31/03/2025-25/04/2025
(I’ve broken this post up into two parts - we were on our terreno for six weeks this time, detailing it all, with narrative meanders intact, might lose your interest if I asked you to take it in, in one sitting; for this and the second part, as it was for ‘Magusto', some of it is based on actual people’s accounts of actual events, some of them still sensitive to them personally, socially and culturally. Part of fictionalising them is intended to safeguard against some of their concerns, as is changing names. I hope its enough, because they are stories which need telling.)
Choosing when and where to go is fundamental to any practical resilience strategy. There are very few places, if any at all, left immune to the discontinuities we all face. Compound crises are here, right now.
Collective, preventative, governmental, international, municipal action has not happened. Bodies tasked with representing humans facing their own climate hubris are reduced, seemingly restrict themselves, to reactive mitigation. As they manage decline, corporate doublespeak has turned literal. They can only firefight.
No one is coming to save you. It's always worth repeating. They can look over devastation we have collectively wrought, though, faces set to earnest, wringing hands in a show of political futility.
So, as you take action, genuine and constructive, it becomes increasingly necessary to weigh up balances of probability, to consider the now and everyday practicalities of space and time. To then distil them, if and where the information required can be found, is to hand, down into likelihoods.
Somewhere, rough equations of choice will emerge, rendering conceptions of what is actually possible probable. You can.
It becomes necessary too, always, to factor in prevailing systems. So much cause and effect, and what we all must face, as consequence can be attributed to them.
Little solace can be gained from the knowledge that, now, increasingly, environmental impact assessments for industry, investment, development, government must, legally, consider all impact, not just direct or immediate. It won't undo what's already been done, but it's a start.
Likewise, the dawn of hope in legal battles fought, being fought, to be fought, will help establish genuine and full culpability. Some are and will be against insurance companies, determining where fire and flood, or other climate led catastrophe, is not ‘force majeure’, or an act of God, but ultimately, if not directly then absolutely as consequence, an act of humanity. Of course, the market-led consequence is and will be higher premiums to absorb their ‘costs’.
Any potentials in battles fought will offer scant consolation to people whose homes are rendered unliveable and where insurers refused, refuse to pay out. Few will realise, as the necessity of moving somewhere else bites and they face actualities, with what little they have left, enforced resettlement, dusting themselves down, trying again, within what prevails tells them they must, they will have become climate migrants, refugees.
As these things often are, but this time in a much more direct, palpable sense, for specific related reasons, all of these things were very much on our minds as we made our second trip, this time for an extended stay, to our Portuguese terreno. Specifics, almost always, require context.
We made choices, based on the evidence we had, unbalances of possibility and probability. Initially, we had looked at land in another region, the Beira Beixa, had almost purchased some, impetuous and keen to make change, to act and feel less helpless. To not allow the world we have, collectively, all made, to just happen to us.
Thankfully, our hands were stayed. We had gone with an eager agent to view some in the central plains forming the lower reaches of the region. It was a vast tract, on sale for a very modest, within budget, price.
On the face of things, it appeared to have many of the criteria we had set for ourselves. Our curiosity was piqued.
So, we found ourselves, in late spring, more than a year and a half before we eventually signed our deed, a delay profoundly influenced by our experience that day, barely able to touch the metal gate, which opened on to the consort, or shared access, to the land. We could literally hear it ping, the sound like tinnitus, a warning from our inner ears, as it overheated in the relentless mid-afternoon sun.
We had come to realise, all too quickly, while visiting other terrenos, including one we were then contemplating making an offer on, why agents tended to offer morning viewings. Somewhere, my neurology, releasing the majority of fronto-parietal, irregular electrical bursts across my brain, symptomatic of my type of epilepsy, overnight, spiking most often with every k-spindle, as my body tries to sleep, helped out.
Mornings tend to find me post or inter ictal, depending on nocturnal frequency and whether I can consider myself still clustering in seizures or in recovery from them. Either state leaves my seizure threshold low, cognitive capacity variable and neurology vulnerable to the multiple kinds of impacts which lower it further still, making continued, repeating or extended seizures and clusters more likely.
For those reasons alone, is not as simple as saying we're not morning people. We manage adversities, through the night and into the early parts of days, those who simply like a lie-in or whose body clocks and sleep patterns are not diurnal can barely conceive of. Though, being in an almost barely acknowledgable statistical percentile - 30% of 2% of 0.19% of the population, if you want to do the maths - neither could those who aren’t.
So, for narrative purposes, fuck it, no, we're not morning people. There are very few things, given the risk to life clustering seizures cause, we can make safe enough for us to venture into a generally waking world of possibilities and probabilities over which we have no control.
Every offer of a viewing in cool but sunshine bright, morning air, during our searches, was rearranged to afternoon. A tarde, later in the day, when cognition varied less and my perceptions, acuities, could more readily, whilst also being able to more rely on and trust in their own function, weigh up pros and cons. Often it meant the cones were brought more to the fore, which is why we had come to suspect earlier appointments were a definite sales tactic.
It had certainly been a factor that day. We travelled, with the agent, from the region's higher altitudes, where we had established our temporary base, with passing, increasingly parched villages and towns merely prologue to the baking, arid landscape we arrived into. Neither of us had known this type of heat before. It felt like a threat.
Later, it was possible with hindsight, palpably marked by the experience, to trace almost exactly why. Where Portugal sits, at the western and southern edges of the European continent, why its southern extremities, popular with, have been but perhaps soon will become less amenable to, The type of tourists who, seeking out places where they can intermittently baste, turn and roast some more in the sun, or, maybe more than a little too frequently, complain as they cool in the shade of bars, marinating in alcohol, readying to repeat the process again, mostly, but not always, narrowly avoiding sunstroke, has had a relatively clear meteorological exposure and facilitation of its prevailing climate.
Heat, generated across the African plains and deserts, moves further north, being increasingly cooled by air currents from the Atlantic, to the West. When it hits Portugal’s South Coast, really it only has a little of the edge taken off. In simplistic terms, because meteorology is complex, the further north heated air moves, the more it cools.
Disruptions to Atlantic air and tidal currents coma due to climate change, have made this less predictable. Portugal's once cooler central regions are becoming more and more exposed to both heat and other discontinuities because of it.
Maps of wildfires across the country, showing where they have occurred most and where they're likely to happen more, are all the evidence really required. Living in the southern and central regions is becoming, will become, increasingly untenable.
Of course, the massive contributions to climate disruption cheap airfares and over tourism have made are unlikely to be playing on the conscience of so many who continue to provide the demand side to prevailing market supply used to justify it. It's also highly unlikely, if the disproportionate impact of all climate chaos in the global south can barely be acknowledged by the north, which disproportionately caused it, those displaced by it will see any kind of reparations.
They are, according to increasingly available evidence, far more likely to be added to the list of easy others, targeted by populist politicians, gaslighting their supporters.
‘Hey!’, their tourist agitators and infiltrators will cry, ‘We paid hard earned money to lounge by your pool and on your beaches. Now scurry along and fetch me another drink and be grateful, thankful, bow and scrape, so I’ll let you keep the change!’
The Norte, Portugal’s northern region, has long been known, to the rest of the country and genuinely interested other parts of the world, as both its most temperate and, due to more diverse weather patterns maintaining more arable land, also its breadbasket. It provides, domestically and for export, a rich array of crops and livestock, as well as the famed foodstuffs derived from them.
This is due largely to literal breakwaters. They divide it from the central and southern regions and allow cooler Atlantic airs to travel further inland along them.
Wide, free flowing rivers, like the Minho, Lima and Vez, as well as their tributaries, like the Cabreiro, have long supported life here. Substantial bodies of archaeological evidence these it is sustained from at least the polio lithic coma consistent through prehistory, roamed into by spread of European Celtic cultures, much like its near neighbour Galicia, eventually making monarchies decadent and balancing Salazar's books, on into where it now sits, still nurturing still growing.
Our experiences of both regions shifted our focus, away from the Beira Beixa and onto the Norte, more specifically to the Alto Minho.
Of course, it is not immune to discontinuity or climate disruption and their spasms, almost nowhere is. When our deposit had been paid and promissory contract for our terreno signed, we became, jarringly, viscerally aware of wildfires, yet again.
Then, our fears slightly assuaged, for all the wrong reasons, as we left Scotland for our second, more extended, post purchase and final deed signing, stay on it, we were also reminded, as repetition is wont to do, of how nowhere is inoculated, has immunity or a free pass, from what we humans have wrought upon our only life support system.
At a distance, we had been worried when, not long after we left our land, for all too short a stay, in November last year, returning to the wet and cold in our country of birth, a wildfire, caused by stray sparks from local limpar practice, spread close to it. Thankfully, for us at least, if not out near neighbours, it didn’t cross the river which separates us from them. After days of effort, the volunteer, as all firefighters are in Portugal are, bombeiros finally tamed it, though it left many a burned-out scar.
Then, as we prepared to travel, a spate of wildfires spread across a Scotland facing its driest winter and spring since 1938. Some still burned as we left, articles condemning the ‘traditional’ practice of muirburn, used by large hunting estates, as at least partly culpable. The arguments seemed familiar, but differed in key aspects, to those heard in Portugal.
There is a guardedness about using burning for the process of limpar in rural Portugal. it is done on a small scale but is widespread. Largely associated with farmers in areas considered to have little monetary affluence, it is considered or referred to as a traditional practise in them. Cultures of tradition are not always borne out by the research of history or anthropology.
During the Visigoth period, stretching roughly from 401-711CE, the village community form of territorial organisation was established across the northern Iberian Peninsula, now encompassing northern Portugal and areas of Spain. Rooted in pre-Roman indigenous society, it consisted of autonomous communities without dependence on the landlord.
Each family had farmland, had the right to use common lands and shared farm tools. They would also work with other farmers for large scale cereal crops and maintain shared flocks. Any use of fire would depend on each community's, individual, family or collective objectives, with localised practise and customs resolving any conflict generated by its use.
Land use rearrangement coma roughly synchronous with few changes across Europe and in the counties of the British Isles, became significant. At this time, the Iberian kingdoms, including Portugal, were founded.
In common with other countries during the Middle Ages, Portugal developed a tripartite division of property. This consisted of Crown, private and common assets. Communities were ‘given’ the right to mange the latter by royal charter.
Royal ‘Charter Letters’ were the basis of Portuguese public law, established by the kingdom’s first monarchs. What was not included in them continued to be governed by local practise and custom.
The manorial regime was widespread, with land ownership taken over by the monarch and their successors, shared among clergy, as well as through concessions to nobles. This evolved an increasingly mercantilist economy.
Its evolution was accelerated by King Ferdinand I’s ‘Sesmaria Laws’, first enacted in 1375, which were aimed at increasing produce from farming and reducing depopulation. It forced landowners to cultivate their lands under penalty of expropriation.
Fostering of the laws led to a wider use of fire for clearing land. this, in turn, led to conflict between landowners. This often arose between owners of large-scale areas of land, appropriated by nobles or the Crown, and smaller, more community-based areas, still managed traditionally and affected by them, though not exclusively.
Where these concerned the conflicting interests of nobles, with some influence from traditional communities, a need for official regulation was required. Nevertheless, in centuries to follow, there were no major changes to the law concerning the use of fire in farming areas. Change only occurred with the establishment of the Penal Code in 1886.
These followed wider European practises, with a particular focus on wildfires and forested areas, aimed at short term suppression and attempting to exclude fire from the landscape in the longer term. Despite imposed legislative constraints, what had become seen as an extension of traditional use, on smaller scales, and as an assertion of community agency against feudal overreach, was not discouraged.
The wildfires, despite this, decreased community empowerment and fire resilient landscapes. Use of fire, as part of small-scale agriculture, in Portugal, has been a counter intuitive and counter productive practise, accordingly, since at least the Middle Ages.
There are parallels to this in Scotland, particularly regarding the practise of muirburn and its proponents’ claims to traditional use. Likewise, the increased use of fossil-fuel driven machinery, counterintuitively impacting climate and any environment in which to farm, as feudal practises, land appropriation integral to it, continued in all but name. With use accelerating through the twentieth century, small scale farmers, like crofters, increasingly struggled to survive.
How these ultimately counterproductive practises have evolved into the context of modern farming and are seen in Portugal was neatly summed up in a conversation we had with one of the organisers of the country’s only ‘slow food’ market. In its most understandable iterations, slow food is globally networked, local community-based sharing of information and resources, acting together, to ensure good, clean, fair food for all.
Slow Food International, a global organising, networked body, states its priorities as defending cultural and biological diversity, educating, inspiring and mobilising the world around us, as well as influencing public decision makers and the private sector. They ‘stand for sustainable methods of food production, transitioning towards healthy, plant-rich diets that support agroecological farming’, whilst arguing that ‘the increase in food of animal origin from factory farming… has been detrimental to food security and human health, disastrous for animal welfare and has contributed greatly to the climate emergency’.
The movement was heavily influenced by Carlo Petrini, who founded the organisation Slow Food in 1986, as a response to the emerging popularity of fast food. it also became associated with a lifestyle, slow living, encompassing a wide variety of subcategories, like slow money and slowcities, proposed as solutions to negative environmental consequences of capitalism and consumerism, in close alignment with the aims of the green politics.
Antithetical to late-stage, tech capitalism and data driven consumerism, the lifestyle movement, if it had a motto, it would be ‘move slow and fix things’. There was much contradictory to it and its roots during our conversation in Sistelo.
The seemingly idyllic mountain village, considered by tourist brochures, which lure individuals, a majority of which drive there, and coach tours into its remote setting, as ‘one of the seven wonders’ or ‘the Tibet’ of Portugal, depending on source, owes its fame to a retained, traditional development of steep, terraced farming up otherwise inaccessible mountain slopes, among other things. Not least among these is the nearby ‘Atlantic Passagem’, a site of special scientific interest.
A forest, lying at the foot of the villages ancient approach soap, it is a repository of plant species rare anywhere else in Portugal. They land, have landed here for centuries, carried across the Atlantic from territories thousands of miles away, and along river courses, flowing down from the mountains, to root into the fertile soil there.
Both, at least on the face of things, seem perfect context and setting for a slow food market. With a deep interest in and growing involvement with slow living generally, we were keen to visit and to do it right.
A one and a half hour walk along the Ecovia, a series of interconnected walkways evading roads and taking in environmental sights, from Cabreiro, passing through the Passagem in no little awe, we arrived on the one Sunday a month the market is held. It wasn’t too long before we found ourselves in a genuinely excited and excitable exchange of ideas with who we discovered was one of its organisers, encountered acting as translator for other market stall holders, plying their wares, who found the hard limits of our initially engaging, locally accented, developing Portuguese all too quick.
Before long we were discussing attempts to change some ways of working farmland whilst respecting local traditions, with underlying environmental concerns. This included an offer of advice and help with machinery for our quintinha.
Not catching every beat, in our enthusiasm, this led on to further discussion on the use of burning for limpar. Replying to our expressed concern and confusion about its use, including it leading to the start and spread of wildfires, the organiser replied, ‘Yes, we are trying to change this. It isn’t good, but so many of the farmers are still relatively poor and they cannot afford the machines you need to do it without this‘. ‘Ah’, I replied, realising the previous beats missed, ‘But, machines, are part of the overall problem too, right? Or, surely, there wouldn't be a date, in the laws, beyond which the use of metal bladed, high-powered machines, which cause sparks leading to some wildfires too, has to stop. It's not enough but at least it tries to be preventative’.
I was building up quite a head of steam and perhaps losing engagement. How long had I been here and I thought I could tell them how it should be?
‘Then there is the contribution to overall environmental degradation and crises, of which wildfires are a symptom too, from them being largely fossil fuel driven’, I continued, oblivious, ‘Surely there are even older, more traditional methods then widespread burning for clearing of and farming on small areas of land, than machines. You know, just like hand tools?’.
‘I guess’, came a slightly distracted, defensive and less engaged reply, ‘But this is long, hard work’. We knew this, being two weeks into further clearing of our land and planting, all by hand, whilst around us other farmers burned theirs or cleared it with machines. This had the added detriment of causing seizure thresholds to lower and frequency increase for me, adding to us making slower progress than we made initially, not realising this was largely due to local holidays meaning although less work was done on them, it intensified when the land was returned to afterwards.
‘But isn’t that the point of slow food, slow living, what they are?’, I asked, realising more fully the irony missed earlier in the conversation, when the offer of help with machines was made. It was clearly well-intentioned and based on local experience, also made to other farmers who couldn’t afford to buy them. Another customer had approached the stall, waiting whilst we conversed, so talk came to a polite but peremptory end.
It appears to be a conversation Portugal, much like the rest of the world, needs to continue having and with some urgency too. Monocultural farming, specialisation, growing predominantly single crops or tending single species, herds or flocks, has become, over time, required and determined only by market forces. These then, in turn, become self perpetuating and develop a kind of environmental cognitive dissonance.
An illusion of traditional farming, following seasons, where things need to be done on time, and in season, so yields will be optimised in others, lingers. Optimising yields, if not for personal or localised food security, is in fact a market driven force.
It is not possible to sustain lives on a single crop or species, so optimising yields determines ability to sell some of them on, to trade, to make money, to buy other things, which, on small or larger scales, perpetuates market driven, capitalist economies. So too does buying fossil fuel driven machines.
To change any of it takes what may seem like asking difficult questions or having difficult conversations. That and long, hard work, trabalhar.
Ultimately though, understanding the cultures, plural, of how we arrived here, how self-sustaining, traditional and diversified agricultural economies have interacted overtime, fuelling mercantilist drives, the original move fast and break things cultural and societal instincts adopted by feudal systems centuries ago, have ultimately led to late stage capitalism, is the job of cultural anthropologists. It's in my bailiwick.
Helping those trapped in its cycles, seemingly unable to break out of them, in deed and word, perpetuating them, is also what that job has become, is becoming, too. Or else, what is it for?
The late, great David Graeber understood this, deeply. continuing his legacy should be the focus of any contemporary cultural anthropologist and, I hope, in whatever small ways possible, I too can contribute.
It's why I ask difficult questions at farmers markets. Not to be disrespectful. On the absolute contrary, I do it out of deep and enduring respect for cultures immersed in nurturing the life giving and sustaining properties of the only planet we have.
Growth, development of them, progress, despite what the trajectories and impulses of capital would have us all believe, is not linear. The past still holds lessons for us, tools we can literally borrow and adapt for the plight we find ourselves in, just as it sounds resonant notes of caution we must listen to.
The present and future echo them too. Listening hard, within intent, is the only way we can make the cacophony, the dissonance, truly, genuinely symphonic.
Of course, I realise and hear too the sound of idylls in the syllables and intent behind those words. Listen too, to how like a sermon they may sound to others, toiling alike on farmland, in distribution centres, call centres, sweatshops and data farms.
Perhaps though, clinging onto those idylls may be the only genuinely liberating force available for us to harness. The only hammer to those chains, to those self-perpetuating cycles of ubiquity, of no other choice, of the sigh and the grind.
Portugal, with its recent histories and salutary lessons, is perfectly poised to realise this. It holds dear to individual, collective and structural awareness required. It’s such a significant part of why we're here and it is truly a privilege to be.
All of which is prologue really.
Spring, everywhere, is liminal. Even as seasons appear to become less relevant, among the global weirding of interlinked crises associated with climate change, it is still possible to detect the patterns of change, of becoming, of being between things, it signals.
Changes happen deceptively fast in Primavera, Portuguese spring, particularly in the Norte region. Not sudden, things overall still transition gradually over a few months, from winter into summer. Some days, often in surreal succession, can feel like either.
Much of Portuguese culture embraces the season, in large part because two of the most important celebrations to it happen then. Both symbolise change to its people, their cultural mores and the country, In very different ways.
Portugal remains europe's most religious country and the religion overwhelmingly practised, by 82.6% of the population, is Catholicism. The single most important calendrical date, in Portuguese iterations of it, as with many other predominantly Catholic cultures, is Pascoa, or Easter.
For those of faith and secular people alike, Easter, or Eostre in older Pagan traditions, from which many of the practises we still associate with it derive, is a mark in time, symbolising birth and rebirth. So, eggs and baby animals feature heavily and almost everyone's associations with it.
They are there too in Portuguese celebrations, just not predominantly. The degree of religiosity, in practise, varies fairly significantly from place to place.
Prepared by travelogues and cultural guides, as well as our own research, ahead of the previous Easter we spent in Portugal, when we intensified our search for terreno, after initial disappointment the previous again year, we then found ourselves surprised by how little of it applied in the small mountain village, near the border with Galicia, we had based ourselves in for a focussed month. Time available to us had dictated it was smack in the middle of Primavera, encompassing Pascoa too, thus the preparations.
During it, was when we first ventured into the town we now associate with life on our terreno, now considering it just ‘town’. As in ‘Shall we go into town on market day’. Arcos de Valdevez, during Holy Week, was where and when we first met our friend Jose, in his estate agent role, to view some properties advertised by the imobilaria where he worked.
Having some significant churches, former monasteries, convents and other religious sites, both in town and its surrounding areas, they take Pascoa and Semana Santa, preceding it, seriously there. Streets leading to the main churches, for the week leading up to and in the days following Pascoa, are lined with purple carpets.
The colour, in Portuguese Catholicism, is associated with Jesus as the ‘king of kings’. The association also derives from other, more ancient customs, where the colour’s rarity, only then able to be extracted, as a dye or pigment, from the mucus of murex sea snails, found mainly in waters around Tyre in Phoenicia, leading to it being called ‘Tyrian purple’.
It was expensive and time-consuming to produce, and items coloured with it became associated with power and wealth, ultimately and more specifically with emperors and monarchies. This popularised the idea of purple being elite, continued by Greek and Roman cultures, as well as, eventually, that of the Catholic Church, which contributes to the modern-day widespread belief that purple is a ‘royal colour.
The mood of the time then coma bedecked in purple carpets and banners, a few days before Pascoa, in the middle of Semana Santa, was as our preparations led us to believe much of Portugal would be. It too, in its own ways, spoke of liminality, of being between things.
Much of Portugal moves through a mood of projected and internalised mourning and reverence in the week before Pascoa. It's movement then shifts, in preparation for, anticipation of what is to come, which breaks and erupts in celebration on the day itself.
All of it was palpable, as we moved through the town’s streets, only briefly able to take it in and engage. Older people were dressed in traditional black mourning wear. Religious symbols associated with the festival were everywhere.
In addition to the carpeted streets, purple or white ribbons we're tied to almost everything, streetlights and shop signs, banners of the same colours, some adorned with symbols, others not, hung from religious, municipal and private buildings alike. Shop window displays mixed them, with varying amounts of other religious and secular imagery.
So many people queued, in the pastelarias, for cakes associated with the coming feast and celebration. They carried them carefully, tentatively, in huge boxes and, despite the busyness of some streets, others avoided knocking them, with subdued reverence and shared anticipatory smiles.
With other business to conduct, yet also with deep respect for other cultures, not least one which we hoped would welcome us as more permanent host, we eagerly noted everything, checked it against our expectations, much of it in accord with them. We bought extra supplies, our viewings concluded, as we prepared to retreat into the mountains for the few days we knew everything would shut down for.
That night, we made a particular point of asking the owner of our temporary home’s son, who had been the person we interacted with most, when making her booking, and was also our defacto linguistic and immediately sociocultural interpreter, given our then extremely basic knowledge of Portuguese language and only distant, learned understanding of mores and customs, a few pertinent questions.
Although self-contained, our traditional cottage, as holiday home, shared a large patio cum driveway, as well as other facilities, with the owner's home. Other family members lived directly adjacent and opposite. All seemed prominent members of the immediate community and, being a small village, a majority of other locals regularly either stopped by or had vocal exchanges with them in the passing.
Most impossible for us to come or go from air accommodation without some interaction with them. Although not ideal for the nature of my neurodivergence and disabling circumstance thus created, or what we had expected when booking, we wanted to be respectful of both wider national or religious and directly local customs.
So, we asked, simply at first, how they celebrated Pascoa, as a family and in the village? We also explained and described how we had experienced some of the preparative mood in town.
‘No’, was the son’s equally simple first reply, ‘We don't do so much here. Some people, of course, they follow the church, but not so many, here in the village and not my family’. He continued, ‘We have the cake and maybe I have a meal with my mae and pae, But this is all. It is mostly quiet, people take it as a holiday, as everyone in Portugal does. So, no, you don't have to worry, I don't think, about customs or offending anyone’. He smiled.
What his reassurance didn't prepare us for were the more distinct, pagan undertones of events which occurred the next day's, Good Friday, clearly in preparation for what feasting and celebration they would engage in. It hit me particularly hard.
Arrived there the week or so before and had familiarised ourselves with some of the family's roles and habits, as well as with where those fit into village life. Although Emmanuel, the owner’s son, was our interlocutor generally, he worked most days in the nearby small town of Paredes de Coura, so, for that and other reasons, some of which we only really understood in retrospect, most of our interactions were with his mother.
She was an eager undetermined host, often knocking at the door to our temporary home, delivering fresh fruit, vegetables and eggs, as well as some traditional dishes prepared from them. We both determined, from the outset, the best way for us to learn the Portuguese language, was to not only study, a period of which we each committed to in the days before and after arriving, but also by immersion, speaking as much as we could, avoiding English, and utilising or adapting as we learned.
Our hostess spoke no English but was a determined communicator. So, she would repeat phrases and respond patiently to our entreaties to ‘Fala devagar, faz favor’, or, ‘Speak more slowly, please’.
Mentioned only briefly, in a cultural context, for previous posts here, our studies didn't prepare us for the vast differences in accent between areas of Portugal. Most study guides, as happens with other languages and places too, reach for a standard or median Portuguese, assuming it will be understood or adapted for in wider understanding across the country. By and large, they default to the type of Portuguese spoken in urban centres of the southern regions, like Lisboa.
This is definitely not understood, or is rejected, culturally, by many people of, the Norte region. Here, the accent is not only strong and region specific, but words and turns of phrase, used regularly, are not by their southern counterparts. This is as well as letters and emphases in words or phrases which are shared being changed too.
For instance, b’s and v’s are often, in what can seem a relatively arbitrary fashion, freely interchangeable, sometimes varying in usage from village to village. Likewise, where s’s become ‘sh’ sounds.
Bella, our hostess, after a lifetime lived entirely in the north and spent mainly working in remote, insular, agricultural areas, only knew this way of speaking Portuguese. She could code switch between some village styles of speech, but that was as far as it went. Drawn further on the subject, she would describe her understanding and application of it as more authentic Portuguese, wholly rejecting standardised language, as also taught in schools, which she left at an early age.
She would regularly and quite forcefully correct our pronunciation, when we attempted to respond to her spoken communications. We accepted this with good grace, even enjoying the localised cultural exchange of it.
There were, however, not infrequent misunderstandings between us and her, some of which we would only come to understand later, when her son intervened and provided A corrected version of our exchanges. Such was the case with some aspects of a peripatetic tour she had given us, early in our stay, of their working, relatively self-sustaining quinta, with varied crops and livestock.
Son had let her know we were there to buy land which we intended to farm. So, she proudly showed us their much longer-lived efforts. Whilst we were being shown turkeys and chickens, utilising our simplistic, learned language skills, we inquired after a large pig we had seen on previous days, feasting on vast amounts of other produce.
By reply, we were promptly led, then ushered into a small, darkened outbuilding. In the shadows there, where the impressive creature was housed, were comfortable enough seeming quarters, complete with well filled trough.
I, in particular, have an affection for and some understanding of our porcine friends' habits. This was based on having developed something of a relationship with an equally sizeable specimen, which roamed freely outside of a village I had lived in, during a three-year stay in Greece, some decades ago.
What we missed in the continued and ongoing conversation, whilst we observed its distant cousin, was likely due to my attentions given to the bristled head and curious snout thrust through the enclosure’s gate. Later, I came to rue that obliviousness and pastoral idealism somewhat.
Early on Good Friday morning, still into rectal and in a decidedly vulnerable and variable cognitive state, I found myself a more than a little agitated and irked, becoming incapacitated, by loud machine motor noise and what sounded like a growing, excitable gathering of folks in the shared areas, between the house where we were based and that of the owners. Wary and irritable, realising the hubbub had been building, as I'd come more to myself after the night’s seizures, I donned my noise cancelling headphones and tentatively raised the blind in the kitchen window, which faced that way.
It transpired I did this just at the peak of what was clearly a village spectacle. Bella's husband, and what seemed like an extension of a role we had become familiar with seeing him in, had just reversed his old tractor through a gathering of the majority of villagers, many now relatively familiar, assembled, waiting in excited anticipation. Bella emerged from the nearby outbuilding, the crowd parting around her.
She counted 2 metal buckets and their relatively dangerous looking, white, curved and long knife. The mood became hushed, as my eyes adjusted and I realised what they had been attempting to unsee.
Approaching the now dead, by some there means, showing no visible marks of cutting, pig, suspended by its hind legs from a hoist on the rear of the tractor, with practised efficiency, placed the buckets just so, below its head, and swiftly cut its throat. A cheer arose from those pressing in around, watching.
This was clearly and at least seasonally irregular occurrence, since the buckets would've perfect proportions to catch all of the drained blood. As the last of it dripped into them, the now chattering crowd began to dissipate, each person offering some kind of salutation I was unable to understand, to Bella, transfixed as I was on the sight.
Remembering moving away from the window, lowering the blind again, then the sounds of the tractor reversing into the outbuilding, where we also had access to a washing machine, as part of our let facilities, I then also realised what the other, until then tucked away and locked, area of it was for.
Sounds familiar to me, from hotel and restaurant kitchens I’d worked in, as well as from the same time in Greece, when much of my stay was spent in a rented apartment above the village butcher shop, soon followed.
Thumping of cleavers meeting thick table wood, after cutting through bone. The clang and rasp of knives sharpening on stone, accompanied by sounds I would less equate with butchering previously, now obvious in hindsight. An axe chopping wood.
For the rest of that day and the next, we would not be able to use the shared washing line, unless we particularly wanted our clothes to smell of smoked meat. With no little expertise, choice cuts had been removed and parcelled, then the rest was traditionally rendered into two local variants on blood and pork sausage, the smoking done with fragrant woods we had seen them sourcing and stockpiling nearby too.
My partner, a sound sleeper, heard little of the outside noise, but was also particularly attuned to my ictal sounds. A short time after I remembered hearing and being confused by the wood chopping sounds, she came through from our bedroom, at the other side of the house, to find me intermittently clustering in seizures, at the kitchen table. When interictal, I was unable to stop floods of body wracking sobs and tears from coursing through me.
‘Is it the seizures or has something else happened?’, she enquired, wiping tears streaming down my cheeks, after offering much required calm reassurance. Unable to form many words, I made a few attempts, then managed, eventually, to haltingly stutter out, ‘They, they killed the pig. And it looked like it was smiling’.
It took a while, that day and the next, for seizures to stop clustering, for seizure-led, erratic interictal behaviours to abate. My partner contacted the owner's son, by text, and asked him to drop by the next again evening.
She explained to him that we couldn't know when the seizures would stop clustering. Perhaps the single most difficult to deal with issue in refractory, high daily seizure frequency, fronto-parietal lobe epilepsy is how seizures cluster. When the threshold is lowered through dysregulated GABA, the amino acid surrounding and protecting the brain, among other things, from irregular electrical discharges, which can happen for a myriad of reasons, external and bodily, the more seizures you have the more you're likely to have.
Once irregular discharges spread across the entire brain which is what happens in secondary generalised seizures and clustering A focal seizures coma GABA levels are persistently lowered. It's why we act preventatively in as much as we can and is a key area of misunderstanding regarding epilepsy generally.
My partner summarised as best she could, given that our interlocutor, although he spoke relatively good English, admitted it had been learned wholly from subtitled American TV series and films broadcast in Portugal. They're not a good source for understanding living with epilepsy and certainly not for the relatively rare type I have.
It was difficult for her to convey that, although I practised a plant-based diet, I did so for health and planetary concerns. My issue with that morning's events, in terms of lowering seizure thresholds, was the timing, noise and spectacle.
Machine noise in particular has a significant impact on thresholds for me at any time. Any loud noise early in the morning, when attempting to sleep starts clusters from impacts on thresholds throughout the day before, their profile determined by what those were, with seizures at their most frequent and thresholds at their lowest levels, can start a snowball like effect of clustering throughout that day, making the next night worse, and so on.
Visual disturbances, when thresholds are lowered, can also have a significant impact. Smell too. Pretty much any high sensory stimulus.
The spectacle, its sounds, sights, smells, still repeat in my brain, often during interictal periods, impacting other seizures, now, as I write this more than a year later. Had we known beforehand, much of the immediate and repeating synaptic impact could have been prevented.
All of this, conveyed by my partner in as summarised a form as possible, whilst also managing to explain not only did we respect the traditions of their place, but we were also very curious about other aspects of what had happened, from a cultural and even gastronomic point of view. Our hosts were very apologetic and a few days later, somewhat recovered, if still tentative and tender, I was invited into the family kitchen plied with tea and cake, sat down at the table and apologised to earnestly by the family, the village matriarch.
In the meantime, most I hadn't been able to venture out, or gastronomic and cultural interest had also been seated. My partner had found herself taking on a tour of the little smoke house and food storage area, connected to it by a hallway, through the family house, where the sausages were prepared and stored coma hung drying on hooks for the purpose. She also found herself unable to refuse when a large sample was thrust into her hands.
Despite mainly eating a largely plant based and responsibly sourced pescatarian diet, my partner will on occasion, most often when dining with family and friends, particularly when it's prepared to pass or some Asian dishes and styles, eat some meat. When I prepared lunch that day, inevitably using the sausage, after her first sample, she wound up sending a photo to her foodie friend with whom she'd often shared top US, the caption repeating her immediate exclamation, ‘I've just eaten the best chorizo I've ever tasted!’.
What the picture didn't, couldn't convey was the ambivalent guilt she also experienced with every mouthful.
On Easter Sunday, a day before I was ushered into the family kitchen, we were barely disturbed, and I was able to continue in recovery. A gentle knock at our door brought a delivery of cake, sweetbreads and candied nuts, in the late morning.
We could hear pealing bells of the slightly distant local church more frequently and convivial voices of extended family arriving next door to eat. It was an old together more muted affair than we've been led to expect before arriving and little of it seemed to be different as a result of my partner's discussion with the owner's son.
There were no fireworks or loud celebrations. No shift from reverent mourning into exuberant festivity.
A year later, in the village where terreno says, just eighteen kilometres away, as the crow flies, and slightly lower in the mountains, smaller than where we were before, we had every reason to expect something relatively similar. We couldn't have been more wrong and the travelogues more right.
Mood in the nearby market town, in the week leading up to Pascoa, was as we'd remembered. We laid in supplies early and again retreated back up the mountain.
Seeking to take extra precautions, a few days before Easter Sunday, we visited the local café, the defacto hub of village activity, run by a congenial and hardworking - there, in its adjoining mercearia, the village community and agricultural lands all around, to her won and her neighbours benefit - owner, who was also the native we’d had most contact with. She also spoke no English and her Portuguese was heavily, locally accented, as well as differing distinctly from that of our previous hostess.
Despite the language barriers, possibly because our Portuguese, if still basic, was improving, there were few misunderstandings between us and her. When there previously, we’d formed the basis of a friendly relationship with her. She’d embraced and greeted us warmly on our first visit there, after our return.
With still a little more language learned, having insisted to the north occasion - as we'd each repeat again and to many others, ‘Falo uma pequena mais Portuguese, mas preciso practicar!’ - and even less difficulty communicating with her than before, now we enquired what the cafe arrangements and general village activities would be over the Easter weekend.
She explained patiently, augmenting her speech, slowed for us, with gestures and body language, as had become the familiar, apparently reliable, method of communication between us. Things seemed like they would be similar to our experience the previous year.
Although festive, she didn't seem to think it would be too much. The cafe would be closed but she was hosting a feast, in their house above it, for family and friends, some from the village, some not. We were more than a little humbled and honoured when she insisted that, of course, we were invited.
Accepting coma as we left, we immediately asserted to ourselves that some research was needed, as to what customs should be observed. What, if any, was an acceptable gift or offering to take? Would it be a cultural minefield, with us as inept initiates? In the end they were somewhat moot concerns.
Things in the village, its surroundings all within the parish of the local church, a sanctuary, with a former monastery, both dedicated to San Sebastiou, as setting, were more in line with what we had prepared for on our previous stay in the other village, but were, thankfully, given other circumstance, slightly underwhelmed by. Given those events and all other indications, this year we were even less prepared.
In the end, it was impossible for us to attend the feast we've been invited to. Given that I'm still experiencing vivid, palpable synaptic repeats Oh some expediencies and me coma accordingly and as has been the case on other such occasions, me lapse into protracted automatic writing, I'll try to summarise in somewhat contemporary epistolary fashion, repeating an e-mail exchange had with our friend Jose, who I had contacted to rearrange a meeting with as a result:
25 April 2025 – Sender, me: subject line; ‘New things (and bell rings!)’
Boa tarde…
…e feliz dia da liberdade! (Portuguese flag emoji, solidarity fist emoji)
We also hope you and yours had a boa Páscoa! (party face emoji, fireworks emoji)
(seeing how long my explanation had gotten below here, I’ve gone back and added this and put that part into italics; if things aren’t going great for you, health, work or stress wise, please skip over them to the last, most relevant part to you - I don’t want to add unecessarily to your cognitive load at all, its just one of my infamous long winded explanations! – smiling face emoji, shrugging emoji)
It wasn’t so great for us. Starting off pretty well, we felt welcomed and slightly, dare I say, honoured, when the owner of our local cafe in Sobreira, who is fairly traditional and doesn’t speak English, managed to communicate and insist on us attending her family celebration, and for us to understand the whole exchange too!
Then, really intense machine work began on the terrenos around ours, some at 7 in the morning, and sounding like it was right at my head in our current temporary set up. We had expected and prepared for some of it, so I was able to adjust after initial impacts on seizures.
What we hadn’t counted on (and compounded things almost too much) was the
amount of extra bells which would ring out from the local church, which we hear
as clear as if they were right next to us on our terreno. All through Holy
Week they got more frequent, until on Good Friday they were, during some hours,
almost every minute. My seizures increased a bit from them, but
I was managing to mitigate and recover. Then, also on Good Friday,
the fireworks started.
The big ones from the church were really impactful (added to by villagers
setting off their own smaller ones!) and my seizures started clustering
into secondary generalisation (which is like the type of ‘grand mal’ type
seizures you see in the movies - full body seizure, foaming at the mouth, eyes
rolling, loss of consciousness for around five minutes at time), at least three
times a day for around five days! For context, people who have temporal
lobe epilepsy, which is the most common type, are considered in danger (to
life, in some contexts) if they have more than one of these a month which lasts
more than four minutes!
The bells and fireworks also set the local dogs howling and barking all day and
night, which brought on other seizures too, compounding the issues, so there
wasn’t even a break from impacts through the nights, which is generally when
the day’s impacts play out in seizures. Kerry was really worried, things
haven’t been that bad for me since the days around my time of diagnosis, when I
was hospitalised for six weeks.
Finally, in the last two days or so, I have managed to recover a little.
It’s ok, lessons learned! We were in the mountain villages around
Paredes de Coura last Easter, and they didn’t celebrate things as much or for
as long, so we weren’t prepared and couldn’t act as preventatively as we
usually would.
I also felt terrible, when I was conscious enough, because I knew we wouldn’t
be able to attend the celebration we were invited to, feeling like I would not
only be offending the cafe owner but virtually all of, if not Portugal, certainly the village we now
call our second home - I haven’t managed to go there to apologise yet but will
soon!
Primavera is a good time for us to be on our land, planting and working it etc,
and we intended to come for an extended trip each year at this time and harvest
time, until we are staying here for even longer periods - so now we have
resolved to take the chance, over Easter, to have a long weekend, somewhere
else in Europe, checking on their firework based celebrations beforehand, of
course!
All of which is just by way of explanation…
…so, my preparations for new business things, some of which I mentioned to you
before and some I won’t bore you with, have been delayed somewhat. It’s
also my birthday next Wednesday, so we have some plans; my son is coming to
visit for a few days (it’s his first time seeing the land!).
All things considered, would you maybe be available for about a half hour
appointment early the week after, sometime in the afternoon (more than happy to
work around your availability) Monday 5th to Wed 7th May?
I have had some good news (my university has approved a research paper, as a three-year
project, based on our use of the land and are now liaising with two Portuguese
universities and one in Nova Scotia on it too) which also influences my
business plans. It’s become quite exciting (well, to my brain anyway!)
but if hearing more about the business led aspects, you really don’t think it
is for you, please don’t feel obliged or unwilling to say no - absolutely no
offence would be taken!
Also, a quick question; is it the local conservatory we would go to, to
get copies of the articles defining our land and those around us?
Thank you for reading as much as you could, for your patience and for any consideration or information you can give, all of which are always very much appreciated.
Hopefully speak soon.
Best regards
29 April 2025 – Sender, José: subject line; ‘re: New things (and bell rings!)’
Dear friend,
I’m so very sorry to know what you’ve been through. What an awful time you’ve been having.
I was actually kind of shocked reading your e-mail. Waw!
I saw you last week, I passed on my motorbike and saw you going next to ‘Centro de Emprego’, close to your office, with a big bag in your hands, didn’t say anything ‘cause I was in a rush but, I had the feeling by the look of your face that you looked stressed and something was not ok. Now I know why.
About your neighbor, the celebration you were invited to, don’t worry, she will understand it.
The noise, the fireworks, church bells, festivals, dogs barking and all kind of noise is something that people here in the north love. They talk really loud (like I said before, sometimes they will sound like they are arguing, usually thay are not!) and make a lot of noise. It’s just the way it is.
I truly hope that you don’t go through another period of seizures like that. If you run away from local churches during festival periods, you should be safer, because it’s around those churches that the celebrations happen.
Hope I don’t forget to send you happy birthday wishes tomorrow, I’m terrible with these dates. Always skip everyone’s birthday and I don’t do it with my own because my wife keeps reminding me, lol!
For our meeting, Monday the 5th at 2.30pm, sounds good to you? Should it be at my office or yours?
Happy for you about the approval of your project. Congratulations! Although…I didn’t understand what you were talking about when you said that it’s ok for me to say no?!
About the articles, that should be in the Municipality not in Conservatory, here in Arcos it’s the pink building next to the Conservatory.
Wish you a great week and, by the way, Thursday, it’s a holiday again.
Kind regards,
José
29 April 2025 – Sender, me: subject line; ‘Re: Re: New things (and bell rings!)’
Boa tarde José
Thank you so much for your kindness and understanding (as well as patience and perseverance reading through all of my last mail!); its also a follow effect from clustering seizures like I had that my brain takes longer to get back to its usual function, so my mind is slower, less like its usual self too.
For me this manifests in a lot of overthinking - I don’t know how many times I asked Kerry, even though I was functioning a lot better by the time I emailed you, ‘You don’t think José will think I’m a crazy person, telling him too much, wondering why are you explaining all this?’, but she kept reassuring me ‘you know we both like him because he is compassionate, he’ll understand’; and of course she was right!
When you saw me in town, that was me coming back from the lavandaria, after washing all our bedding (there are some unfortunate aspects of seizures people don’t generally consider!), so it was the stress of another after effect, self-loathing, I probably showed on my face. They are not usually big things for me, but we also usually manage to prevent the type of experience I’d just had!
Haha, don’t worry about birthday stuff, I am the same as you, without Kerry I would forget my own too; I am writing this as we prepare to head to Porto to meet my son, then to Braga for two days; we did notice it was a holiday on Thursday, so tweaked our plans a little.
So I don’t go on longer again, I can explain the other little bits, more related to our meeting and over which you were slightly confused, when I see you for our meeting - Monday 5th at 1430 works perfect for me. I’m a little behind in getting our office the way I would want to present it to anyone (folks might have enough difficulty understanding what a ‘resilience agency’ is, without confused décor contributing – the little we have managed to upgrade is still sitting among the previous set up, which, as you know, was from tenants there quite a few years ago!), alongside everything else, so your office works better too, if that’s ok with you.
Until then, have a good end of the week and a restful weekend.
Best wishes and kind regards
29 April 2025 – Sender, José: subject line; ‘re: New things (and bell rings!)’
Good morning
No, I don’t think your crazy or anything like that, I know you, I know how your emails are, and start to proper understand your condition, which I’m deeply sorry for you because it really doesn’t make your life easy.
I was just about to forget… Happy birthday!!!!!!!!!!!! Nice and easy on the celebrations (blushing smiley face emoji)
Enjoy your birthday with Kerry and your son, I hope he likes your second home.
Wishing you a great day!
See you Monday at my office.
All the best,
José
So, although some of the dates fall a little beyond those covered in the title to this post, I’ve included them because the start of the conversation does. He was right, our friend, the café owner understood with no little compassion too, although, she was a little circumspect in her emphasis on, ‘Well, it’s a festa, there are fireworks, there is noise’, too, just as José was.
There might be a long road to travel, as there is in so many other places regarding so many other things, for the social model of disability to influence any change over how they celebrate Pascoa in the village. Its ok, as I let José know, we’ll mitigate.
We are new here, they are not.