WAGS 13.03.2019: A Touch or Two of Messines Nostalgia

Well, I have been steam-rollered into doing this blog, because our principal blogger claims that, as he is incapacitated and wasn´t there, he can´t blog it. Adopting the twin disguises of legal eagle Attorney-General Cox of cod-piece fame and of T. S Eliot, he proffers this excuse:-

“Under the well founded principle of habeas corpus, I am hardly eligible to compile an even more fictitious blog than is customary. Think of me as Macavity!”
"He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:At whatever time the deed took place
 - MACAVITY WASN'T THERE!"

What codswallop! Hasn´t he heard of ghost-writing? Ah well, here goes…………..It was a bit like old times when we met at Café João de Deus in Messines, an establishment that had been shut for perhaps a year, but is now re-opened under new management. TerryA was there to lead the troops, and it was good to see Yves back with us after some close encounters of the surgical kind.

Starters  ( Front Row): Dina, Myriam, Jill, Ingrid, Hazel, Maria.
               ( Back Row): Rod, Yves, TerryA, JohnH.
We are lucky to be able to bring this photo to you because, just after the shutter had clicked, the driver of the pick-up truck, on the bonnet of which JohnH´s camera was balanced, came running out of the café and  was was about to drive away with it still there when some alert WAG stopped him. Obrigado !
Then we were off.

The Track

The Statistics  (JohnH´s SatMap in blue: Rod´s ViewRanger in red)
Total distance: 13.6 kms; 14.82 kms
Total time:  3 hrs 56 mins: 4 hrs 32 mins
Moving time: 3 hrs 06 mins
Average speed: 4.4 kph: 3.27 kph
Ascent: 413 metres: 344 metres.
As far as your scribe can remember, JohnH and Rod were on the same walk and both started and finished at approximately the same time so why the discrepancies? Beats me. Yves´ gizmo, I think, had a distance of 13.7 kms.
Your scribe can´t get a photo of Rod´s track, although he has been able to see it and it did look very much the same as JohnH´s. Maybe Paul can insert Rod´s track here. But how man managed to get to the moon and back, goodness knows, but obviously he did not rely on SatMap or ViewRanger to do so.
Our leader, whose report follows, maintains a diplomatic silence on all this statistical byplay.
Hi JohnOnly just got round to writing this report, since Wednesday it’s been mayhem! we have had an elusive water leak for sometime; it comes and goes needless to say when the plumber comes round it stops, Wednesday afternoon was to be third time lucky when we got home there was a steady drip through the celling in the downstairs bathroom conveniently right in the shower, at last I can see a leak says the plumber!! ok but where its coming from?  who knows, late Wednesday evening he finally finds which he can only see with his very long dentist mirror. I will have to knock a hole in the wall, be back in the morning, leak now needed a 5 cent washer on a pipe joint, fixed awaiting fatura with baited breath.So I am thinking to myself  - Paul sitting in his ivory tower handing out his steamrollering instructions to us at the ground floor level. He would never know he had a leak till some one below bangs on his door so the moral to this saga is to live as high up as you can.OK the walk on Wed, there was a feeling of nostalgic meeting at the Cafe once a favourite meeting place of AWW in the past and a lot of good walking has been led from here, so no pressure on me then, I think there were 10 Wags or is a group of Wags known as Wagies? anyway a cold wind was after us so we moved into the lee of the cork wood heading West for about +/- 3 km.

 Took a local footpath Northwards I knew the direction I needed but not where the path would come out, but surprise it was bang on, we almost had a little bit of mud to step over Rod all most got some on his new blue suede shoes, also decked out in new shoes and!!!! new rucksack no expense spared for Yves´ comeback walk.

Them blue suede shoes

We turned back to the North West on tracks I was familiar with, Rod he a fountain of knowledge pointed out to us Lindsay and Andrew’s son Nicks new residence on top of the hill looking very good

   (Don´t ask)

                                            No, that is not Nick´s new house

on and up to the VA turning left up to the ridge top and down to the track into Amorosa.

     On the VA

  We disturbed some residents of Amorosa from their siesta

    At The Amorosa Nora

   Admiring an Amorosa Horta

Yves had a cut out here but the plucky French man said no, so with a bit of head scratching I managed to find my way through to the track up the other side which provoked memories of walks long passed familiar with the older AWW walkers.At the main road crossing Yves had another chance to abort but it was a NO to the backstop again. all familiar paths now heading round Monte Boi down to what’s known as the Three Coins in the Fountain well which started a conversation on the song/film/who acted in it etc.< oh for the power of instant answers on Google whilst on the move.(Ed:see Post-script)

And here we interrupt the Leader´s report briefly for a touch of nostalgia from the archives.

 JohnH enthralls his audience with tales of the past at the Three Coins in the Fountain well




















 "It was a dark and stormy morning and there were only three of us.........................."

  TerryM, TerryA and Rusty, and JohnH

To read more, of how they survived the gale, found a living megalith atop Vale Fuzeiros, and recorded The Two Tremolos singing that old-time hit, follow the link to 

http://aww2010-11.blogspot.com/2011/02/aww-16022011-three-musketeers-take.html

 and now back to the Leader´s report
My last little bit down to the railway line was a bit rough, old paths well disappeared but, once we found the old Maurice blob, it was OK..

                      The blob

 Tthe way back to Messines has changed. it seems George and his brother, citrus growers, have been finding every rock on their land and building the biggest wall they can from them.

Is this grammatical Portuguese?
and no wonder the machinery in the estaleiro looked knackered when you see the length of the wall they were used for!

The Great Boulder Wall (see map): nearly a kilometre in length 


Back at the Café, the group split those for the traditional TM or Bifana and those for the sit down job which is becoming popular. It was a good walk, I think we all enjoyed it, Yves survived it, the day warmed up, the cold wind dropped and it was good to use the café again.
Terry & Jill   

In the ordinary café, there were the usual bifanas and tostas mistas

   The bifana

This is Ingrid apologising for scoffing all the tostas mistas –she forgot the protocol that they have to be photographed first
Meanwhile, through in the pullman-class dining saloon, there were….

The Ladies Who Lunch

On the menu were:-

   Carapau limado (is that correct?) con batata

  And some bigger fish - the potatoes were adjudged to be excellent

   Lombo de porco

    and various sobremesas

plus a drink and coffee, all for Euros 8.

Befitting the name of the restaurant, the walls were decorated with examples of João de Deus´s poetry

                  A Vida 

and the conversation at the table was equally intellectual and stimulating, particularly when Yves joined the group when, for some reason now lost in the mists of time, we  began to discuss the meaning of the French word vanité and its Portuguese equivalent. Apparently, vanité is short for table de vanité, that is dressing table in English and penteadeira in Portuguese, which is where the hair-combing and, by, extension , the nose-powdering takes place. As a side note, interestingly enough, Harraps Shorter Dictionnaire – Anglais-Français/Français-Anglais does not give the table de vanité usage but gives  table de toilette or table de coiffure instead; perhaps the Longer one does. 
Now, this truly rivetting and potentially endlessly-fascinating discussion could have gone on all afternoon, if it had not been for the fact that Maria got into an altercation with the maître d`hôtel about her chocolate mousse which she found unchocolatey and almost inedible. He protested that he had used proper coooking chocolate and produced some sort of evidence:- 


   Hazel scrutinises said evidence


In the subsequent post-mortem enquiry, expert analysis concluded that there may have been some culinary chocolate in the mixture but that it was spoilt by the inclusion of white of egg which, according to the cognoscenti, is a no no!

Be that as it may, at this juncture, the adjacent party of some forty employees of the Messines Junta de Freguesia, who had been holding a farewell lunch for their retiring Presidente, began to leave the restaurant, when JohnH expressed admiration for their official T-shirts. Maria jumped up and asked said Presidente if he would give us one.

   Can I have a T-shirt, please?

It was a done deal, a few minutes later, we collected official T-shirt plus two books of poems by a still-living Portuguese poet, Manuel Neto dos Santos, from the very smart and modern offices of the Freguesia de S.Bartolomeu de Messines.

 Splendid T-shirt.

The only draw-back was that JohnH was expected to sign on for street-sweeping du
ties at 8 am the following morning.Post-script

When we all were trying to remember who sang the song Three Coins In The Fountain in the film of that name (1954), all sorts of suggestions were made - Grace Kelly, Doris Day, Dinah Shore, Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardener. TerryA correctly got who the composer and lyricist were (Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn). But in fact, the singer for the film wasn´t female at all ; it was Frank Sinatra.
In The Tale of the Lone Banana, the Goons did a version – “Three Goons in a Fountain. Which one will the Fountain Drown” –unfortunately it´s not on YouTube so you will have to sing that one yourself, but here is Frankie Boy.

https://youtu.be/rkHkMH5uxrA

No concluding limerick this week but food for thought in a letter appearing in The Daily Telegraph this morning:

"Sir,
When I lived in Zambia 45 years ago, walking up Kilimanjaro was a popular activity. I note that people now climb Kilimanjaro.Has it got steeper?"



Leaving aside the fact that Kilimanjaro is actually in Tanzania, not Zambia,
this thought that things get steeper as the years pass must have occurred to most of us on recent walks.