Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal

I’ve recently realised we don’t live like real people. When real people have a problem they call someone: a workman, an expert, a master technician, Ghostbusters, or whoever it might be - and they come with some tools and they solve it. It costs some money and takes some time to arrange, but it works. They know what they are doing, and grumbles aside, they get things working again and real life go...

Sometimes we thought it would never happen, but four years after moving to Portugal full time and two years after construction work started on our retrospectively but objectively crazy off-grid eco-luxe lodge project we are finally ready to open. The cut-down-and-dug-out eucalyptus forest where our new buildings now stand is a distant memory, the views are as stunning as the first day we found thi...

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 “enoug...

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 gro...

“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 Commissio...

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...

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 st...

“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...

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...

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...

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 w...

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 a...

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 dro...

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 ta...

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 d...

“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 th...

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...

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, land...

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...

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 in...

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 t...

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....

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 finishe...

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 P...

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 Track...