Vocal Voices

Any news Jan?

Looks like we're going to be getting new neighbours sometime. Dan and Becky next door are looking at getting their house on the market. Their oldest son is at the junior school on the estate, he's about 8, and they want to move back to Wolverhampton so that he (and subsequently his brother) can get into one of the secondary schools there. B teaches in one there so she obviously knows which the good ones are. That'll be a shame as they're a lovely family.

Crikey Ton I missed this!
Hope you get good news from the solicitor x

Jo that's a shame, always a bit disconcerting when you get a change of neighbour, although we've been very lucky with each of ours.

Di, thankfully it's not the ones joined on to us. Their house is sort of at a right angle to ours as we're on a corner and they're the next house around the corner but our drive and garage is next to theirs. Three houses have been sold on the close since we moved in almost seven years ago and out of those three there's only the one opposite where the new people are friendly.

We can't stop them from using the bottom part of the land, it's been notorised and we agreed to access when we bought. All of the legal side of it was done before we bought it.

Only we weren't aware they were going to sell it.

As regards the electric, we're going to wait until they actually sell it before we do anything. They haven't got permission to put anything on the land, just access over it.

I saw Sue this morning and explained that we were rather surprised that she is selling it, when we understood her sister owned the land and would have liked a polite "oh, by the way, we're hoping to sell the land and you'll be getting a lot of people over it" from her.

She did apologise, but I didn't stay any longer to ask anything else, as half of the cafe was listening

There are many ruins around here for sale and most have better views, flat land and don't flood, so it will hopefully take many years to sell, if at all.

I should add that the original access is through a normally dry river bed, and it was for all three houses up here, but Mercedes changed it when she bought the land.

They can get to the land from there, but it is easier this way.

We had a good look this morning and they would have great difficulty getting concrete lorries and any other large truck through the opening, due to the angle.

That may just make their life a little difficult, as I'm not going to remove any posts, fencing or pillars.

And to be fair, it's not really going to make a huge impact on our lives here. I'm more concerned about Judy and Carlos, as their bedroom windows are very close to the boundary.

My only real concern is water. We're all having to be very careful, as no-one knows how much water is down there. Another bore hole would make a difference.

Hmmm...that's not a problem that you want to have to deal with is it

Dimas says that this area of the Alentejo will normally have 10 years of rain and 10 years of drought.

We're now in the 7th year of drought.

The local barragem is a puddle, literally.

How much rain, typically, could you get every year once the drought ends?

Think we need about a years worth of rain Jo

When it rains here, it really really chucks it down.

When we were in the Algarve, we had rain very day from 22 December until 22 February. Absolutely poured down, every day As much as i don't like being wet, I'd love that now.

But looking at the long range weather, we have one day of rain, possibly, this month, a few days next month and not much more for January

November and February are normally our wettest months.