WAGS 28.10.2020: Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble!

 

'Bubbles' by Millais

       It has been a long hard week in AR (Active Retirement), and the Lagos Bubble failed to meet on Wednesday, for the second week of Bubbling. I was reminded of a verse:-

Dip your pipe and gently blow.
Watch the tiny bubble grow
Big and bigger, round and fat,
Rainbow-colored, and then
SPLAT!

    And it was a bit of this and a bit of that. I had a rearranged 10am. appointment at HPA which I couldn't miss, the Consultants becoming very hard to pin down these days, and of course time slipped out of the window like an errant bubble, and so did our walk. So I won't bore you with an account of that event, but just as a side note as we didn't get back from Alvor until almost 2pm and decided to reacquaint ourselves with Sergio at Pedra Alcada Cafe  for lunch, as I hadn't seen him since March. 

            

He was on fine form, greeted us like long lost friends, and delighted us with his Pratos do Dia, a baby squid stew for me and a stuffed pepper for Myriam.

Very welcome for a late lunch at €6,50 per head.

If I remember correctly, only a select few had been introduced to this establishment at The Secret Christmas Lunch on 20.12.2017.

https://w-a-g-s.blogspot.com/2017/12/wags-secret-christmas-lunch-20122017.html

I had thought we were here after a WAGS walk with John, Hazel and Rod, but I may have imagined it!!

Anyway Antje and Chris had also been slightly more active with Sascha, and I received a fuller exposition than the previous week BY THURSDAY EVENING!!!

Here it is:

A short report about today’s outing.

We had intended to stay close to home as the service engineer for the boiler had announced we would come today. Then a message this morning that he could not come after all until tomorrow. So we took the opportunity and drove to Carrapateira.

Cafe Bravo was closed so the local Social Club provided coffees and facilities.
We started off heading towards Sitio do Forno and Praia do Amado. The sun soon came out and we shed a layer of clothing.

We met nobody until the beach where we found just a few surfer 🏄‍♂️ wagons and nobody in the water. 

Sascha went for dip while we walked the length of the beach. We then turned left and made a loop which took us eventually back to Carrapateira.

Distance was 5 km but could be extended by going via Praia da Bordeira or making a larger return loop.

We finished with lunch at Vista do Rio. No Toastes at lunch they said but the fish soup was good and so the Calamares fritos.

Thanks Antje. Culinary photography needs a little work but at least you 3 saved the honour of the Lagos Bubble.

Meanwhile, over in Silves:-

This Wednesday, the WAGS Silves Bubble of Five was in danger of being reduced to only two. Rod was away gallivanting before the All Souls week-end lock-down; Maria had work to do; and Yves was embroiled in one of his periodic disputes with the financial bureaucracy. But in the nick of time Terry, Jill and Becky responded to the call and made up the Five, although it cannot be said that Becky looked particularly thrilled at her promotion to full if temporary membership.

Despite the apparently glum looks on our faces, it was a comparatively light-hearted group that set off from Pescadores. Throughout the preceding week, you will recall, we had all been struggling with the weighty matter of how to identify, let alone define, the French sense of humour. A comment had been published the blog of 21^st October running to approximately 430 words - (there should surely be a limit placed on blog comments, as in Twitter. Just imagine what shenanigans Donald Trump could get up to if he started blog-commenting on that scale.) As far as one could tell, the comment was advancing the proposition that the French sense of humour is more sophisticated than the British one. Well, one can concede that Voltaire could sometimes be witty:

“Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.”

But one would struggle to find humour in Jean-Jacque Rousseau´s philosophising (but then of course he was a Calvinistic Swiss.) Rabelais, who was the sort of humorist who would find the scatalogical sound effects emanating from Paul´s smartphone highly comical, wasn´t mentioned at all. Nor was Jacques Tati´s Mr Hulot and his Holiday. And the interested reader could have been pointed in the direction of Clochmerle whose the town mayor decided that what Clochmerle needed was a vespasienne placed just in front of the church.

Tout a commencé quand Barthélemy Piéchut, maire de Clochemerle-en-Beaujolais, dévoila à Ernest Tafardel, l'instituteur, son projet :« Je veux faire construire un urinoir, Tafardel. Un urinoir ! s'écria l'instituteur, tout saisi, tant la chose aussitôt lui parut d'importance. Le maire se méprit sur le sens de l'exclamation : Enfin, dit-il, une pissotière ! »Cette vespasienne, destinée, bien plus peut-être, à confondre Mme la baronne Alphonsine de Courtebiche, le curé Ponosse, le notaire Girodot et les suppôts de la réaction, qu'à procurer un grand soulagement à la gent virile de Clochemerle, sera édifiée tout près de l'église où Justine Putet, aride demoiselle, exerce une surveillance étroite.

A clash of personalities ripe with potential for comedy, as you can tell from its opening. But the book wasn´t mentioned. Just why the Roman Emperor Vespasian should have a pissoir named after him is a mystery; perhaps it is an example of the French peculiar sense of humour, Anyway, there was so much more Yves (for it was indeed he who had authored the comment could have given by way of example but, for some reason, he then launched a totally unprovoked attack on the sainted Billy Connolly, alleging the few had any idea what the man was saying. What nonsense! Since every third word Billy Connolly utters is the “F” word, most people understand at least a third of what he is on about. But as all that stuff was a bit too heavy to contemplate again, our group of five contented ourselves at laughing at Terry´s tales of his correspondence with HMRC about residency.

Yves did however strike a note of humour during the week when he circulated a brief video to a select few with the message:

9 out of 10 urologists agree that regularly emptying your bladder can save your life. The evidence is overwhelming!

However, if he had applied his customary Aristotelian logic to what was being suggested in the video, he would soon have realised that it was an example of a variety of the Post Hoc fallacy, or Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy, to give it its full name. This is a logical fallacy of the questionable cause variety: subtly different from the  Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy, in which two events occur simultaneously or the chronological ordering is insignificant or unknown. Post hoc is a particularly tempting error because correlation appears to suggest causality. The fallacy lies in a conclusion based solely on the order of events, rather than taking into account other factors potentially responsible for the result that might rule out the connection.

Proof that this video is a fallacy lies in the following alternative scenario.

The young man controls his impulse to park his Mercedes and irrigate the trees. He does not stop but carries on driving, passes the HGV with its load of boulders a kilometre or so further along the road, and so is nowhere near the spot where and when the HGV hits a pothole in the road, shedding a boulder which bounces harmlessly into the undergrowth.

But back to our walk. About twenty minutes into the walk we were joined by a large flock of goats which accompanied us up the track for some way. We asked the goatherd how many animals he had and got answers varying between eighty to a hundred. All very disciplined.

At the top of the valley, we turned towards the east and took a path which a few months ago during Quarantine One had been so heavily overgrown that, when the Four WAGS Irregulars had tackled it, Yves and I had had to send Hazel and Maria ahead of us to clear a way through for us. But now, the whole landscape has been opened up. Trees have been felled; terraces cleared of undergrowth and freshly demarcated; and hitherto obscured tracks opened up. So the walking was gentle and very easy.

We met the goats again as we turned for home.

The distance of a little bit over 7.4 kilometres was just about enough for Hazel and her new special insoles.

 Back at Pescadores, sad to say but perhaps a sign of the times, Dona Fernanda is no longer doing lunches - not enough regular customers, apparently - so no bean soup. We had to make do with coffees, beers and potato crisps instead.

But back at Casa E afterwards, Hazel gave the Leader a consoling plate of bacon and eggs.

                                East African beer tankard courtesy of Ian Scott.

And here endeth the Silves Bubble's contribution, which not only admirably described their outing, but also dealt deftly with Yves misconceptions.

Not much really to add, and as it is already Monday morning I won't. I had been waiting to hear if we were going to suffer any more restrictions that might interfere with even our limited activity. Just thank our stars that we are not in UK, As of now it looks like we may continue with bubbles of 5 and cross Concelho boundaries by Wednesday except for Sao Bras.

     Keep on walking where you can and even if you only have one photo and a couple of sentences, let myself or John know about it, so we can pad out this blog more easily!  I am already racking my brains for more bubble themed information for next week!!

    Take care and stay healthy!

It had to be done - Some old classic fun from the innocent days!