Time To Go Home

There was a time, before Bastard Cancer reared his ugly head, that we gave serious consideration to relocating to Portugal on a permanent basis. There are many potential advantages to that, I was probably more keen on the idea than the Blonde, but when BC came along in 2015 our minds were made up for us, as despite all its shortcomings, I’d rather be at home in England being treated for a serious illness by the NHS than anywhere else in the world.

 

We’re booked to fly home on Monday, but the temptation to stay in Portugal is strong, and I can fully understand why so many Brits and other nationalities choose to relocate here. It’s a good life, and without doubt one of the safest countries in Europe.

 

So, apart from my next round of JJ cancer treatment that is scheduled for next Wednesday, what awaits us on our return?

 

A useless and totally ineffective government with an unelected PM that are clueless when it comes to the issues that concern ordinary people.

Uncontrolled mass illegal immigration.

Young fit male refugees from war torn France being housed in 4* hotels while our homeless ex-servicemen are forced to sleep on the streets.

A pointless and vastly expensive Net Zero mandate and climate hysteria.

Wokery everywhere

The scum media, particularly the laughably biased BBC.

A police force that stands aside to let all kinds of lunatics, fanatics and terrorist supporters take over the streets but come down on you like a ton of bricks if you use hurty words on social media or do 25mph in a 20 zone.

Jeremy Vine.

Jeremy Hunt.

ULEZ, which has been introduced to save the lives and lungs of our children, unless you pay a tax of £12.50 a day, in which case you can kill as many as you like.

HS2, a train link between Birmingham and somewhere NW of London that no one will use and costs many many corrupt £Billions.

Roads full of potholes.

The management of NHS who couldn’t organise a pissup in a brewery and think £150Billion p/a isn’t enough, taking on countless diversity and equal opportunities directors and managers while almost 8 million people are on a waiting list for treatment.

Beer costing £7 a pint.

Thirty-six different types of gender (at the last count).

Crap weather.

 

I could go on all day; the list is almost endless. But I really can’t stay here in Portugal after what I saw yesterday. You’ll see what I mean in the attached photo. What was this bloke actually thinking when he pitched up at my local golf course Vale de Pinta dressed like that? I can almost forgive the collarless shirt and the black socks (he’s clearly foreign after all) but what are those bloody trousers all about? I don’t know the correct name, are they pedal pushers, cargo pants, three quarters, or did they simply have any argument with his shoes?

 

Whatever they are, now that I have started to take my first tentative steps back on to the fairways, I refuse to share the course with anyone attired in such a manner. Old Tom Morris will be turning in his grave. Taxi for Faro Airport please.

Força Portugal

Back in the pioneering days of Formula Freight Ltd, the Blonde and I would regularly holiday in Southern Spain. It allowed us to combine a few days of sun, sea and Sangria with an opportunity to meet clients that were based in that area, and moreover spend time with our agents and customers in Gibraltar. We were one of the few companies to offer a direct truck service between London and Gib; it was quite a niche market but a lucrative one in which I forged long-standing friendships that have lasted to this day.

 

However one day I had to visit a customer in Estepona that was involved in the personal and household effects market. We never did much in the removals sector, it’s normally too much trouble than it’s worth and you end up with a warehouse full of ironing boards. Anyway, just as I arrived to see them our truck pulled up. They had to offload a few cubic metres of flat packed furniture before the truck continued on to Gibraltar. In those days the border between Spain and Gib closed at 2pm so the lorry was on a strict deadline and had to be offloaded quickly. Unfortunately all the Spanish warehouse staff had wandered off for an extended coffee break or early siesta and were nowhere to be seen. There was only one way the truck was going to get to Gib before the border closed – I jumped up on the lorry and unloaded it myself.

 

I’m not exaggerating when I say the temperature inside the truck was in excess of 50 degrees; I was sweating like Stevie Wonder in a darts final, no wonder Miguel and his mates had buggered off. The Blonde watched me struggling to get the boxes off and with all the sincerity she could muster called up to me and said “What the **** are you doing? We are supposed to be on holiday!”

 

She was right. I was spending too much of our precious holiday time with customers and agents, so the next year we decided to go to Portugal instead. Ironically we had much more business to and from Portugal than Spain, but everything was concentrated around the industrial north and Porto in particular; there was no commercial business in the southern Algarve region, which is where we headed.

 

It was then that the love affair with Portugal began. I’d been to the Algarve a couple of times but the Blonde never had. We adored it and immediately felt at home. That affection for Portugal still remains. We love everything about the place. We love the food, the wine, the climate, the golf, the beaches, the scenery and especially the people, who are probably the friendliest in Europe. Or at least they are till they get behind the wheel of a car, when they become utter psychopaths.

 

We holidayed in Portugal regularly after that and toyed with the idea of buying a place of of own. Finally, in 2010, that dream became a reality and we became the proud owners of our house near Carvoeiro.

 

I’m writing this missive from our patio at the house. It’s a pleasantly warm day, I might fire up the BBQ later and I’m planning to have my first game of golf (in shorts) in nearly three months in a couple of days’ time. But we have come to a decision. For reasons that many of you are fully aware of, particularly my health issues and the consequential very limited use of the house in the recent past, we have today instructed agents to put the house on the market. It’s not a decision we have taken lightly, but feel the time is now right. Hopefully we will still visit Portugal once the house is sold and our love for the country and its people will never diminish, but it’s time to close that chapter, which is sad but we’ll always treasure the memories of the great times and enormous fun we’ve had here over the last thirteen or so years. Força Portugal.

First Class? Third World More Like

My old dad was a costermonger by trade, but as he was a very unlucky gambler he was forced to hand over the family business to his brother and sister when he could no longer pay for his stock at Covent Garden. He got a job as a lorry driver for Idris, a soft drinks company – the pay wasn’t very good but we were never short of lemonade or cream soda when my dad’s round took him anywhere near our house.

 

But after a while he managed to get a much better job, with better pay and conditions, at the Post Office (as the Royal Mail was known back then). He still drove a truck, but it was primarily between the main sorting office at Mount Pleasant and the various London rail termini. It was night work, but he was dead chuffed, and took great pride in being part of the team.

 

One night there was an attempted armed robbery on his truck at the depot and dad received an award for his part in thwarting it. I think all he did was lock himself in his cab, set the alarm and hide under the dashboard, but as a demonstration of gratitude we were invited to the GPO Tower to see dad receive an award, probably a fiver in Premium Bonds, from Ted Short who was Postmaster General at the time. That’s my old fella in the photo, with mum in a two-piece she made herself, along with a specky geek who was just about to have his first day at Colfe’s Grammar School. I did eventually grow into the jacket.

 

It’s hard to believe, kids, but back in the 1960’s you could post a first class letter anywhere in the UK and be absolutely confident that it would be delivered to its destination by 0800 the next day. Remember this was before automation, computerised systems and AI. And if for any reason it didn’t arrive. it would be in the second post which arrived about lunchtime.

 

Compare and contrast that with the absolute shitshow of a service we get from Royal Mail nowadays. Where we live, near the centre of Brighton, we are lucky if we get one delivery of post per week, let alone day. The “service” is absolute crap, other local neighbourhoods wait as long as a month for a delivery, and the only way to get hold of urgent legal documents, theatre tickets and hospital appointment letters is to queue in the pouring rain at the main sorting office where they graciously open up to the public for four hours per day so you can collect items that have already cost a fortune in postage. I swear there are tribes of Amazonian Indians, deep in the rainforest, that have never seen a white face in their lives, who get a better post service than we do in Brighton. It’s pathetic.

 

Our old postie, Wendy, the thespian with the cropped hair, bovver boots and a body like a bag of spanners, has clearly moved on to pastures new, and been replaced by a proper soapy-looking long-haired lazy twat who every now and again will begrudgingly push his little trolley around our local streets. But on those rare occasions that he is seen, he will confusingly seem to miss out our apartment block. This really incensed the Blonde who went down to have a word. What she got in reply was a rude lecture from him about Covid, the Tory Government, staff shortages and all the other bullshit excuses that all public service organisations spew out nowadays. But the soapy twat didn’t realise quite who he was taking on. The Blonde was having none of it and gave the lazy twat bother barrels in reply…

She clearly got through to him. The very next day we actually did get a delivery, and incredibly the day after that too. That was nine days ago though, and we have had nothing since. He’s probably gone off sick with a bad back or stress or “long Covid.”

 

First Class mail? Third World more like.

Still Punching

Never a week in my life seems to go past nowadays without a visit to some doctor, hospital or other medical facility. This week it was the turn of Mr Jeremy “Gucci Belt” Clark on Monday morning. It was six weeks almost to the day since he had performed the bowel reversal surgery at the Nuffield and it was just a routine appointment to check the healing was proceeding as it should be and things were “functioning” normally. He was also keen to know about the radiotherapy treatment I’d had on my brain at the Marsden. It was painless of course, although the three months wait to find out if it has worked brings its own suffering.

 

He had a good old rummage and poke around, got me to cough a couple of times and pronounced that everything seemed fine. He didn’t seem overly surprised that my energy levels hadn’t quite returned to where they were and I was still experiencing some occasional stabbing pains in the general location of the surgery. After all, he reminded me, I’d had a major bowel operation requiring general anaesthetic, a hefty dose of “Cyberknife” radiotherapy to my brain, a course of DEFCON 2 steroids and a shot of toxic JJ immunotherapy delivered intravenously, all within the space of four short weeks. Added to that, apparently steroids and the body’s healing process aren’t particularly good bedfellows which will have delayed things. You learn something new every day.

 

He asked about my diet and I was happy to report that apart from the red flag foods like sprouts I was eating normally and really looking forward to my first Ruby. I had my first portion of baked beans the week before which were quite magnificent, sorely missed and massively underrated. A bit like farting…

 

He said there was no reason I couldn’t venture back to my local Star of India, maybe easing myself in with something relatively mild – no phaals just yet – and in addition to that I could up the exercise regime and resume swimming immediately. I’m planning to make my way down the pool at David Lloyd later today (Friday), only this time I won’t need the Big Pants that I’d bought on-line to cover up Stanley but not my embarrassment. They were only worn once and have now been consigned to the bin as well as Stanley himself of course.

 

The icing on the cake was his agreement that in a couple of weeks time, when coincidentally we plan to be in Portugal for a few days, and the eight weeks post-op are up, I can start gently swinging a golf club. Gently? He’s obviously never seen me hack my way round a course…

 

We promised to reconvene in another six weeks, and he rose out of his chair to shake me warmly by the hand. His handshakes are surprisingly firm in fact, for a surgeon.

 

“Glad to see you’re doing so well Bill,” he announced.

 

“Thanks, Jeremy. Still punching” I replied smiling.