailed.

He shrugged, heads were scratched and a plan was hatched.

“They’ll find a solution,” he said calmly. “Things are done differently in Portugal from what you’re used to.”

I’m not really used to anything, having never built any houses, moved any large metal boxes or guided any diggers, I just thought planning was the right thing to do...but José is usually right and watches our back.

I was frantic, stressed and manic. Ana was the voice of calm.

Just as we were fretting about the container – and the increasing cost of unplanned machine hours – a cement mixer arrived and had to squeeze past the bulldozer.

It was the final day of the Nightmare Polished Concrete Floor Job Before Christmas...and at least the mixer had arrived and had the confidence to drive through the mud.

The polished concrete guys have been anything but polished, and immediately started shouting about how they had to work the night before in the dark because there was no electricity.

There is power, they just didn’t ask where the socket was...but at least that provided an explanation for how wrongly they’d coloured the floors: they had done it in the dark.

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They started work on November 7th, got stuck in the mud reversing the cement mixer too close to the house to save them wheeling it, and then had an industrial dispute with management which culminated in dumping about 30 tonnes of cement on our land (the aforementioned concrete poop).

Then the company ghosted us for a fortnight, dropped by for one day only to do a couple of floors before disappearing again amid excuses about a national concrete shortage.

They were never seen again until this week when we pointed out the Fifty Shades of Yellow that now covered our supposedly uniform “gr-eige” floors – each relating to a different team using a different percentage of colour on a different occasion.

But then we had to travel to Lisbon for a bank meeting and they were left unaccompanied on the building site.

We’d missed the sight of the large concrete pump arriving and doing all the outside decks in one day (why couldn’t they have done that weeks ago?), and apart from the different colours it seemed to have generally gone OK.

As we watched them shovelling concrete on top of the metal reinforcing grids (rather than placing the grids inside the hardening mass) and we fretted about whether they’d remembered to add the underfloor heating liquid, the doors and windows guy arrived.

He was wanting final confirmation of every PVC unit and I was battling to understand his Portuguese.

On the other side of the building site the bulldozer was now moving concrete slabs, lifting the workers’ cabin and having another go at placing the 40 foot shipping container on the four concrete feet built for the purpose.

We’d stopped it just before the tracked monster had taken a short cut across the “future vineyard” which we had seeded and turned over at great cost and effort a few weeks ago and had been delighted to see the green shoots now emerging.

Then the leader of the Un-polished Pratts started shouting at José for something else as his phone kept ringing.

Amid the madness Ana was preoccupied on her phone desperately trying to give directions to a delivery truck driver bringing us a solar pump kit from Spain.

I didn’t know where to turn. Everything was out of control, everything was happening at once and then Ana said I had to drop everything and drive to the main road to meet the delivery van and guide him in.

I got into the car, shut the door and enjoyed a precious moment of calm.

Google maps take delivery drivers up impossible hills – which is why we have a series of signposts guiding visitors to our door – but meeting at the road is the best way to guarantee they don’t give up and tell the office “they weren’t in.”

The only way the 200kg pallet of solar panels, metal frames and a powerful water pump will make it down the valley is on the back of our trailer slowly towed behind the 4x4, so I helped the guy deliver it directly onto the trailer.

All went smoothly, and while I had been preoccupied the container had been placed and the bulldozer had started task two: levelling ground and digging holes for the water treatment tanks and reed beds.

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As I headed back up towards the chaos on the building site and looked across the valley I saw the excavator excavating in the wrong place...and raced up the hill to try and stop them.

Much as we’d like to make a point about how all our water waste is recycled we really don’t want the reed bed septic tank to be the first thing people look at when they walk onto their balcony and take in the view.

It was too high up on the hill, which was strange because we’d walked it and talked it with Sr Manuel and Rui the water guy – and even pegged out the place with wooden stakes.

By the time we arrived to redirect the digger we already had a 3m x 20m chunk taken out of the hillside.

As both the focus of attention and the digger moved down the hill, we pondered the possibilities of an accidentally created new hillside deck and seating area.

We watched nervously as Sr Manuel referred to a printed-out scan of dimensions and Joaquim the 76 year old builder was jumping in and out of the holes with a tape measure and a spirit level making sure the depths were correct as the giant bucket swung soil between pine trees.

Suddenly the bulldozer engine cut, work stopped and the cheerful guy at the wheel shouted almoçar and everything went quiet for lunch.

Somehow we had made it through the morning.

After inhaling a couple of fried eggs we picked up our recently-returned neighbour Daniel –to show him where his water is now supposed to come from and to try and work out why it wasn’t coming from there anymore and had stopped filling our new pillow tank.

Turning a few taps on and off, way down the valley, somehow did the trick.

With after lunch work stopped by a faulty hydraulic pipe on the digger and concrete polishing proceeding apace, we felt comfortable enough to abandon the site and head to the town hall to submit some documents and then travel out to the PVC guy’s workshop just to go over all the things he’d said earlier in the day which we hadn’t really understood amid the chaos.

When we got back the bulldozer was still stranded with one final job remaining, Carlos the landscaper had brought his small digger ready for a pipe burying job the next day. And I had a beer.

Ana and I made for the sofa, put on a film and tried to reconnect with Garfunkel – the big dog – who still hadn’t forgiven us for going to Lisbon for a few days and taking Simon.

The little LA dog loves the city and had a wonderful time sniffing every tree and lamppost.

“You would have hated it Garfie,” we tried to explain and I think he understood.

“It’s just too busy and crazy and hectic in the city...and here it’s...calm and...quiet and, erm, relaxed...”

Now, where should we put that car park?

With a thousand and one things to do, a deadline always helps sort the wheat from the chaff – or the wheat from the oats as it would turn out.

An incoming Atlantic storm to break the sunshine of St Martin’s Summer provided the necessary motivation to get us out onto the land and tick things off before it all turned to a thick claggy clay mud.

We knew rain would come and there were certain things that needed to be done before it did, but it was only when our weather app started giving us some meaty millimetre rainfall predictions that we snapped into action.

Two weeks of warm and sunny weather had dried out our building site beautifully – the perfect time for our shipping container and would-be water filtration house to be delivered and the cement mixers to return so the polished concrete floor guys could finish the job they had dramatically stopped by way of a large concrete poop.

But of course they waited until the weather was upon us before making an albeit fleeting appearance: “roll up, roll up: get yer concrete while it lasts – one day only.”

It was nice of them to drop by, but the problem with doing six indoor floors and six outside decks in small batches is the inconsistency in the amount of colour they spread and therefore the finished hue.

And doing shower areas and bathrooms separately – with weeks in between – does inevitably result in multicoloured floors...which really weren’t as advertised in the brochure.

We’ll work around it, but it’s very frustrating.

Ana came up with a new version of the three letter acronym “AWA” which some readers may recognise and relate to. It’s: “Alentejo Wins Again.”

Whatever you do, however you prepare, however you balance pushing not to hard or too softly, Alentejo is going to win...it’s just a matter of understanding that and going with the flow...which is sometimes easier said than done.

We’re lucky that our building work is not being delayed by their absence, which is apparently due to a shortage of cement in southern Portugal...for reasons so far unexplained.

Our contractor Sr Manuel and his fabulous builders Justo and Joaquim are just cracking on and getting stuff done while the window guy and the carpenter work tirelessly (presumably) on preparing all our fittings for fitting.

This week they’ve been doing a load of digging – cutting the first of three cross-property trenches to move water, waste and electricity between the houses and to where it needs to be.

We’ll be collecting all our rainwater runoff to store in a 200,000 litre pillow tank, and have ordered the biological waste water treatment system, and so the guys have been using levelling lasers to dig a trench at the correct angle to bring everything down the hill.

They added some French drains to soak up some of the surface water which will sink through the gravel around the houses, but sitting as we are on a hilltop of clay, we will need even more creative ways of helping the water run off during high rainfall winters.

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With landscaping a top priority we had to take advantage of this year’s last opportunity to get things into the ground before we (hopefully) open.

We’ll have one more chance to pretty things up in February/March, but the perfect time to plant cover crops is after one big rain has soaked into the ground nicely and another one is on the way.

With storm clouds forecast we headed for the hills – of Monchique mountain in the Algarve – to buy some more olive trees to plant.

“How many would you like?” asked the nice chap at our favourite nursery Viveiro Dinis.

“How many can we get in the trailer?” Ana replied, expecting that we’d need a couple of trips to transport the 200 olive saplings we’d decided to plant as a hedge to surround our land.

It turns out he could have packed 500 in there, and so we bounced the trailer back to the Valley with the whole batch of 200 small trees and a load of work ahead of us.

It’s more difficult than you might think to find a load of old s**t on social media – especially nearby manure or estrume as it’s known here – but after many hours of searching, Ana stumbled upon a large local stash of 18 month old horse dung ready to help our olive hedge establish itself.

Another trailer trip later and we had everything we needed to start digging holes and planting the trees about a metre or so apart.

If we thought that was backbreaking work it had nothing on the cover-crop seeding of the area referred to as “the future vineyard.”

We’ve had a couple of fantastic viticulturist consultants come and visit and spoke to Dorina Lindemann who runs Plansel, selling and preparing grapevine plants and making wine.

We visited her for the soon-to-be-released wine podcast and I wrote an article about the process of grafting grape varietals onto root stock...and why you do it.

We’re hoping to plant in March 2025 as there’s just too much else going on right now to have the headspace for the research we need to do, but we can plant a mix of cereals and legumes to provide some organic material and fix some nitrogen in the soil.

With some help we ordered seed from the local agricultural supplies shop and had to mix the wheat with the oats...and everything else. This is what we ended up with:

Trigo and aveia forrageiro (fodder wheat and oats), ervilhaca granel (bulk vetch), tremocilha raiada (striped lupin), trevo subterrâneo dalkeith (clover), sementa relva prado florido (flowering grass seed) and tremoço reginal (local lupins).

As a student studying Irish historical geography I obsessed over one particularly down-beat film called The Field starring Richard Harris.

His character Bull McCabe has a deep attachment to the patch of land in the title: “which his family has cultivated and improved, from barren to now very productive, over a number of generations.”

I remembered his obsession with removing all the rocks and carrying seaweed over the mountain to make it the most wonderfully lush green field you could imagine.

I was channelling my inner Bull McCabe as I dug rocks out of the soft clay and hurled them into piles – imagining how wonderful our field could be one day.

Our topsoil is mostly good, but we turned over quite a bit of clay in some sections while burying the old eucalyptus roots and I’m concerned little will grow there.

Ana praised my dedication and ambition to hoe and dig out rocks from a third of a hectare of land, but firmly questioned the timeline, my blind stubbornness and the mismatch between intention and reality...the rain was approaching and the seeds needed to be sewn that day.

I suppose the rocks (let alone the seaweed) will have to wait...it was another day of tough and backbreaking spadework.

We also needed to bury the first of our water tanks in the bottom of the valley. Carlos the landscaper had kindly dug the 2.6m deep hole, but had work elsewhere so we had to lower it by hand, get it level and then backfill many cubic metres of soil.

With the help of long straps, the car and the friendly Moldovans building our neighbour Daniel’s new patio, we managed to get the tank into the hole, but there was much more to be done to stop it from floating out in the rain.

Hours of even more backbreaking work later, we had filled as much as we could before the rain arrived...now the sun is shining again at some point I’ll venture down through the mud to see whether we were successful.

And the shipping container? It arrived, but the guy couldn’t lift it onto our new concrete supports because of the wet ground...so it’s just been parked next to the concrete poop for now...until it’s dry enough to get a crane in and place it properly.

Ah well, AWA.

Our path of life is a little treacherous – steep and with lots of places to slip and fall – but the further we go down it, the smaller the drop becomes and the less chance we have of plunging to our deaths.

The recent rain has slid in some complications – as I wrote about last week – but the route is still navigable and we’re confident that reaching the destination is worth the difficult journey.

And thanks to St Martin, this week we took this metaphor literally, packed a picnic and scrambled a tricky track down the cliffs to the beach to enjoy some warm weather and a dip in the ocean before colder weather comes along.

Verão de São Martinho – St Martin’s Summer – arrives in mid-November and is fast becoming one of our favourite times of year.

It’s when the talha amphorae are opened and the first new wines of the year begin to trickle out, when chestnuts are ready to be roasted, and when temperatures in the mid-20s give us the chance to gloat (just a little) about where we live and why we’re doing all this.

I’ve written before about St Martin’s progression from plain old Hungarian Martin, to patron saint of the poor, of tailors, winemakers and curiously both soldiers and conscientious objectors. Oh, and of France.

There’s a Portuguese saying “esta é a minha praia” – meaning that’s my beach, but also “that’s my thing” – and this is definitely our beach.

We call it “The Birthday Beach,” and it’s one of the most beautiful spots along this wonderfully wild coast – if not always the easiest to access.

Ana dusted off her summer sandwich making skills, Daniel threw in some hot tamales and after a sip of beer and a glass of wine we dived into the waves and all agreed the water really wasn’t cold...although we didn’t linger too long.

For the dogs it was the end of an excellent week as Simon celebrated his 12th birthday and Garfunkel enjoyed their joint celebration through meats, treats, some dried chicken and a lot of fussing.

And it was also a great week for us that began in Vila de Frades with a feast of wine tastings, fabulous food, music and friends...and ended with water...coming out of a tap...at the bottom of the valley.

We love inland Alentejo and it was only the coastal climate and of course the beaches that kept us from moving to the winelands when we first drew a line around Alentejo to choose our new home.

We’d been planning the two-hour trip to the November 11th opening of the talhas wine weekend since November 12th last year and this time managed to persuade our friends Niels and Sybille to join us.

Talha wine has its own official classification in Portugal and to qualify it has to stay in its fermenting clay pots until St Martin’s Day.

That’s when the celebrations begin – the taps are hammered in, the songs are sung, the chestnuts (and the pigs) are roasted and the wines are sampled.

And boy were they sampled.

Thanks to the amazing Mauro Azóia and Rita – and the generosity of Hamilton Reis, the guys from XXVI Talhas and the ROCIM Amphora Day we had the most wonderful weekend.

There’s an amazing energy among Portugal’s winemakers and we were lucky to dip into it for a weekend and meet many of the industry’s powerhouses like Hugo Mendes, Gonçalo Patraquim, Mariana Siqueira and many more from Portugal the US, UK and beyond.

Niels showcased his Syrah to the delight of visiting American wine journalists and somehow we both managed to get interviewed for Portuguese telly.

But our adventure to Cuba, Vila de Frades, Vidigueira and Vila Alva began by visiting a weaving mill to choose the oversized headboards for the new lodge bedrooms.

We’ve been to Fabricaal a few times to watch the traditional looms in action, ponder what to order, and also to record for the podcast, but this was the “now we know what we want” pressure trip.

Ana’s eye for colour and style took the lead and I think we have chosen well.

We book-ended the weekend with an amazing late lunch at Quinta de Quetzal and then dipped into Justino Damas Winery where we stumbled across some traditional Cante Alentejano singing last year.

The guys seemed to be winding down after a hectic weekend, but when Ana played them the video she’d filmed last year, they sparked straight up into song again...next thing passers-by were joining in and it was a proper song-off.

I even joined in...albeit a little timidly...

But it’s not been all fine wines and song this week...we also used the good weather to get in amongst it and push a couple of neglected parts of our project.

Not surprisingly there was no sign of the polished concrete floor guys who’d abandoned ship over a labour dispute, but we are reliably informed they will be back in another week to finish the job and clean up the concrete poop/art installation.

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Whilst awaiting their return we focussed on water.

With 6km of plastic pipes delivered from the factory Christiano Santos and his brother Eduardo, turned up to lay a couple of kilometres from the irrigation canal to the bottom of the valley where gravity just about provides it.

They wanted to run pipes along the river, but I thought the bank would be a better option, so got up nice and early to strim down some brambles and make a path for them to run routes for both us and our neighbour Daniel.

It all happened a bit quicker than we expected...and a bit too quickly for us to give timely heads up to the neighbours who were gracious about our lack of communication.

There’s something wonderfully reassuring about having a pipe at the bottom of the valley with a tap to turn on water...one small step for Christiano, but one huge leap for our kind.

Our “dilution over treatment” approach to turning mineral-salted water into drinking water involves two 200,000 litre pillow tanks – one for the canal water and the other for rainwater which we’ll collect.

That involves levelling two 180m2 areas and laying 10cm of sand on top before the pillow tanks can be installed...it also involves putting in other tanks for collecting and pumping the water up the hill.

Enter Charles Days (aka Carlos Dias) with his digger and levelling laser...and apart from being excellently distracted working wonders on Daniel’s land, everything is just about ready.

An expensive week of paying for tanks and pipes pushed me to go through the finances again to make sure all is well.

Surprisingly things are still broadly on track and on budget...barring the occasional surprise from the builder to give us something to argue about this week.

St Martin’s Summer has dried the building site up nicely – let’s hope the concrete guys can come back before the forecast changes.

But the path is still slippy and treacherous in places...and no doubt there are plenty of potholes a little further down the road, but we’re still heading broadly in the right direction.

Life in Portugal is definitely our beach. Especially when we’re on our beach.

Since our Portuguese adventure began, there are certain phrases I never thought I’d say out loud.

For example: “Once we discovered pillow tanks we knew we had the answer to rainwater capture.”

Then there things I never knew I’d even know, let alone say out loud:

“The LPWAN system is like WiFi over kilometres and it helps us blend our mineral salted water with rain to make drinking water...oh, and stops the pool overflowing.”

I mean, really.

And then there are those truly out-there unexpected sentences: “So we’re having an event in two weeks’ time celebrating Alicante Bouschet – a French grape the Portuguese made their own.”

I like wine, I like history, I love telling stories...and it turns out there’s a wine grape which does all three across Portugal, France and America and thoroughly excites normal people like us (or is that pushing it too far?).

More about the event on Saturday March 1st coming up.

But there was one message we received last week which we really never thought would come.

It was one of those distant hopes lying at the top of the Penrose Stairs – that infinite staircase you climb forever but never reach the top.

One of those things that for every one step forward, you take two steps back...and it’s only when you give up and turn around that you actually get there.

Or it’s like penguins toppling over watching a plane fly overhead: an amazing idea which could be true, but is actually just a myth.

You get the general idea. Anyway, the message said:

“You have your licence.”

Drumroll please.

Now, before you get overexcited and start inundating us with messages of congratulations, it’s only the licence to use the buildings...there’s still an inspection from the tourism authorities to come before we get our final stamp to fully open for business.

But...actually...do please inundate us with messages.

Because we’re delighted, astonished, amazed, blown away and all sorts of other predictable synonyms one can use, given the circumstances.

The message just popped into our inbox one afternoon, but to begin with the letter kept us guessing.

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Written in the fabulously complex high Portuguese and in the best traditions of formal legalese we read it, looked at each other quizzically, ran it through DeepL and were even more confused than before.

“I hereby inform Your Excellency,” it began, “that following the approval of the aforementioned request, the application timely submitted to that effect and the payment of the respective fees, the ‘Response to the communication, for use after urban operation subject to prior control no. 9/2025,’ which is attached hereto, was issued.”

“Is that good?” we asked each other.

“Is that good?” we asked our architect.

“It’s good,” our architect replied.

So now we have a long list of things we need to make sure are in place before the tourism inspection.

It includes mirrors, soap, electricity, a big rule book, drinking water, a pile of local tourist guides, a complaints book and a waste water treatment plant.

There are a few other rules for “Agro-tourism” establishments, but we’re classified as Casa do Campo...or country house.

(Just as an aside, I love the concept of “agro-tourism” – presumably when you arrive you are greeted by a furious host hurling a string of verbal abuse and screaming at you?)

Anyway, there’s plenty of work to be done.

The website building is progressing, but we’re waiting for the sunniest of days to take the best photos.

And we keep being distracted by fabulous visitors.

Top Portuguese winemaker Hamilton Reis came to visit and Ana cooked up a feast for his wife Susana’s birthday dinner.

“Is it OK if I bring my own wine?” he asked. “Oh, go on then,” we replied.

Hamilton is winemaker at the legendary Mouchão winery and produces his own Natus Vini wine...which is usually served in the best Michelin starred restaurants.

Some old university friends were in town and were treated to some of the best Alentejo wines going.

Among them was Nick Spotswood who has the Spotswood wine estate in Stellenbosch, South Africa and loved his first steps into Alentejo vinhos, even if his dinner table deep discussion with Hamilton over the brix system for measuring sugar content in grapes wasn’t for everyone.

But all were blown away by what we’ve achieved – at least that’s what they told us – by the local fish and porco preto black pork, by Oda’s amazing LA-style cocktails, and by the beaches (yes, we managed a February ocean dip).

Shameless Plug

To celebrate our successful licence approval...and the launch of our next podcast episode about one of the oldest, most historic, and most amazing wineries in Alentejo, we are holding a special wine event on Saturday March 1st.

Space is limited, but we have two amazing winemakers talking about Alicante Bouschet – a French grape which (as I found myself mentioning at the beginning) Portugal has made its own.

Developed in the mid-1800s to give poor French wine a deeper red colour, it was brought to Portugal in the hope it might resist a bug destroying Europe’s vineyards (it didn’t), but it then thrived in the heat of Alentejo.

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Hot on Hamilton’s heals we have Mouchão’s custodian Iain Reynolds Richardson telling the many amazing stories of his family’s 250 years of Portuguese history, how they introduced Alicante Bouschet to Portugal and how he now champions simplicity and tradition in his winemaking.

And French winemaker Baptiste Carrière Pradal (Domaine de la Massole) is bringing his single varietal Alicante Bouschet from the region in the south of France where Henri Bouschet created the amazing red grape with red juice in the first place.

If you’d like to support us and help us celebrate do come along.

Contact us directly for more information, but we’re offering a three course dinner, a guided wine tasting by the two aforementioned marvels and a stay in our lovely eco-luxe lodge for one or two nights at a really good price.

So, if you’ve been thinking about coming to see us, now’s the time! Ping us a message.

Things can change very quickly here in the Valley of the Stars.

The first draft of this week’s despatch began: “This week our dream has really started looking like a fabulous reality…”

By that same afternoon it needed a complete rewrite, and this line needed to be cut entirely:

“I don’t want this to sound like an Academy Award acceptance speech for a film that isn’t done, as we’re far from finished yet, but we are just a little more confident that one day we might be.”

It was around the time I was writing those words that the cement mixer got bogged down in the mud, the polished concrete floor guys went on strike and tonnes of cement started hardening in the truck.

Things had been ticking over nicely and although it was a little later than we expected, the stars had been aligning for the final floors to be laid.

We want a particular polished-concrete look in a sandy, gr-iege colour for all our floors, inside and out, and so had contracted a polished concrete floor specialist to do the job.

Sr Manuel, our main builder, had been playing nicely with them to prepare the surfaces and everything as required – the Moldovan Front Row plasterers did the first layers of concrete flooring inside and Heatpump Paulo had also laid the underfloor heating pipes on time.

Our great friends Becky & Rachel had been staying – full of encouragement and enthusiasm for the project and the podcast, which Pete Emmerson had also been working on many hours a day.

There’d been some rain – we’ve had quite a lot and it’s very welcome (the lake is already very full and it’s only November!)

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We even had a weekend up in Lisbon for our brother-in-law Pasi’s 50th birthday – an amazing whirlwind of fantastic people from all over the world and some incredible food and wine among family and friends.

It was a Big Week ahead, but we were ready – and also gained from a slight delay with the concrete truck which would come a day later than planned to let the land dry out a bit.

When the polished concrete guys arrived on day one they brought a surge of energy and urgency, wheeling barrows of cement from the mixer – sometimes even breaking into song – and then staining and polishing the floors beautifully.

It was after day one when I started writing what I originally called “A Big Week in the Valley,” but then came day two...

“Muito complicado,” the cement mixer driver kept mumbling to himself, as he did circles around his stranded truck.

Arriving late to the scene I wondered why the guys weren’t able to get the cement out of the truck and onto the floors – and then extract a much lighter mixer from the mud.

It became clear the pourers and polishers weren’t doing the pouring bit: they were refusing to wheel cement the extra few meters from the stuck truck. They downed wheelbarrows as it was more than their jobsworth to do it.

Their boss wasn’t here and through some patchy Portuguese eavesdropping of phone conversations, I began to realise this was an industrial dispute.

The idea of the company losing a lot of money in spoiled concrete was apparently part of their leverage – they didn’t want to find a solution.

As the driver said, Muito complicado.

Then things suddenly got even more complicated when the clock ran out.

The concrete was no longer useable in the floors...it was too old...and Mr Complicado started to panic...what was he going to do with his delivery?

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He didn’t want to be the driver returning to base with a useless concrete block for a van, and pleading with the strikers, he persuaded the guys to start passing up buckets of water from puddles to try and stop it from setting.

Our builder Sr Manuel and his guys shrugged – he had no jurisdiction over other contractors and just found it astonishing the polished floors team had felt the need to reverse forty plus tonnes of truck into a puddle just so moving wheelbarrows was going to be easier.

By the time I’d arrived they had tried various things to get it out, but the dispute with the boss had lost a load of time.

With Mr Complicado sweating it, Justo the tractor genius who can take a top off a beer with a huge metal digging bucket (we suspect) gave it a go...but it wouldn’t budge.

Our ever-diligent engineer José added industrial tribunal negotiator to his wide skillset of general problem-solver, diplomat, intermediary and superstar, and was doing everything he could remotely from another building site many miles away.

He also pulled in a favour from the Cow King – our neighbourhood farmer and his mate from the hunting club.

Sadly the King of the Cows got mixed up with where José was talking about and went to the wrong site to begin with.

That’s when I realised the mixer guy needed a lot of water to save his skin...and his truck.

Dragging pipes through the pools of water I managed to reach the van, but then a crushed electrical cable somewhere amid the miles of mud tripped the electricity and the water pump stopped.

I felt like I was in some odd Benny Hill throwback running up and down the hill between pump houses and power stations flicking switches on and off, breakers up and down and then communicating it all to the mudbath men.

By the time António Oliveira – O Rei das Vacas – arrived, the water was running, the concrete was watery, Mr Complicado was more relaxed and I had a very sore back.

“He won’t be able to do it,” Justo said, nodding at the tractor and the depth the mixer’s tyres had sunk into the clay – and Justo is a man used to getting things out of places.

The first attempt ended in failure, but that’s because of all the random bricks and planks thrown into the mud to try and give the insanely heavy truck some traction.

Once removed Sr Oliveira went again, and this time the truck was up and out and everyone was smiling.

Particularly the cow king, who despite having to go out of his way to help us, was delighted to have got one over a bunch of blokes from the city who came to the country thinking reversing a truck into a waterhole was going to end any other way.

Mr Complicado was delighted – he drove off to the factory with a wave and a smile of thanks that gave me no indication of what he was going to do the moment I went back down to our house for an hour-long Zoom call.

“They did what?” I asked as poor Ana, who had risen from her sick bed with a really nasty cold, to deal with the chaos while my meeting was on.

“They dumped all the concrete on our land,” she said.

I went back up...there is was...a huge mass of quickly hardening concrete poop spread over maybe 50m2 like washed out lava in little towers: a hot mud spring frozen in time.

Mr Complicado had turned around, driven back onto the site and emptied his whole truck on the ground.

I asked Justo whether I should try spreading it into bits to make it set in small rocks rather than one solid outcrop...with no nearby shovel, and a worsening back (courtesy of two disks apparently slightly more prolapsed than before this madness began).

He just laughed “it’ll be hard as rock in an hour,” and he was right. I didn’t even try.

Here was us thinking the biggest issue in the whole polished concrete pouring operation was going to be making sure LBD (the Little Black Dog) didn’t spend the evenings tapdancing on it while it set.

So now we have a wonderfully large and unmoveable slab of concrete poop languishing by the place our main gate is supposed to go.

José reassures us it’s not our responsibility, but it’s hard to see how we can force someone else to take it away.

Perhaps we can get someone with a pneumatic drill to cut it up into small bits which we could use as aggregate for our road...to save it from becoming a mud bath.

That sounds a lot more costly than ordering some pre-crushed rocks to be delivered.

The following day the building site was like a ghost town...until the painters turned up...and then Heatpump Paulo arrived: “I was expecting everyone to be very busy,” he said, with the wise words: “we all just want the same thing, right? To get the work done.”

Not necessarily it seems. Everyone else was either giving it a miss after a bit of overnight rain, or planning their employment tribunal statements.

The day after that nobody turned up at all. Let’s hope something happens on Monday...

I’ve always wanted a dog called Eileen.

The delight it would bring every time I shouted out in public “Come on Eileen...Come on Eileen...” would never get old.

Sadly The LBD (Little Black Dog) is a boy, but at least we had Portugal’s first named Atlantic storm to fall back on this week.

It might have been Storm Babet battering Britain, but it was Aline which was too-loo-rye-aying her way towards Portugal this week...same storm system, different first letter.

Or for those preferring an alternative pronunciation, perhaps Aline was making a beeline for Iberia.

Either way we had rain coming for the first time in a while.

And somewhat later than we should have done, we went into batten-down-the-hatches mode and started preparing optimistically for a steady stream of winter storms.

First off was the wood pile.

The last remnants of the eucalyptus forest which inhabited the area where we’re now building has been waiting for collection for a while, and having been baked for another summer was ready to be harvested and neatly arranged behind the house.

I’ve been blaming a dodgy back for putting it off, but with Aline coming, that excuse – like the woodpile – couldn’t wash.

And it was a good reminder to Ana and I of the great thing about having a natural gym on our doorstep - despite the aches and pains afterwards.

Then there was the other woodpile almost covered by brambles: a dense harder wood which will burn better, but needed chopping first.

Enter Erik’s Axe – the splitter axe kindly bought and carried from Sweden by Ana’s brother after a call to arms inspired by reading Norwegian Wood (no, not the Murakame version but by a Scandinavian author…and which has been a bestseller…in Scandinavia at least).

And chopping wood…that is a workout.

We got those at least under cover, if not all neatly stacked, but had no time for the pine.

But that’s been drying for a year and a half and is parked on a wooden pallet, so will have to wait under a tarpaulin until the rain clears and I have recovered from the last round of axing.

We lapped around the house looking for things that could get wet in a storm, made sure the tools were tidied away and the doors firmly shut and readied ourselves for its arrival.

Everything was pretty well prepared by the time the wind speed started increasing – with one exception.

We have some equipment up on the site, too big and bulky to be moved in and out of the new houses as required by the builders, and so it has been languishing on the hill in full exposure to the elements...which had not so far been particularly troublesome.

With a storm coming we invested in some thick black plastic sheeting to keep the rain off the machines and their cardboard boxes (to sit alongside the already well-covered bar) and set about wrapping them up tightly.

But as the storm approached the inadequacy of our preparations became obvious.

The winds were strong – very strong – apparently gusting at more than 100km/h and some heavy rocks and scaffolding frames did as well as Argentina did against the All Blacks in the first rugby world cup semi-final.

They resisted well and put up a good fight, but were comprehensively overwhelmed in the end.

Just before the first wave of torrential rain began, I popped up to check out the defences and they were already breached.

I did what I could, navigating a huge black plastic sail in the quickly strengthening horizontal rain, but with little success retreated to the house to enjoy the spectacle of some proper water flowing down our swales and into the lake.

The first storm is the time to find those little leaks which have widened through the summer heat and let the winter water in...and we found a few.

It’s a chance to see where pools of water are forming, and where strategic digging can direct even more into the lake.

It’s also a reminder of how solar panels need the sun to work as well as usual – something we sometimes forget with 300 days of sunshine a year.

Neighbour Daniel will admit he’s been a little lavish with his ‘lectrics and after two early morning power cuts caused by a new heat pump and a night time dishwash on the first day, (and a coffee maker and microwave used at the same time on the second) he is adapting to off-grid living in the time of rain.

At least he could cancel the water delivery, as his new gutter system was gathering all his worldy flushing needs...for a couple of weeks at least!

The rainfall wasn’t bad...but it wasn’t as much as predicted.

By the time the rain came, the Moldovan Front Row I wrote about last week were long gone: they had packed up and shipped off to help someone else get well and truly plastered.

But just a couple of days later, a Romanian tile master arrived and showed us what speed-tiling looks like.

Hot on the heels of our three week marathon of bathroom redesign we could appreciate the skills of a man who been doing it for 15 years.

His pace was as phenomenal as the plastering crew. Working alone he tiled to the tune of Europop radio and in the blink of an eye had glue mixed, tiles cut, placed and bathrooms quickly covered.

Just to keep up with him we had to race to the shop to collect a truckload of tiles ourselves rather than waiting for delivery, causing even Cassie the Hilux to dip under the weight as I very slowly navigated the dirt road back.

Seeing bathrooms fully tiled is another aesthetically satisfying step towards completion – despite the lack of windows – but that’s also moved on as the PVC guys turned up to take the final measurements and discuss the designs.

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Windows which open in various ways are always a winner, but with wind – and the reminder this week of how strong it can be on top of the hill – helped us to decide on sliding panes to avoid windows taking a battering.

The key is lots of large glass panes with not so many frames in the way of the view, which will be the main attraction at Vale das Estrelas when we open.

The sun is now shining, the power banks and the hot water is replenishing and there’s more rainfall on the horizon.

Hopefully the as yet unnamed new storm approaching as I write will actually bring the mighty number of millimetres my app is predicting.

Come on Aline...2...rye-eh.

It was dusk and we were wandering around the silent building site pondering where to place outside taps when a fancy truck pulled up.

The Little Black Dog (LBD) was transitioning from timid to over-excited (more on him later), and we were surprised: we don’t get people ‘round ‘ere after the sun’s set.

Then a smallish, tough-looking guy speaking Portuguese leaped down from the shiny grey Ford Tracker flanked by heavies and started walking towards us...with purpose, looking around...with interest.

So this was it: the local mafia had arrived, investigating what we were building and how they were going to take their cut.

I couldn’t see any iron bars, but I also couldn’t see their hands.

“Reboque” I was sure he said – Portuguese for trailer – but what did he mean? Were we going to be towed by a car? Was it a threat?

Ana stepped in calmly as he repeated the word: reboco – Portuguese for plaster.

A small difference in pronunciation, but a massive difference in meaning: we smiled nervously, then grinned broadly and then shook their hands warmly.

This was the Moldovan Front Row as they came to be known and they were sussing the joint...ahead of their arrival with machinery and metric tonnes of cement the following week.

This was the legendary travelling plastering team we’d heard about – the fastest plasterers in the west...of Alentejo certainly.

For weeks we had been awaiting news of their arrival. The builders had been concreting and levelling surfaces, the electrician, the plumber and heatpump Paulo had been busy installing, piping and prepping in anticipation of this day.

They had swept into Vera & Joep’s place, mixed and pumped plaster onto the walls with something resembling a fireman’s hose.

They had trowelled and smoothed, sponged and finished their new buildings beautifully and then as quickly as they had arrived they had gone...and the painting work had begun.

Now it was our turn.

Being big lads with broad enough shoulders to swing a bucket load of plaster on one giant trowel they reminded me of a rugby front row.

As the Rugby World Cup in France begins the knock-out stage, we were very glad Moldova hadn’t qualified this year – as these fellas might well have been in France rather than here.

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The front row was where Alan Gledson and I played some years ago, and while neither of us can wield a whole bucket of tile glue on one trowel any longer, we still think we can and so have spent the best part of three weeks attempting to achieve the unachievable.

We set out last month when Alan and Margery arrived to “help us with a bit of tiling” and we are now the proud owners of two fully refitted guesthouse bathrooms.

Margery went home a week earlier but Alan refused to even book a flight back until we were well on our way to finishing.

The first challenge was chiselling out the concrete surrounding the baths – it seems the Germans who built the place erred on the side of caution and cast the cast iron bath in concrete.

When the jackhammering stopped, Alan kept vibrating...for a couple of days...any good rugby referee would have sent him off for a head injury assessment as it was clearly a concussion.

Then we started taking off the horrible white things previously known as tiles with the aforementioned hammer.

With tile chips flying there was blood on the floor and the walls, and then we decided to cut into the brick and install new in-wall showers similar to those in our new buildings.

That’s when we taught ourselves plumbing from YouTube (using PEX or Polyethylene cross-linked pipe), borrowed a bender from the plumber and a crimper from Joep – to link the pipes and connect the showers and sinks. Let’s hope the joints hold.

Thankfully we were able to take notes from the building site to learn how to do it properly before the Moldovan Front Row arrived and covered everything up with plaster so beautifully.

We covered things up not quite so beautifully, installed the new shower base trays and began “a bit of tiling.”

It was tough work – even more so because of the unusually high summer-style temperatures.

Alan did most of the skilled stuff, while I did the measuring and cutting, mixing and cleaning, but day by day the level of finished tile increased.

Then there was the grouting, and Ana switched from working on our main project (and cooking like a demon) to join the push to get the bathrooms finished before our next guests arrive.

Alan worked on the shower screens while I worked out vinyl click flooring – cutting, shaping and placing.

Guido the wonderful German boiler master appeared on cue to reinstall the radiators and get the whole drained water boiler and solar system pressurised and back up and running.

The final act was fitting the toilets, sealing anywhere water might get in...and adding all the finishing touches.

Alan Gledson, you are a legend...a force of nature...a bloody-minded, determined, unmovable machine...and thank you for helping us and for creating two beautiful new bathrooms and for “going Egyptian” to fetch our new bar.

And thanks so much to our generous neighbour Daniel for kindly putting the Gledsons up while they didn’t have bathrooms! We couldn’t have done it without you.

In a fraction of the time it took us to do a bit of tiling, the Moldovan Front Row had pretty much plastered all three buildings inside and out.

They’ll do the last bits this weekend (yes, they work weekends).

It looks stunning, the finishing is beautiful and although it was all the hard work by Senhor Manuel’s guys which got us here, the plastering is the icing on the cake which makes everything look more real and more finished.

With a three-phase power generator, truck-loads of cement mix and a lot of hard work they covered all the floors and walls with their fire hose and then smoothed it all to perfection, prepping for the tiling team who will be coming next.

We’re still a long way from being done – the next juggling act is to bring the underfloor heating and polished concrete guys together as soon as possible, make sure the doors and windows are correctly ordered...and the small matters of the electricity and water infrastructure.

But it’s all heading in the right direction.

It’s hard to know what the LBD has made of all this.

The Little Black Dog is a young puppy with a docked tail who just turned up one day hungry and scared and seems to have made the top of the hill his home...not entirely because he gets fed and watered by us and the builders.

Anyway, he helped me resolve a feeling that I was going slightly mad...

Given that not long ago I thought DIY was something you were cited for in the US for drinking and driving, I’m doing OK, but my biggest problem is spending half the time looking for tools I’ve just left in various places.

Having passed 50 I regularly struggle with readings glasses retention, but pencils, tape measures and trowels seemed to migrate between rooms on their own.

But what made me question my own sanity was the disappearance of the yellow cleaning brush for the concrete buckets.

“Nope,” said Alan. “I haven’t seen it...I don’t even know what it looks like.”

So I bought another one.

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We left a blanket out for LBD, and the next day it was gone. Weird. And then a mop went missing.

Just I was pondering the possibility of poltergeists, LBD bounded over and I realised he wasn’t just a plastic insulation and doormat chewer but was also a hoarder.

I found his stash next to the builders’ hut that he has made home. Mop, blanket, yellow brush and various clothing items and shoes pinched from the Moldovan Front Row.

He’s a lovely dog with a wonderful nature and we’re looking for someone to give him a home...so please let me know if you can fit an LBD into your life.

In my experience one should never turn down the offer of a free bar: it’s always fun and it usually leads to new friendships, but of course there can be consequences.

So when I received the message from Vanessa and Jeremy who read this blog and live in Porto, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

“We’ve just purchased a small quinta just outside Porto and the previous owners left few pieces behind,” Vanessa wrote.

“It’s quite large, some see possible beauty, some see a large monstrosity, but it’s free to a new caring home. So as requested, I send photos...”

I saw it and thought “wow, that looks amazing...but my wife is going to think it’s hideous.”

My wife saw the photograph and said: “wow...that’s hideous,” but then surprised me, as always, by adding: “we must get it – I have the perfect place for it.”

My eye for interior design is at best short sighted and my stylistic vision similarly blurred, but undoubtedly every eco-lodge needs a sturdy, solid, Brazilian oak, 4m long, German-built, tiki-style bar topped with a suspension bridge.

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It was back in February when we enthusiastically replied yes to the free bar, but with all the ups and downs of the project it was only last week when we finally managed to hit the road north to Porto with the trailer clattering behind us.

With Alan and Margery staying, we had dog and cat carers, and so arranged a few other meetings and planned a couple of nights in a city where I’d never been.

We were just south of Porto last year in Vila Nova de Gaia doing a story and a radio piece for the BBC and for our podcast at Amorim – the world’s largest cork producer.

But I had never been to the city itself and Ana was last there some years ago.

On the way up we dropped in to meet Meterboost – the Portuguese company which makes the lithium batteries we’ve installed in our three-phase power system for the new lodge.

I’m doing a couple of BBC radio programmes on off-grid living and Sérgio Rodrigues’ start-up story from making batteries in his garage to co-founder and CEO, is straight out of Silicon Valley.

More to follow when I gather all the interviews together and get the pieces out on the World Service programme Business Daily in the next couple of months.

Our first stop on arrival in Porto was to meet Vanessa and Jeremy at the quinta, or estate house, they bought and are beginning to renovate.

We’d already bonded by text and phone as they had also left a life of Global Nomad-ness (as Vanessa calls it) to find a home in Portugal...and were embarking on a new adventure with architects and builders.

It’s the most wonderful, classic, creeper-adorned house built surrounding an open courtyard, with lots of little sections reflecting its former life as combined office and accommodation space for a German company.

There are so many things that could be done in so many ways, and Vanessa is overflowing with design ideas, but their first architect let them down and they lost a load of time.

Now back on track, they were keen to have the bar liberated from the pool house, but we quickly discovered that was going to be far more easily said than done.

Our trailer was painfully insufficient both in size and carrying capacity – this was truly a giant among bars.

We’ve noticed German taste leans towards strong, solid and utterly unshiftable, so this clearly needed more plotting and scheming.

Operation Free Bar began its planning stages as we left the trailer parked at their place and manoeuvred our tractor into the narrow streets of Porto.

(Cassieopia the Hilux is a necessity in the countryside, but is a nightmare to park in big cities).

As a huge part of Alentejo’s story, cork is part of our interiors plan – on the mezzanine floors, occasional walls and as fun punctuation marks...and Tony Marques at Corticeira Viking certainly has some great stuff.

This blog once again led us to Tony’s door...via Australia. Phoebe owns The Cork Shop in Byron Bay and next thing she and partner Omar were in the valley as part of their work trip to research cork and meet distributers.

“Tony’s amazing,” she said – and a few months later here we were in his showroom looking at cork stools, ice buckets, bags, yoga blocks, coasters – all sorts of really lovely stuff which we can use for décor and to sell in the little shop we’ll have.

We found some incredible cork flooring, some beautiful wall coverings and even a bath and handbasins made of cork...

Next we headed to the specialist furniture-making town of Paços de Ferreira which we learned about in Nancy Whiteman’s fantastic blog Expat in Portugal which is a great guide to making the move, especially for Americans keen to cross the Atlantic.

But after interior-overload I needed a gin...and to meet another social media pal in real life.

Australian globe-trotter Travis Cunningham has also made Portugal his home and started the Scoundrels Distilling Company in the shadow of FC Porto’s stadium.

Gin was his thing – his Invicta Gin won Gold Medal at the London Spirits Competition and he’s even set up a gin school to teach the art of distilling – but now he’s moved on to rum aged in old Port casks.

I’ll be writing more about Travis and his recent signing for FC Porto in my other much-neglected blog The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure.

Final stop of the day was dinner with Nuno Vargas and family – and their introduction to the famous Porto speciality Francesinha (which curiously translates to “little French woman”).

We met at the legendary CUFRA diner which claims to have a “Festival da Francesinha” todos os dias (every day).

It was timed to perfection with kick off in the FC Porto UEFA Champions League match and three quick Porto goals gave us the perfect backdrop for a sandwich which hardened the arteries on sight.

It was a great trip to a great city, but one issue remained unsettled: the free bar.

Ana spent a couple of full days ringing around car hire companies for vans or bigger trailers, we popped into Ikea and a Leroy-Merlin DIY store to enquire about their vehicles.

Free bars don’t come without consequences and we were deep in planning logistics when our winemaking pal Niels stepped in.

His versatile van wasn’t quite long enough in a straight line...and then there was the issue of how to get hundreds of kilos of oak into the back...but with Alan Gledson in the valley anything is possible.

Niels introduced us to his tractor jack and sending us on our way with a couple of wheel boards, Alan and I began the long drive north.

This time it was all focussed on one challenge: bringing the bar home.

Spanners, jacks and a heavy metal pry bar lay alongside the last-resort chainsaw but Ana’s maths had established it should fit...just...on its side and at an angle.

Vanessa and Jeremy were a little more optimistic when they saw our upgraded van and with the addition of their gardener and his wife, thought it might actually be possible.

With all hands on deck, Operation Free Bar began.

Mallets were swung, pry bars pried, and amid much huffing and puffing we had the 4m piece of solid hardwood half way to the van when the cobbles threw a spanner in the works.

“Right, time to go Egyptian,” Alan said. “We need rollers.”

A CO2 gas bottle from the bar provided the necessary support and with far less faff than anyone (except Alan) expected, the whole thing was secured in the van and the chainsaw remained blissfully silent.

Back home we drafted in Ana, Margery and landscaper Carlos who happened to be passing and the bar was assembled in its new temporary home on the hill.

It’s wonderful...it will look even better in front of the infinity pool when it’s all finished...and with a little cleaning and protecting it will be an iconic landmark in Vale das Estrelas.

In the best Hollywood tradition I’d like to thank everyone involved in making this move a success, but above all Vanessa and Jeremy for donating it...and Alan for going Egyptian and bringing the bar to a new caring home.

We’d been mildly bothering Carlos the building supplies guy for a few weeks about bringing one of his big diggers in to help rearrange a few things.

We’ve had a couple of rearrangements in the valley already and it usually involves setting a site visit, walking, talking, pointing and head scratching, and then waiting weeks for the agreed machine to rock up.

Our most recent bothering was on our umpteenth trip to the tiles and taps place to sort out a still unresolved confusion with the builder over shower and sink hardware.

.Usually-very-calm-Carlos was a little stressed so we light-heartedly nudged him before moonwalking out as he mumbled something about talvez amanhã de manhã (maybe tomorrow morning).

So when a car trundled down the drive at 8.30am the next day, the dogs were almost as surprised as we were (too be fair they’re a bit slow until they’ve had breakfast).

Carlos had sent his digger guy, and after some walking, talking and pointing (and virtually no scratching of heads) he asked if we wanted to start straight away.

We nodded enthusiastically and naively and headed off to the shops.

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Half an hour later we met the big digger delivery truck coming the other way on our dirt road and Mr Digger and his 21-tonne truck were already 3m deep in trenches.

The bigger the digger the harder it is to undo mistakes – once things are done, they stay done – but our new trench seemed to be heading in roughly the right direction.

The extreme gardening was to deal with the large piles of eucalyptus roots which have been languishing on the property’s perimeter since the whole adventure began.

Our first job had been to cut down the eucalyptus forest occupying our flattest land with our bestest view and then dig out the deep roots and either burn them, bury them or truck them out.

We’d opted for burial over climatic impact or cost with the intention of creating a mound of amazing water-retaining soil to feed growth over the next 30 years, but had to wait until they had dried out and reduced by about half the size before digging them in.

That time had come and with a deadline for opening and an ugly fence to bury, there was an urgency requiring a certain level of bothering.

Bothering doesn’t always work here; in fact, it sometimes has the opposite effect.

But not bothering also has the opposite effect, so we are constantly striving for the correct level of balanced bothering.

We are clearly not getting that balance right in a couple of key areas, but it seems the town hall now has the paperwork it needed three months ago and hopefully we will imminently receive our plan for the water infrastructure.

But while I digress, do check out the movie…

Landscaping is an important part of our project and a little vineyard will look great and maybe even make us something suitable for human consumption at some point in the future.

It’s taken me a while, but I have finally accepted the fact there is no way we can plant wine grapes next Spring, as Ana has been saying for months, for a whole number of reasons not least that there are far too many other things to do.

But there are some things we can do , and so the focus for that patch of land is to prep it as well as we can for a Spring 2025 planting.

This involves taking soil samples to see if the area is even appropriate for grapes – even though quite a few people we have spoken to have shrugged as if to say “why not?”

The 3m trenches have revealed our soil profile and it appears to be about half a metre of soil on top of thick clay...hmm.

With that in mind, and a lot of soil improvement to be done, we also need to work out which other machines need to be arranged.

Mr Digger said we’d need a smaller bulldozer to mix and break down some of the clay and rocks, but the options also include disking, harrowing, raking or maybe ploughing with a tractor before planting some nitrogen-fixing greenery...and then perhaps bringing in some sheep?

We were thinking about maybe three sheep to begin with when Alan scoffed and said “you’ll need at least a dozen.”

The Gledsons – Alan and Margery – are back in the valley for a couple of weeks to give us a hand with some heavy lifting.

Alan was a sheep farmer when he was my rugby coach many years ago at Northern and Northumberland, and so presumably “a dozen” might well be a walk in the park for him.

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Our sheep experience is limited to Ana’s parents’ farm in Sweden, and apart from a bit of shepherding and fence building we honestly spend less time feeding them than they do feeding us.

We haven’t even decided between sheep, goats or donkeys as yet.

Some people advise us to start small with one breed of grazers and go from there, whereas others are encouraging us to start a small zoo.

We’re asking the Gledsons for some land preparing advice, but we’re also getting our hands dirty for the first time in a while – and there’s nothing like the unstoppable force of the Alan Gledson machine to get things done.

The project for the next couple of weeks is a refurbishment of the guesthouse bathrooms: switching the old baths for modern walk-in showers, swapping in new water-saving toilets and retiling all the walls.

How hard can it be to remove a bath? Really hard when it’s been concreted in.

Yes, for some absurd reason the bath installation by the German folk who built this place involved building a small wall in the bathroom corner, filling it with broken bricks and concrete and then lowering in a metal bath as it was setting...certainly solid and better safe than sorry I suppose?

My jackhammer wasn’t going to cut it and even after borrowing something far more substantial from the builder, it took the best part of a morning and about six wheelbarrow loads of brick and cement waste before we could consider the next step.

That could be either a ready-made shower tray or non-slip tiles. We’ll need a new shower unit for sure...and while we’re smashing up the walls we may as well move the taps to the side rather than under the shower head.

We’re analysing what the guys are doing in new buildings to make a plan, and while it all seems a little ambitious, what could possibly go wrong?

I might run a book on how long it is before I chisel a water pipe and we get caught up in a vicious cycle of “mission creep” as the military call it.

The one good thing about being rubbish at DIY is it always makes for a better story.

There are many good reasons to visit Marvão – a beautiful fortified hilltop town in Alentejo’s interior - but this is not the place for a day trip from our house.

With a view over Spain, it’s more than four hours one-way, not giving much time for lunch or dinner at the fabulous Mil Homens restaurant, or to stay in the stunning pousada, or to do a sunrise walk around the castle and the town’s walls as we did a couple of years ago.

But in pursuit of a bargain we can do eight-hour round trips, and the purpose of the drive was to meet a second-hand talha salesman.

Talhas are the giant clay amphorae used to make wine since Roman times which I have written about before, and the surge of interest in natural winemaking using these pots has led to some hefty inflation in the informal talha market.

Wine will be a big part of our tourism theme at Vale das Estrelas, and so we need talhas for decoration – and possibly even to make our own wine – so we wanted something rustic for the entrance and something practical for the wine cellar.

It turned out to be not quite as easy as we had hoped.

With the roofs on all the new buildings, the focus of our project has naturally turned to the interiors, and while I’m busy making colourful flow charts for electrical and water infrastructure, Ana is running the administration of the interiors.

As I’ve hinted at before, this includes hours trawling Facebook Marketplace for deals that match the style she’s developing for the interior design.

With an opening date pencilled in for the end of next March we can’t be waiting to gather furniture, ornaments, materials and everything else we’re going to need once the floors are down, the walls are plastered and the windows are in.

Buying through The Facebook needs flexibility and quick decision making, and Marvão isn’t the first place where we’ve dropped everything in pursuit of a deal (but is the furthest...so far).

The other night Ana stumbled across a printers’ table – a large cabinet with many drawers to store the different sizes and fonts of typographic lead letters which would have been assembled on the desk before being delivered to a printing press.

I remember the excitement of the presses rolling at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle where I started out in journalism many years and where typography had recently been replaced by computers.

On the occasional day I produced a story worthy of holding the front page, I would go down to the printing halls minutes after sending my copy over, with the adrenaline of the deadline still pumping, to watch my words being applied to paper and then bundled off onto the streets.

I didn’t quite understand Ana’s vision for where the piece would fit in, but confident in her eye for design (and a bargain) we jumped into the car and headed to the Algarve at 7pm.

It was dark when we loaded the drawers and the cabinet into the car, but on seeing them I understood Ana intended to use the many-partitioned drawers vertically – as picture frames of tiny compartments to fill with colour or ornaments.

And what a great reception desk!

Of course with the acquisitions in full flow, we will need somewhere to store all the new old stuff until we can get them placed in the buildings.

And securing some water-tight cover came into focus as meteorological autumn officially began on September 1st and temperatures behaved accordingly, dropping from the mid-30s Celsius to mid-20s in a couple of days.

We caught the edge of an Atlantic Storm which soaked much of Portugal.

It brought our first trickle of rain in months, and a rush to cover topless Siouxsie the Suzuki and to reconnect the gutters to the depleted drinking water tank.

The days of regular weather app watching have returned – even though rain in September often preceeds a second summer in October (and is good for Medronho Jorge’s harvest as it fattens up the fruit nicely).

But this year things could be different and lots of welcome rain could be coming our way courtesy of the El Niño weather phenomenon, if it does what the experts are predicting it might in Portugal.

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As an aside (and as a geographer) all this climate stuff fascinates me, and The Economist did a great job of explaining El Niño the other week, and commenting on how global warming will amplify its impact.

In short, for us in Iberia it means higher temperatures – and the nearby ocean helps protect our valley against that – but also more rainfall and more intensive rain showers.

It’s what we’re planning for...and why we met Vitor André and his partner last week.

Our off-grid water plans revolve around being able to capture and keep all the storm rain we can harvest from the roofs, patios and solar panels...and that is potentially a lot of water.

With budgets top of mind, Ana’s intensive online research introduced us to Vitor’s pillow tanks.

Anything hard and plastic that stores more than about 15,000 litres of water must be dug into the ground or reinforced by concrete and so the only affordable and practical solution for 200,000 litres is a large plastic bag on a piece of flat ground in the forest.

Bring on pillow tank time.

And the pursuit of storage space with affordability also took us to a large shipping container depot.

We need a technical room for our water treatment station, and inspired by friends Joep & Vera we’ve decided to buy a container rather than build a small brick house to also provide us with watertight storage now and in the future.

They look very stark at the port, but with a coat of paint, a few windows and a shade in front they will be an affordable additional shed on our hilltop...especially for farming equipment in the future.

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Great beds are probably the most important thing we need to invest in for the interiors and we’ve had some top reviews of the mattresses we bought for the guesthouse, most recently from the Lisbon family.

Ana’s sisters are like buses...you don’t see one for ages and then they both arrive at once...well, in the same week at least.

Rita and Pasi stayed a night en route from the Algarve back to Lisbon before Diogo and Valpuri were due back at school.

And Maria João and (El) Nuno enjoyed a couple of nights in comfort after a hard day on the beach without any of us – yet again – managing to catch any fish at all.

The beds got the thumbs up, and while our supplier bought them from the UK – before Brexit kicked in – they are now being supplied from Ireland and are even better.

Just how good the final beds will be is all down to the Excel sheet and the budget...which was helped by Ana’s tough negotiations over the talhas.

Our talha day trip to Marvão included a stop at the brilliant Estremoz Saturday market for lunch and a few extra acquisitions, and took us on to António the clay-pot peddler’s yard.

The price had doubled by the time we got there, but had halved again by the time he delivered the four talhas to us...some days later, once he realised we wouldn’t be paying estrangeiro (foreigner) prices.

The amphorae date from the late 1800s, two are coated inside ready for some winemaking, which we might even try to do next year with some bought-in grapes.

They look great on the top of the hill – at least until we can get them into the wine cellar – but the most precious thing we received all week was the most fabulous charroa plough from our friend John Rourke.

He tragically lost his wonderful wife Isabel earlier this year – far too young – and he came to see us for lunch with his son James who has been staying.

John has been restoring some of the old equipment from the family farm, and as he and James carried the beautifully painted plough from the car he said Isabel had promised to gift us one for the lodge...and so here it was.

It’s under cover while we decide on the perfect place to put it...to remind us of Portugal’s agricultural heritage and in memory of Isabel.

Being in the right place at completely the wrong time used to be a professional blessing, but these days I’m not so sure.

When I was a BBC foreign correspondent, friends would ask where I was planning to visit next so they could avoid going there on holiday because news stories seemed to follow me around the world.

What could possibly happen moving to Miami? (Hurricane Katrina hit there first), or Bangkok? (weeks of violent street protests ended by a military massacre) or Kabul? (Afghanistan was supposedly back on a happy democratic track at the time).

What could possibly happen in Odemira, Alentejo...in a remote rural spot living off the grid, ignorantly?

Fire it seems.

Last year was a huge shock – when fire rushed up the Valley of the Stars burning our land and sending us scattering around with just an hour to choose which worldly possessions to pack into Cassie the Hilux and head for the hills with the dogs.

So when fire came to Odemira again this week...to the southern edge of our nearest town of São Teotónio...and this time was a large enough blaze to make international news, I began to ask if the gods of news might consider leaving me alone now I’ve left the BBC.

The fire began on Saturday – apparently at a picnic area popular for barbecuing close to the main road – and it quickly spread into narrow valleys of tinder-dry eucalyptus forests.

But it was Monday’s strong easterly winds which brought hot, dry air from Spain and drove the fire towards us.

People were evacuated from guest houses and homes as the fire spread out of control and the smoke blotted out the sun. It doubled in size in a few hours.

Dramatic pictures, and a proximity to the holidaymaking spot of the Algarve, gave this story a lot more attention than I expected, and so I was drawn back into the old job, doing live interviews for BBC TV and radio programmes throughout the day.

It’s a popular tourist area in its own right and thankfully our friends who evacuated guests from their Aterra eco-boutique glamping lodge avoided the flames and their place was saved.

Other tourist lodges appear not to have been as lucky.

This week is the Meo Sudoeste music festival – a Portuguese Glastonbury which is held not too far up the coast from us, and for now it’s going ahead as planned.

Fire trucks arrived from all over Portugal, and aircraft have been continuously flying to a nearby reservoir to pick up water to drop on buildings and dowse areas ahead of the fire to try and stop it spreading.

Today we were blessed by calm air, with high temperatures but little wind to drive the fire forward.

Roads are still closed as more than a thousand firefighters spent another day cutting fire breaks with ploughs and trying to contain the flames while they can, and before high winds return.

We discovered an amazing website for monitoring fires from NASA satellite information, but hitting refresh every thirty seconds doesn’t help reduce stress levels.

And so we went out and about to see for ourselves where the fire had reached and which way the wind was going. The evenings here are usually calm and so a big red glow on the horizon soon subsided.

The full extent of the damage is hard to know and the threat is still not over – our friends who breed Lusitano horses are closer to the fire and more at risk from the switching wind direction, but if the fire heads down their valley it will come towards us as well. We are all on high alert.

As we watched the satellite map refresh, we feared for the beautiful Vicentino vineyard – one of the biggest producers of Pinot Noir in Portugal and a place we take all our guests.

We know the guys there well and it wasn’t looking good, until I received a message that they had managed to save both the new winery (which only received its first harvested grapes last week) and the vineyards...by fighting the fire themselves.

The trees and fields cleared to build the winery acted as a fire break and helped protect the vineyards.

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Forty five members of staff stayed on the land to put out spot fires, dousing vines with water and ploughing fire breaks to protect the farm as the fire closed in.

“With the enormous heat, the eucalyptus trees send burning globes 200m and they start new fires,” said Vicentino and Frupor owner Ole Martin Siem who was critical of the fire brigade for a lack of communication between crews and central command.

“I am frustrated because of the lack of action from the fire brigade and the police,” he said.

“There were three big trucks full of water sitting there all day and they did nothing – we were putting the fires out ourselves.

“We asked why they were not helping and they told us they were waiting for instructions from above and could not help.”

“My frustration is with the bureaucracy and the bad management of the fire,” said the Norwegian grower who has lived and farmed in the area for 50 years.

“When you have a large fire you need good organisation at every level, but fire fighters were admitting there was nothing they could do to help us because they were waiting for instructions.”

A lot of firefighters are volunteers and they have been working tirelessly for the last few days.

Crews arrived from all over Portugal to help, but we also heard criticism last year about the lack of communication between different agencies and crews.

When the fire goes into the eucalyptus or pine nut forests there’s not much they can do except to try and direct it into more open areas where there’s less fuel for the flames – and away from houses which are the firefighters’ priority.

Last year we were very unlucky when fire came up our valley for the first time in a hundred years, but extremely lucky we escaped largely unscathed.

Most big fires rage in the interior of the country – close to the border with Spain where the temperatures are a lot higher.

But again we have been unlucky that a strong east wind arrived in those couple of days before a fire could be brought under control.

It’s another reminder for us to make sure our land is cleared of old branches and leaves, that we have fire breaks in place, no wooden decks – and perhaps that we might need to get some sheep or goats to do some of the work for us.

And if we get grazers we’ll need someone to look after them...and that’s when Vasco the Llama comes along. I’ve always wanted a llama, and what better name for him?

You can listen to every despatch where you get your podcasts - here’s last year’s.

Right now we’re optimistic but we’re vigilant. The black plumes of towering smoke are now a misty layer in the distance, but the buzz of aircraft is a constant reminder it’s not far away and there’s always the risk of new sparks.

If it does come closer to us, we have done this before and know the drill: we know what to grab and throw in the car.

We’ll just have a leave a few things out this time as we have an extra three young cats to accommodate (and they don’t currently get on!).

I don’t think this is the new normal for our part of Portugal, but I think it will be a more familiar occurance across large swathes of southern Europe as temperature records are broken and long periods of drought persist.

And thanks to everyone who’s been in touch to make sure we’re OK.

So far so un-fire-y in Vale das Estrelas...and long may it remain that way.

It was wonderful to be away, but it’s wonderful to be back in the Valley of the Stars – reinvigorated by a few weeks of adventure and ready to plunge back into the madness with renewed vigour.

The builders have been busy while we’ve been away, the animals were almost as pleased to see us as our neighbour Daniel who’s been managing the menagerie solo for a week of torment by Simon & Garfunkel and the relentless Val Kilmer thief-cat and her kittens.

We were amazed to see most of our saplings have survived the summer (so far) and that everything was far tidier than when we left courtesy of our work-obsessed house sitter pals the Gledsons.  

And what a trip – to London, California and Lisbon – to meet up with old friends and family, spending time with our wonderful daughter Oda after too long apart and going on what for us is now a rare overseas expedition.

Jumping on planes was once our way of life, but there’s far too much to do these days in remote rural Portugal and a whole new life to invent.

A wildfire alert the day before our return, the remnants of an aircraft cold and a couple of welcome-home wasp stings didn’t even dent the excitement of being back at Vale das Estrelas.

In summary, we embraced the Barbenheimer weekend in LA, saw two amazing Derek Day concerts, ate “the world’s largest shrimp platter” washed down by Mexican micheladas, tasted our friend’s award winning wine and met one of America’s most Alentejo-obsessed wine masters.

I re-engaged with the journalistic world at a Stanford University JSK fellowship reunion delving into Artificial Intelligence and Disinformation.

We headed up into the high desert to double down on California’s heat wave, and our Joshua Tree AirBnB had a cowboy saloon complete with swing doors, honky-tonk piano and cowboy pool – a theme we extended with a trip to Western film-set Pioneertown.

We ate the best tacos, dim sum and sushi, got our fix of In-N-Out Burgers, went the full lobster while outlet mall shopping and heard ourselves telling everyone how amazing life is in Portugal...and realised just how right we are.

Apart from starting to write a new monthly column in the Portugal Resident magazine (greetings to our new subscribers!) it was a total break – a reset and a re-evaluation ahead of a re-launch as we work hard re: the opening of our eco-lodge in the Spring.

Crazy California is a wonderful world apart from the peace and serenity of Alentejo, but it excites and invigorates us almost as much.

The two places in the world where Ana and I would most like to live are a city of nearly 10 million people and a valley of five.

So this week’s despatch is a window into our old world – the four years we spent living in Los Angeles, our year studying in San Jose and the fabulous craziness of the other west coast we call home.

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And I’d like to begin with an equally unlikely combination: Barbenheimer and the buzz around a double-movie opening weekend which broke records and packed cinemas with people dressed in pink.

Fuelled by memes and marketing, watching the films Barbie and Oppenheimer back to back became a thing and Hollywood embraced it as only Hollywood can.

Oda drove us from cinema to cinema scrambling for the last tickets as foyers ran out of Diet Coke and popcorn jalapeños and rubbish bins and car parks were crammed to overflowing...it was the biggest movie weekend she or boyfriend Derek could remember.

By the time we settled in for our first big-screening in three years complete with popcorn and refill-popcorn, we’d already timed out on the double and would have to leave Oppenheimer for another day.

If you haven’t seen Barbie yet it’s a great film, but in the crazily polarised and parallel worlds of America I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that some Republican Grand Old Party extremists burned Barbie dolls in protest at its “woke” feminism.

Really? Ana follows US politics far more closely than I do, but these are worrying times.

As the New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz put it: “Trump only a few indicments away from clinching GOP nomination.”

At the brilliantly named, dog-friendly bar Boozehounds in Palm Springs, Oda complemented our server on her pink nails: “thanks, I’ve had them done for Oppenheimer,” she said.

It was a rare moment of sarcasm in a country known for its irony-deficiency.

It was so hot in LA we decided to embrace the heatwave and head to the desert – the one place that definitely does really good air conditioning.

I’m not sure what 114 Fahrenheit is in real money, only to say the streets of Palm Springs were mostly abandoned and the city’s hounds – boozy or otherwise – were either wearing booties or were safely air conditioned indoors.

Echoes of the Barbie film’s Ken-dom manosphere were thriving in the Huntington Beach dive bar where Derek Day played a Saturday night set...and set the place alight.

After watching his Classless Act band play in San Diego the week before (and after the launch of their live video recording of a track with 80s early rap icon DMC) it was great to hear some of his original songs again alongside rock classics.

The characters in attendance at the bar included an aging rocker with a black spotted head, pink tambourine man, a grim-reaper look ruined by the guy’s aluminium stick (rather than a black cane), and a gold-lamé outfit-collage was only eclipsed by our friend Susannah’s long sequinned dress.

But it was the cockroach scuttling across the dance floor which gave Perqs the legendary dive bar status acknowledged by the punters spilling out into the street while rocking to the sounds of Mr D.Day. It had everything.

A couple of back to back birthday bashes in London with silent disco headphones and the best British Indian curry ever, some quality time with old friends and some successful wine project meetings made for a great get-away.

But now we’re back...the buildings have new walls, their water and electrical connections are being cemented in and a long line of meetings are already stacking up.

We have water, power, waste treatment and landscaping to resolve, all the interiors to design and build, and budgets to balance...and we hope to open by Easter.

We have a podcast to finish, a load of wonderful pals lined up to visit...and some amazing beaches to remind ourselves of.

But for now our funding is back along with our mojo. It’s exciting, it’s fun and it will only be stressful if we let it.

Let the good times management roll...

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 place you're inAnd don't think I couldn't ever understandI tried my handJohn, honestly we'll never stop this train"

And in the end it’s hard to know whether it’s resignation, acknowledgement or embracing life for what it is...I’m going to go with the latter.

'Cause now I see, I'm never gonna stop this train.

Birthday presents can reveal a lot about one’s age, stage of life and current circumstances, and this couldn’t have been closer to the truth than on the occasion of my 53rd birthday.

I mean this year’s couldn’t have been much more self-explanatory:

* two chequered shirts

* working dungarees with lots of pockets

* steel-capped safety boots

* a two-pack of crowbars

I presume this means there’s stuff to do in the country.

We are, of course, all aware that Darth Vader knew what Luke Skywalker was getting for his birthday...because he felt his presents.

But I imagine even The Force wouldn’t have helped the bloke in the black cape work out what was in the long and extremely heavy silver-wrapped box.

In retrospect, the clue which Ana always writes on presents should have given it away, but in my defence I had just woken up.

“Where Murders of These Guys Would Go,” it said.

Adding “...for a drink” still didn’t help me. But it was a high bar.

“Of course,” I exclaimed, as I excitedly ripped off the wrapping paper, forgetting how I’d mentioned a while ago how much I wanted a new crowbar.

But why two? You might ask.

Well either – like dogs – you can never have too many crowbars...or Lidl were doing a special two-pack deal...and you can never have too many crowbars.

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Itching as I was to get outside with excellent foot protection, carrying loads of tools in my dungaree pockets to start crowbar-ing things, there was a birthday to celebrate.

And so the most colourful of the fabulous chequered shirts was the first present to be pressed into use...once I’d enjoyed my fabulous birthday sandwiches and coffee despite the kind offer of help from the dogs.

Lunch with Ana and neighbour Daniel – during one of his fleeting visits to the valley – was at our favourite clifftop restaurant O Sacas, and then it was back to the Clubhouse via the beach to continue the shelebrations.

A January birthday is always a nice lift after the post-holiday comedown, but the holidays extended themselves this year as we were lucky enough to have our daughter Oda and her boyfriend Derek staying with us from mid-December well into the New Year.

Derek also celebrated his birthday before Christmas – with a trip to the birthday beach and a stunning lunch of all his favourite things.

We’ve found an amazing straight-from-the-source oyster supplier (with thanks to our friend David) and our butcher considers bone marrow to be only suitable for dogs which makes it considerably cheaper than in Los Angeles!

Our present, and the theme of all his birthday sandwiches was “a night in a castle” and so we took the guys to the fantastic Estremoz Pousada in the Alentejo interior.

Derek really enjoyed the trip, the meals, the experience...and to be honest his baggage allowance wouldn’t really have stretched to one, let alone two crowbars, to take back to LA.

A few projects were ticked off at the farm including getting the raised beds built, but we also took advantage of a slow tourist month to take a couple of trips up to Lisbon to stay at our flat and enjoy some city time in our suitably named Estrela neighbourhood.

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The calçada cobbled pavements in that part of Lisbon feature various black star designs which inspired those arranged in a constellation on our limestone deck in the valley.

We’re just across the road from the landmark Basílica da Estrela and one of my favourite places in the world (and certainly one of Simon’s favourites) – the Jardim da Estrela.

Dating back to 1842, it was designed in the style of an English garden and has the most incredible mature trees: towering palms reminiscent of LA (with matching streetlights) and giant spirit trees like the one under which we were married in Bangkok.

Parrots play in the treetops, ducks do their thing in the ponds and a peacock puts in the occasional appearance.

Sculptures and statues, an old bandstand, lawns, coffee kiosks, a giant children’s playground and a maze of paths makes it the go-to place for workout classes, dog walks and happy hour.

Simon the ageing Hollywood dog is utterly in his element there, spending hours piecing together the pee-mail stories of every dog in Lisbon and becoming less obedient and more food obsessed with age.

Garfunkel is less keen. Order, security and control are what cattle dogs pine for – not the chaotic city sounds of trams and traffic.

There are only two safe spaces for Garfie in Lisbon: the flat, and the big red box of freedom which magically transported him here from his rural home at great speed...and can just as magically take him back.

Most trips to Lisbon involve the running repairs required from a short-term rental property and it’s a good yardstick to how far my tinkering skills have come.

I’m pleased to report replacing toilets, fitting ceiling lights, extensive drain cleaning and advanced shower replacement are now firmly in my repertoire.

The place is back to being tip top, so if you fancy a stay in Lisbon this is our listing on AirBnB...but if you have dates in mind please contact us directly.

But Lisboa was not all work – we discovered some wonderful new wine bars and restaurants and were honoured to attend our friend Mauro’s 40th birthday bash in the very cool Fábrica Braço de Prata.

It’s a former munitions factory in the artsy Marvila neighbourhood of Lisbon close to the river between the city centre and Parque de Naçoẽs.

It’s an area emerging from an old industrial zone to give vibes of San Francisco when artists could still afford to live there.

It was fantastic to wander the arts space and meet Mauro & Rita’s friends and family and – in the same week as my birthday – to be treated to my own cake.

I do hope Mauro wears that Alentejo farmer’s flat cap we brought him from the countryside!

Back in the valley, outdoor work has taken a bit of a backseat as a decent bout of rain has kept us indoors making sure all the animals are warm enough.

With the rain coming down and amid cloudy skies, there’s something strangely exciting about having a hot shower, knowing the water was heated at the same time as we were, courtesy of the roaring wood fire.

And there’s something even more exciting about watching a 200,000 litre pillow tank gradually filling up with rainwater to see us through the summer.

We’ve been staying in each new unit making sure it’s comfortable and properly equipped, casting a critical eye across everything, making tweaks and improvements as we go.

The list of DIY tasks never seems to get any shorter, but the slow calm approach to craftwork makes it more of a hobby than a chore.

Anyway, a higher priority right now is to make sure all those people who will love the calm, the serenity and the undiscovered beauty of this place will find us.

We’ve been plotting and scheming marketing strategies, planning retreat proposals, making lists of people to approach and getting down to the serious matter of website construction.

If running a retreat – or just attending one – is something you’d like to do with us, please get in touch. Art, writing, wine, wellness - send us a ping.

The next date for your diaries is Saturday March 1st when we’re planning our next wine weekend of tastings and dinner at Vale das Estrelas with a chance to stay over.

This time we’ve decided to celebrate the French grape that Portugal’s made its own: Alicante Bouschet.

We’ll be hosting a dinner with the amazing Mouchão winery and our great friend Baptiste Carrière Pradal who will be visiting the valley with his family wines.

The Alicante Bouschet grape has been a personal obsession for a little while now – and there’ll be a new podcast episode coming out very soon, so if you haven’t signed up for The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure, now’s your chance!

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.

Despite being retired from the foreign service, Lennart is heading to Ukraine next month for a temporary posting to bridge a departing and an arriving ambassador.

We talked about the friends we’d seen at a castle in Belgium, reminisced about the madness of Thai street protests back in the day and think we’ve done enough to lure them to The Valley of the Stars next year (once the pool is open!).

Next stop for us on our European excursion is Copenhagen, from where we’re flying back to the valley, the dogs, the cats, and with huge thanks to Misha and Daniel for keeping an eye on everything for us.

And finally...it was great to get so much feedback last week about Artificial Intelligence and the end of the world as we know it.

I may have mocked, but with thanks to Ola for this YouTube video and to The Economist for this timely essay, Yuval Noah Harari’s predictions are as convincing as they are scary.

“New AI tools have emerged that threaten the survival of human civilisation from an unexpected direction,” he says.

“AI has just hacked the operating system of human civilisation: language.”

I take it all back: be afraid, be very afraid.

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 Artificial Intelligence unit. They did a great chat recently you can see here.

Prof Ng also spoke to Meta’s Yann LeCun which is a great reality check against fearmongering.

Prof LeCun says we have a misplaced impression that human-level intelligence is closer because of things like Chat GPT: “It’s not going to happen tomorrow,” he says.

“We think that when something is fluent it is intelligent, but that’s not true. Those systems have a very superficial understanding of reality – they don’t have any experience of reality,” said Prof LeCun, talking about something called the Moravsky paradox.

“Things that appear sophisticated to us in terms of intelligence, like playing chess and writing text, turn out to be relatively simple for machines.”

Whereas things we take for granted, he argues, things a ten year old can do like clearing the dinner table and filling the dishwasher is still beyond any robot existing on the planet.

There’s a question I’m sure ChatGPT has been asked once or twice already: “Are you going to take over the world?”

And so I asked and this was the reply:

“No, I am an AI language model...and I don't have the capability or intention to take over the world.

“The responsibility for how AI is used lies with the individuals and organizations that utilize it. It's essential to ensure ethical and responsible use of AI technology for the benefit of society.”

Well, it would say that wouldn’t it?

Oh, and did I mention that we used an augmented reality app when choosing our bathroom tiles? Nowhere is safe...

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 spending three or four hours every day strimming the grass before the legal fire-protection deadline (tomorrow).

But it worked last year - both in helping to save us from the fire and shedding a few pounds - and stepping on the scales straight after a short-term weight loss session makes me feel better even if it means nothing once I’ve rehydrated!

6. Connectivity

It’s the one thing we got right early on and continue to enjoy – a line-of-sight radio link to a fibre optic cable that allows us to stream high-definition telly.

On the occasional time it fails us we ponder Starlink – a now affordable and accessible satellite internet system – but we just don’t like Elon Musk very much and don’t want to make him even richer.

Every expert has their way of doing things – based on experience, or what it is they’re trying to sell – but most assume an endless supply of energy which we don’t have.

If only there was some kind of off-grid consultant to bring it all together.

“You could do that,” said our old friend Tim Johnson who has been staying with us with wife Sian.

“You could run whole projects, find builders, project-manage, and create the perfect system for people who want to build off the grid.”

It’s bad enough trying to keep our heads above water on our own project, let alone someone else’s.

To be honest, the whole idea fills me with fear and panic...but never say never, eh?

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 times in 2023 – it will be in retrograde and one of them starts this week – from April 21st to May 14th.

“It can’t be that then,” I thought...until I was reliably informed the “pre-retrograde shadow” can happen from “as early as April 7th.”

So there we go. Not my fault. Blame the stars for the chaos in the Valley of the Stars. Perhaps I am getting somewhere after all.

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!

“Mais animais” as they say around here – more animals.

Shortly after sending out last week’s despatch, Val Kilmer’s kittens started appearing – we counted them one by one with an increasing sense of fear and foreboding, but thankfully she stopped at a conservative five.

Not content with being a teenage mum it was also clear that there wasn’t just one father, but three or four. Imagine.

And so a small bundle of different coloured blind fur rats have been squealing at us all week from the safety of a crib under the daybed constructed from Simon’s old globetrotting kennel, and occasionally from the bathroom towel cupboard when Val breaches the defences and makes it into the house with a kitten in her mouth.

The dogs have taken a bit of battering as Val understandably wanted to keep prying pooch noses from getting too close, so I guess they’re giving her a wide berth while their cuts heal.

Garfie – at 65kg – went very quickly from licking his lips in interest to nervously dashing past and outside before the strangely fast moving thing with pins in its paws pounced.

The plan has always been for Val to be more of an outdoor cat once the kittens are old enough and so we’ve been containing them to our indoor/outdoor room much to her frustration.

But I was still surprised to be woken up at 5am by one of the kittens mewling loudly having found itself alone and hungry buried amid the towels under the sink.

We had a chat with Val about parenting.

We intend to keep two of the kittens and believe we have homes for the other three, but the issue of names has now been raised...

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Old-school pet names are definitely out of fashion, but human names are undoubtedly in.

Val Kilmer was an odd choice for a cat – it was Oda’s choice after her frustration with our decision to go with Garfunkel for the big dog – but it was her call, and it does open up interesting opportunities for Val’s progeny.

It strikes me as obvious that each of them now needs to be named after one of the characters played by Val Kilmer during his long acting career.

I mean who doesn’t want a cat called Jim Morrison, Iceman (either Admiral Ice or Lieutenant, depending on whether we want to go original Top Gun or remake) or “Bruce Wayne aka Batcat”?

I’ll be honest I had to turn to The Google to help me out with the rest.

I had no idea Val Kilmer had played Elvis Presley, Mark Twain, the Voice of God and Moses...twice.

And while we can’t call two kittens both Moses and “honey, can you hear the “Voice of God anywhere?” would be an unusual thing to shout down the valley, I’m sure we could train one to thrust over to his litter tray when we do an “uh-huh-huh” Elvis impression, and hopefully make it back alive.

But nothing will be decided until their eyes are open.

Please let us know which ones get your vote, or if there are any other hidden corners of Val Kilmer’s filmography that may have passed me by.

Lionel was back in the valley this week with his chainsaw and an ambitious project – cutting up the fallen 150 year old oak tree in a way which might allow us to turn it into something useful like a table, a bench or a bar...or ideally all three.

One of our two big and beautiful cork oaks fell when the fire got into its roots and smouldered away for a week.

It wouldn’t have burned if it had been healthy, so we approached the exercise expecting a rotten trunk, a load of firewood and a vague hope of recovering some useable sections.

Working quickly, the sad silhouette of a slumped, grand old tree was soon gone and the logs were tractored over to a spot on the hill for me to calculate the planking possibilities and get to work with an axe on the rest.

Constantly looking for new and exciting outdoor gym opportunities I ordered a book recommended by Dom last week and settled into some practical Scandinavian advice for wood chopping.

“Norwegian Wood” is an unusual subject for a best-seller (it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Scandinavia...and beyond), but to me it’s an extremely helpful and practical manual for wood stacking, chopping, chain sawing and storing.

And it’s always nice to have a pre-packaged, pocket-sized analogue rabbit hole to disappear down in a quiet moment.

Anyone who thinks chopping wood is as easy as it looks in the movies would no doubt be as frustrated as I was, buying an axe and then successfully chopping precisely nothing except a few small chips off an old block for all that effort.

And anyone who ordered the book on Amazon expecting Murakami’s weird novel of the same name might be marginally more confused than if they’d received what they were expecting.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Murakami but his parallel worlds through the walls of a well have become less fascinating since we discovered a deep well on the opposite hill.

We’ve moved on to Operation Hoover Dam this week in terms of outdoor projects to put new blisters on top of our olive grove-planting old blisters.

Ana and I took to the clay dam with medieval throwing spikes and shovels to prepare some holes for the fig trees, nespras (lowquat or Japanese plum), marmelos (quince) and a couple of soon to be acquired avocado trees.

All the bulldozing we did last year to create a new terrace was great, but the dam was mostly fortified with clay and so it takes a lot longer for things to seed.

It’s still somewhat bare despite our best efforts with a few sacks of oats – hence Daniel’s description of it as looking like the Hoover Dam from his house.

Not having an insanely hard-working volunteer like Dom here to encourage us to set a landscaping schedule means we’ve not been as motivated, and I really must prune the table grapes this week (before the full moon, apparently).

But Ana’s brother Erik is heading our way next week and is renowned for his excellently green fingers...so there’s hope.

The temperatures here certainly seem to be drifting up towards proper Spring, despite a short and surprising hail storm and we managed a couple of beach visits with our guest and friend Aislinn Laing, Hugo and their three boys from Madrid.

Aislinn is the bureau chief for Reuters for Spain and Portugal and so they set off on a cross-country road trip to reach us with a stop on the route each way to explore our wild coast.

We didn’t manage much more than a paddle, but I’m happy to report the birthday beach is as beautiful as ever, the meat from the local butcher is as good as always, and a wine taste off between a Spanish Tempranillo blend and Portuguese Aragonez (the same grape) leaned in Portugal’s favour (although it was close)!

If you’re interested in wine do sign up for The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure - I’ve just written a new story called Hard Graft on how America saved Europe’s wine and there’s more to come this week on three new and unusual grapes.

We start the week with a huge stack of new quotes from our builder to decipher, with huge congratulations to daughter Oda in LA on the occasion of her 27th birthday and to boyfriend Derek Day and Classless Act for making it to the pages of Forbes...and with an amazing new single.

Got to go...Val Kilmer’s making a rush for the door again. “NO! Leave the kittens there Val! We’ve talked about this…”

Januaries here in Portugal are more palatable than most northern hemisphere winters.

For one, I never do the whole Dry January thing because it’s my birthday month, and while we do need more rain, I love the clear chilly mornings which open up into beautiful sunny blue skies.

The low arcing winter sun strikes our south facing glass and pours heat into our house – something it doesn’t do in the higher-in-the-sky warmer summer months.

And the winter sun also brings enough heat for beach walks in shorts, ocean dips and plenty of power to keep the heat pumps running.

Cold air coming in off the ocean blows over our hill and sinks into the valley keeping our temperatures higher and providing spectacular sunrise views over seas of mist below which in the mornings slowly burn off and melt away.

Unusually we saw a little frost last week, but the new villa we’ve been trying out for ourselves has remained toasty thanks to the underfloor heating.

Of course as I put the finishing touches to this despatch the rain has finally arrived and we’re monitoring water collection pumps and power systems and getting our energy saving levels right.

Sun or storm, it’s a great chance to put on the fire get into the reading and research and to plan for success in this first year of being open for business.

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Every new year brings plenty of predictions of tourist trends for the year ahead – and so I’ve been deep-diving into some of the articles, reports and industry advisories to learn about Bleisure, Calmcations, PTO hacking and the “new dawn for oenotourism.”

It’s a lot to unpack, but at least one or two of every “top trends” list is exactly what we’re creating, so I thought it was worth sharing:

* I got most excited about the BBC’s “Seven travel trends that will shape 2025” article which listed Noctourism, Calmcations and “Off-the-beaten-track goes mainstream” at numbers one, two and five respectively.

* In terms of tourism for nighttime, our skies are really dark and usually clear. The reason we called our place “The Valley of the Stars” was because of that first night we spent at our new home when we sat outside with a glass of wine and stared up, gobsmacked, at the Milky Way soaring across the sky above us. We’re a bit too far south to offer the northern lights, despite this coming year’s peak of solar activity, but I’ll be working on my astronomy knowledge over the winter months for another string to the storytelling bow and we’ll be investing in a telescope or two for a closer look.

* Calmcations “focused on creating a sense of tranquillity” are very much our bag, and I can understand why, after this WHO noise report quoted in the article revealed that 20% of Europeans live in unhealthily noisy places. The quiet calm in our valley is something our friends always love – relaxing time to take in the nature – a silence only interrupted by frogs, owls, the eagle that lives over the hill and occasionally the extended playlist of the Nightingale. With yoga and massage to suit some visitors and wine tastings to calm others, this style of tourism is front and centre of what we’ll be doing at Vale das Estrelas. We’ll be offering little retreats based around painting, pottery, wine, writing and hiking....that kind of thing.

* As for “Off-the-beaten-track goes mainstream” I’m happy to report our off-grid track is firmly in the un-beaten category and our area is home to the last truly wild and undiscovered coast in Europe. We face the hills and valleys, but there’s an endless supply of rugged wild beaches and coves to explore just 15 minutes from the lodge.

* According to The Portugal News there are More Brits heading to Portugal and why wouldn’t they? The UK was the largest source of flights to and from Portugal from January to November last year and the number of British travellers increased more than any other nation. Quoting a Statistics Portugal report, the article explained that more people in general are heading to Portugal. It was apparently a record year for visitors, and November 2024 saw a 6.2% increase in passenger numbers year on year. Research Nester’s Global Tourism Industry Market Overview reports Ryanair will have 5.2 million affordable seats to Portugal available as part of its summer 2025 schedule.

* And even more are coming – the IPDT Tourism Barometer predicts 33 million tourists will visit Portugal this year – up from 30 million in 2023 (the last year with figures). According to their survey of professionals in Portugal’s tourism sector, they highlight “a focus on sustainability.” Reinforcing the “Off-the-beaten-track goes mainstream” thing, they predict 2025 will be about “demystifying the perception of overtourism.” The IPDT believes “dispersing visitor influxes from overcrowded areas to less-explored regions is key to maintaining balance and reducing tensions in popular destinations.” So leave the city and come and see us in the country!

* And it’s not just about holidays any more – a BBC article about people staying away for longer talks about “blended travel trips that include both work and leisure, which are occasionally referred to by the mush-mouth portmanteau of ‘Bleisure’". So now you know. That’s also where I discovered the concept of PTO hacking (Paid Time Off) which was apparently a big TikTok thing – the idea of combining national holidays with paid leave to get longer breaks. Quoting a Skirft Research report there’s apparently a “shift to spending on experiences over things” and it could be "the year of long getaways." With the continuing popularity of remote working and Portugal’s Digital Nomad Visas we’re hoping to lure some people to WFV (Work from the Valley) and stay with us through the winter. It’s why we put in underfloor heating.

* That fits in with record November numbers seeing the tourist season extending deeper into Autumn and people travelling earlier in the year. “Spring is the new summer,” according to Zicasso’s luxury travel report, which says March to May is becoming increasingly popular for holidays and that Portugal is now the sixth most popular place to visit in the world – up from eighth for the last couple of years. There’s still a broad interest in “food, culture, wine, wildlife and adventure.” And younger travellers are showing more interest in culture and history. Repeat travellers are interested in off the beaten track tourism and there’s “an increase in requests for eco-friendly and sustainable luxury options.” Marvellous.

* The most interesting thing Conde Naste Traveller announced from our perspective was “a new dawn for oenotourism” as “curiosity around lesser-known and re-emerging wine destinations is growing.” The Alentejo wine region is becoming increasingly popular, but it’s crazy hot inland where most of the wineries are! By bringing their stories and their wines for tastings at the cooler coast we hope to take advantage of the interest in 250 indigenous wine grapes and put vinho at the centre of our tourism.

* The Portugal Portfolio puts the Rise of Sustainable Travel in first place, both with the demand for “eco-friendly experiences” such as eco-lodges and Community-Focussed Tourism. “Tourists in 2025 won’t just be looking for breathtaking views; they’ll want responsible ways to enjoy them,” the property management company says. They emphasise Off the beaten path exploration: “Travellers are seeking lesser-known spots, avoiding tourist-crowded hubs. This desire to discover “hidden gems” will shape new...local tourism economies.” And on ‘Bleisure’: “Digital nomads are no longer confined to coffee shops in major cities; they’re branching out to smaller, scenic locales offering reliable internet, cultural richness, and a stable environment.”

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* And as a final thought...less about tourism and more about a longer term move...the Financial Times featured a big report recently on “Creating new utopias in Portugal.” Sadly it’s behind their firewall, but all their examples were in Alentejo and they quoted Claus Sendlinger, founder of Design Hotels saying “Portugal has become the new California,” and a “fertile ground for experimental developments.” We’re certainly that! Portugal Portfolio has a similar take: Portugal’s New Utopias: Sustainable Communities is about environments that “blend modern comforts with eco-friendly practices.”

So my take-away from all this is that we’re doing something right. Eco-luxe, off-the beaten track, place for Calmcations, Noctourism and the “mush-mouth portmanteau of ‘Bleisure’". What a great line, I do love the BBC.

“So you’re retired?” someone asked me recently.

We’ve given up our jobs, moved to the countryside, don’t have any income but are spending lots of money building things, so I suppose we could give that impression.

My alternative answer to “no of course not” is: “yes, in the sense that we get tired, we recover, and then get tired again...or re-tired you might say.”

Often it’s a 5am start and a 10pm finish, juggling finances, planning interiors, editing podcast audio, studying for wine qualifications and Ana’s driving license, or fretting about whether we will succeed...none of which sounds like my idea of retirement.

In truth, we came here to launch our second careers – to move on from the nomadic years when Ana was a Swedish diplomat and I was a foreign correspondent and we lived all over the world a few years at a time.

There are parallels: the level of diplomacy required to get things done here should not be underestimated.

Maintaining the ability to communicate with an energy certificate engineer who still hasn’t delivered a vital document after first coming to survey the buildings last April...without screaming at him...is not straightforward.

And a lot of what we’re doing is – and will be – based around storytelling.

But at the core of it is throwing all our savings in with a whacking great loan courtesy of Portugal’s tourism authority to try and build a fancy guest lodge with a marvellous view.

Regular readers will have seen our scraggy patch of eucalyptus forest cut down and dug out, and watched our new buildings slowly rise from the roots.

We’ve been battling to stay on budget despite inflation, but at least so far appear to be on track and this week have been getting down into the nitty gritty of phase two.

Phase one was everything up to but not including the windows, and we agreed a fixed price for that eight months ago.

Phase two is everything else up to a finished villa, row of suites and main building with a pool, a little restaurant and the hope of knowing enough about Portuguese wine by next Spring to introduce guests to a taste of Alentejo.

So we’ve been hurling ourselves headlong into spreadsheets, checking what we planned for, what we’ve added since and what we’ve taken away and what we need to create the perfect spot.

The various orçamento quotes are all downloaded through Google Translate or DeepL to unveil what’s included in the price (and what’s not), and we’ve been digging down into the detail of how it’s all going to look.

Of course we’ve not done anything like this before – never built anything, especially in a remote part of rural Portugal, nor made so many expensive decisions on things we can only imagine.

We’ve lost track of all the site meetings, factory visits and supplier discussions we’ve had about the various solutions and are constantly thankful to our engineer José Correia for helping bridge the gap between us and our septuagenarian builder.

The research rumbles on, but decisions have to be made:

* Should the windows be wood, PVC or aluminium?

* Can we afford polished concrete floors throughout?

* Which heat pump is best for the underfloor heating?

* Do we go with the carpenter or IKEA for the kitchen cabinets?

* Do we install a solar pump or a regular pump for the new borehole?

* And where on earth do we buy 600m of three phase electrical cable?

Those are just today’s questions, and only the first one seems to have been answered so far: PVC windows seem best, given the intense 300 days of sun baking down on the south-facing buildings every year.

Everyone has an opinion, and they are usually different, but every bit of advice helps us move towards a decision which might be wrong, but at least we own it...and have thought about it.

The colourful do-to list of our post-it note wall remains – each one its own world of work and decision making.

But a few have already been removed and triumphantly scrunched into the fire and there has been some structural rearrangement.

And with the arrival of a new Cat (Catarina, a volunteer who spent a few days with us), we started to focus in on a few planting things.

As a trained agronomist, Cat helped us make some plans, scatter some land-improving oats and peg out an olive orchard for 42 trees.

The temperature has dropped down to just two or three degrees Celsius overnight, so we’re waiting before putting the saplings in, but the layout looks good and the irrigation plan should work...in case we don’t get much more rain this year.

The lake will take a metre or more before it overflows, so although we’re delighted with what we’ve got, we would still love a little more...in case there are any Rain Gods reading.

Sadly Cat couldn’t stay longer, but we will soon have more cats arriving in the form of Val Kilmer’s kittens...which should be due any day now.

Having a volunteer stay with us who knew so much about how to do stuff was brilliant and we are still in the market for anyone with experience in landscaping and building to give us a hand.

Right now we need some muscle as we’re going to be doing a lot of digging and rock moving to get those trees planted. Please apply here...and forward this to anyone you know who might be interested in helping us out before March.

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One of the differences between my old life and this new one is the lack of deadlines...I love a good deadline as it gives me that extra shove.

A dinner invitation and movie screening request from the local hunting club provided the incentive to prioritise a lower order post-it note and finally edit the video I filmed of their hunt.

I couldn’t believe it’s been almost a year since the Cow King took us to watch the ancient montaria style of hunting with dogs driving wild boar (wild boar) out of the undergrowth and into the sights of waiting associação de caça (hunting club) members.

You can read about that adventure here, but you can also watch the video...although if you’re not a fan of wild boar (wild boar) butchery, maybe give it a miss?

And thanks to another deadline I also did a turn on the ABC Australia radio show Late Night Live with the legendary broadcaster Phillip Adams.

The subject was all things cork and so I had to be up nice and early (Portugal time) to make sure I got my facts right.

It was my 51st birthday this week, and once again my wonderful wife nailed it with a surprise trip to Sagres and a picnic on the southwestern tip of mainland Europe at Cabo de San Vincente (Cape St Vincent) – the edge of the world – while Cat looked after the dogs.

Amazing sandwiches for lunch, a great beer on Sagres beach with our friends Richard & Pauline and dinner at an American/Mexican taco restaurant after a champagne sunset made for a wonderful day and stay in a clifftop pousada.

Ana introduced the idea of a “Birthday Boxing Day” and so we slowly meandered our way back up the coast stopping for Sunday lunch at one of our favourites: O Sacas.

We had a lovely weekend off...I guess that’s the kind of thing one does more often when one is retired (and not just tired, again).

But while everything we’re doing is tough and challenging and we juggle the post-it notes in a new order of importance, we must remember to remind ourselves how fun and adventurous it is to be working on our crazy project...in this beautiful part of the world.

This year we decided to spend the ‘New Year, New Start’ gym membership money on post-it notes.

The white board just wasn’t big enough for what we aimed to achieve on January 3rd when we felt compelled to get a grip on the chaos of our projects our business and our lives in general.

Inspired by Ana’s experience of work planning retreats she led our inaugural annual planning meeting with the support of the sticky paper colours yellow, pink, green and blue.

And in the pursuit of strict structure and prioritisation we almost ran out of yellow.

Everything was on the table...and then stuck on the windows...and then transferred into a spreadsheet as we divvied it all up and got a head start on 2023.

Things have been...getting away from us...and after putting back on all the weight I’d lost last year with my Springtime strimming frenzy, we had everything from pulling up estevas (rock rose) and moving rocks to getting Ana’s driving license and designing interiors.

This is the year of action, after all.

Last year we took a different approach, rejecting the whole wholesome approach and doubling down when we #TookBackJanuary with Mr Piggywig’s parade, and that was fun.

But with an F-ing dishwasher problem still to solve, a pump to buy for our disappointing and expensive new hole, and measuring how many hundred metres of three phase, armoured electrical cable we need (and where we can buy it cheap), there’s no time for pig roasting.

In my first step towards a clean-living, booze-light January I made sure the rest of the Christmas cake was eaten as soon as possible and all the chocolates polished off so I could start cutting back without any distractions.

Bread is out, intermittent fasting and aggressive dog walking is in.

We need to be in tip-top shape for the largest expansion of the valley family so far: it turns out Val Kilmer is pregnant.

For those a blogpost or two behind and confused by this unexpected and unique Hollywood update, Val Kilmer is the Oda-named cat we rescued from a restaurant clifftop, and the vet says we’ve got less than two weeks before anything from two to six kittens are delivered.

No wonder she’s been hungry.

Valkyrie Killmouse (to give her full name) has now successfully imposed herself on Simon & Garfunkel and is turning into a wonderfully sweet indoor/outdoor household cat..let’s see how she does as a teenage mum as she can’t be more than a year old.

The post-it notes naturally arranged themselves into sections like ‘building project’, landscaping, guesthouse improvements...that kind of thing...and then were ordered by Quarter (1-4) and Priority (1-3).

Top of the list, beyond the usual post-holiday catch-up admin, was planting trees to make use of the continuing and very welcome rain and getting Ana’s driving license sorted.

Now that has been a drama: one small yellow post-it note just doesn’t seem enough for the weight of the task in hand.

Ana’s had a driving license for ten years and other than needing a few lessons in non-automatic cars (courtesy of learning to drive in LA) is good to go.

Although her US license expired a while back, her Kenyan license and international permit from our last posting meant we didn’t foresee any problem.

But...it seems Kenya didn’t sign the right UN treaty in the 1960s (I don’t know, maybe they were too busy getting independence or something) and so Portugal still doesn’t recognise a Kenyan licence and so the best option is to take a new test here. How hard could it be?

It turns out 28 theory classes and 32 driving lessons are obligatory preparation for a test – even for those who can already drive – and although the package costs less than in most other European countries, that’s a lot of time and effort.

And Portugal’s highway code book is a monstrous document of amateur psychology, sweeping generalisations about how much “more aggressive” male drivers are than women, and a lot of ambiguity.

Ana’s been caning it on the studies and we’ll be taking Siouxsie the Suzuki out for some clutch practice, so hopefully we’ll soon be up in Lisbon for some proper practical lessons and a shorter waiting list for a test than down here in the country.

Under “Outdoor Projects” Q1, priority 1 was “order trees for Spring” and “seed terrace” and so we began the search for a source.

A great Facebook group tip-off pointed us towards a plant nursery up in Monchique called Viveiros Dinis and so we headed for the hills with our neighbour Daniel who’s always on the lookout for new plants.

Linking up with Swiss pals Niels and the particularly green-fingered Sybille, we ticked off the vegetables before moving on to a meat main course at Dona Paula’s wild boar (wild boar) restaurant and dropped by a fabulously crazy sculpture garden for dessert.

We learned a lot about the different types of local olives (the best for eating, the best for making oil), were told we needed permission to plant cork oak and pine nuts from the town hall, and were kept well away from citrus saplings curiously sealed off in double plastic tunnels.

It turns out there’s a major threat to Iberian citrus trees, which if established could wipe out Portugal and Spain’s orchards in just 15 years...that’s a lot of lost oranges.

This week’s rabbit hole is Huanglongbing disease (HLB) – also known as ‘Citrus Greening’ and caused by Candidatus liberibacter – a bacterium spread by insects.

The guilty sap-sucking psyllid is a little blighter called Trioza erytreae and it’s been spreading down the Portuguese coast for the last ten years.

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We’re lucky the Citrus Greening bacteria hasn’t followed it yet, but the Life for Citrus programme fears it’s only a matter of time.

“The disease has no known cure and the current means of control...[has] a high economic and environmental cost that is incompatible with European production systems,” the EU-funded body warns.

Presumably meaning you have to rip them all out and it explains why some fields of oranges near the coast from here have gone un-harvested and we heard are destined for destruction.

Daniel went plant-crazy as usual, Niels & Sybille chose four types of apricot tree and we picked up a few fast-growing melaleuca to help private-ise our guesthouse while we plot, scheme, order and return with the trailer this week or next to get planting!

I’d love to linger longer and bore you with the minutes of our latest building meeting, and the findings of our PVC factory day out, but there’s post-it notes to tear through, tick off, scrunch up and use to start the fire.

But I definitely think we’re going to need a lot more yellow ones.

On New Year’s Eve 2022, the last despatch of the year looks back at the challenges we’ve faced in a tough but fun year, and what we hope to achieve in 2023.

Thanks for listening - and for following the blog and/or the podcast - please share it with a few friends to help broaden our support community that’s helping us through our big new adventure.

Audio versions of next year’s despatches will all appear on the podcast feed, but do check out the pictures and the links on the website!

Don’t forget to check out the wine blog as well…there’s already a load of tales from the winelands of Alentejo, and a lot more in my notebook and audio recorder ready to burst into action in 2023!

Finally digging for water in December 2022 - and getting a lot more from the sky than the ground (and a lot more cheaply)…but them’s the breaks.

TRANSCRIPT…

It was months ago when Twitching Justino’s divining rods first dipped towards the ground and two crossed sticks X-marked the spot where he literally felt we would have the best hope of finding water.

As I wrote in August: “the only control you have over a high-stakes gamble is which good luck charm to choose,” and we’d chosen him for a job which would cost thousands of euros.

After weeks of delays and of broken machinery, Justino’s rig finally rocked up in the valley with three boreholes to dig: one for our friend David, one for neighbour Daniel and one for us.

It was proper pioneer wild-west stuff, and his guys weren’t messing around.

The rumble of the massive diesel generator clocked them in each morning and the sudden silence checked them out each night, as the diamond-tipped drill bit gradually cut its way through our land three metres at a time.

That was the length of each drill section pulled from the truck and hauled vertical when the time was right and then added to the ever deepening hole.

Each time the drilling paused, a soil sample was taken and laid out in order to build up a profile of our geology.

We would occasionally wander up to watch, willing water up to the surface, but then leave a little disappointed that it hadn’t already started spouting H2O like an oil strike in a movie.

There was nothing to do but wait and hope that somewhere down there – between 150 and 250m – there’d be something worth digging for at €50 a metre.

The borehole investment is about future-proofing our tourism project for the decades to come, and as you’ll know we were becoming increasingly worried about water throughout the long dry summer.

But December’s rainfall has been breaking records – not just in Lisbon – and has returned in a volume not seen for 40 years.

Last year we were enjoying the beach and the sunshine at this time, but then we suffered with a shamefully low lake come the Spring.

But now the lake is already higher than we have ever seen it. Increasing the capacity and cutting swales in the hillside to extend its catchment area all seems to have worked (thanks Carlos!).

There’s been enough rain to soak the ground, so all the excess now freely flows into the dam with waterfalls forming and even a spring which trickles for days after a downpour.

But it’s muito complicado according to Senhor Manuel our builder, whose guys have been kept away by the weather: tiling one roof and finishing the form wood on the other between storms ahead of a concrete truck which can’t deliver because it’s still too wet.

Work is finished now for the holidays, and while we wish for more rain we also don’t want the work to fall too far behind schedule.

But we have a little work on our hands introducing the latest addition to the family – an abandoned young cat who we’ve adopted to help with our mouse issue.

It wasn’t a mouse problem as such – we have an indoor/outdoor room and it was a little awkward catching the guy that had somehow made it into our bedroom in the middle of the night, and given the lack of mousetraps here a cat seems a good solution.

I would have thought an old-school snapping trap would have been a humane option but none of the shops here sell them, leaving only poisons and something I’d never previously encountered: rat glue.

This terrible stuff seems much more like torture – sticking them to a bit of cardboard to die slowly if they’re not quickly dealt with on capture...we don’t want to be doing that.

Hence the idea of getting a cat – a kitten probably, given that Simon & Garfunkel would be more likely to accept a small furry ball than a clawing, hissing, growling cat.

But this wasn’t to be: it’s not kitten season for a couple of months, and while visiting one of our favourite clifftop restaurants to ask about their beautiful cats (to line ourselves up for a future kitten) they reported an abandoned youngster who wasn’t getting on with the locals.

Next thing we had a cat in the car and were buying a litter box – she’s probably only nine months old but friendly and used to people...and it was Oda’s turn to name her.

Having scoffed at our decision (without consultation) to call the big dog Garfunkel, Oda promptly settled on “Val Kilmer” – not our immediate first choice.

But having thought it through, we decided “Valkyrie Kill-Mouse” was an acceptable option, given it could be suitably abbreviated.

Simon picked up a nose battering on day one and is currently trying to reimpose some kind of control (good luck with that)...and Garfie is showing perhaps a little too much interest.

Let’s see how things go over Christmas...

Back to the borehole digging and Justino and the gang cut through schists until they hit bedrock at 205m – deeper than we expected – and sadly they didn’t find the magic underground reservoir we’d been dreaming about.

He estimates it will provide about 5,000 litres a day...not a huge amount, but along with our other water sources plenty for the 20 or so people we’d expect at full capacity when the lodge is open.

But we still have to install an underground pump, get power down to it and buy pipes to transport the new water to the current tanks...and until we do that we won’t have the chance to test the water quality.

Drinking water would be amazing, mineral-salt water like our current supply would be second best, but the worst of all worlds would be water that’s heavy in iron...that would require two different filtration systems that don’t come cheap.

It was disappointing – it’s a big chunk of change for not a huge return – but we always knew it would be a gamble...and we chose our lucky charm.

Daniel got a little less than us, David got a little more, but this is a dry area and we should be glad for what we have…and long may it keep on flowing.

It’s good to be at home and together over the holidays after Ana’s dad sadly passed away a week ago aged only 75.

We are proudly remembering José Manuel Valadas Revez, a man who had a huge impact during his lifetime.

He was a revolutionary student leader opposing Salazar in Portugal in the late 1960s and early 70s, and considered such a threat by the dictatorship regime that he had to flee and continue his operations with fellow courageous revolutionaries under political asylum in Sweden.

After the carnation revolution in 1974 he returned to Portugal, and worked as a civil servant in many capacities, greatly contributing to the rise of the new nation and notably its education system.

He held a special place in his heart for East Timor where he lived and worked for many years.

Zé was a beloved husband, father, brother and grandfather. He was also a popular friend and colleague. He is greatly missed.

Rest in Peace Zé. Our thoughts are with Filomena and Ana’s sisters Rita and Maria João and his sister Ana-Maria.