| From The Algarve - September 07
Let’s ignore the majority of Portuguese drivers who don’t know how to work the indicator switch, and examine some of the more serious aspects of life here.
This has been the season for refurbishing petrol stations, most of which have bars as well as petrol pumps. Our nearest garage was closed for two or more months while the forecourt was resurfaced, the bar and café extended, and the pumps turned sideways. Then there was the grand re-opening. Newprices. New signs warning you not to smoke and to switch off your engine, and an open-air firework display!
Our post office has also been refurbished. There were queues in the old post office and there are queues in the new one. In the old one, I had become tolerant of people who hurried to the front of the queue to ask the assistant to turn on one of the three phone booths at the rear of the office so that they could make a call.
The refurbished post office has been open for two months (I went on opening day. It was empty apart from the assistants and three men in suits supervising the opening: but there was a table with cakes, biscuits, wine, and orange juice for first day customers). There is now only one phone booth. It has not yet been connected.
Then there are stamps. A stamp for the UK now costs 61 cents. Up to this year, the stamps for the UK were increased annually by one cent, so you bought a stamp at the old rate, and a one-cent stamp to add to it. The printing of that stamp and its distribution must have cost much more than the single cent.
Finally, magazines. Even the smallest newsagent has at least 40 magazines on display (plus two daily football papers). One newsagent told me that most of them were unsold at the end of the week, taken away by the distributors, and replaced with the latest issue. But go to a hospital or to a doctor’s surgery and look round those waiting for an appointment (at the local hospital, there could be as many as sixty patient patients), and none of them are reading anything.
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