9th May CASTELO BRANCO

OMG, we’ve bought Donkey Quinta!!!!! Only it’s not really called Donkey Quinta it’s called Fonte Dos Clerigos – Spring of the Clerics. We went into the estate agents before lunch, did some haggling (Brett) and by 2.00 we’d arranged the transfer of the deposit from our bank in Britain to the estate agent’s bank – so ‘no going back’! It’s a really quick and easy process (as long as all the paperwork is in order, and ours is) we could be completed by the end of next week.

Portugal is a little different to Britain; when you sell in Britain once you have completed you have to move out (obviously!) and anything you leave behind belongs to the buyers. Well here we’re told it is customary practise (goodwill) that when one of these small farms is sold (and I’m not sure how legal this is) that the seller can come back and harvest the crops he’s planted – our seller put in potatoes last week (they take about 4 months to grow) so that means he’s allowed to come back and pick them in September? And there was me being all smug about him keeping the vegetable patch up; I will be scrumping!.

The estate agent took us to get our fiscal numbers, so we can pay taxes (yippee) and tomorrow we’ll be opening a Portuguese bank account – it’s all a little bit scary.  It’s weird we’ve been so keen to get this and this afternoon we’re both feeling rather flat; hopefully we’ll start feeling excited soon.

Later the same evening ....................... We’ve just eaten; we bought a ½ kilo of giant prawns (rather expensive, 8 prawns cost €13.67 or £11.20) and a bottle of, what we thought was champagne type wine, but turned out to be a fizzy red wine (one of the few things that Brett will drink is champagne, he didn’t like the ‘warmish’ red fizzy!) for our celebration meal; the prawns were lovely (and quite filling) and I enjoyed the wine! We’re getting very excited now – we’re planning our house, it’s going to be so bloody fantastic (as all our visitors will see).

The weather is HOT again (hoorah we managed to do our washing), it’s  now 10.00 p.m. and it’s still 28°C; Friday is supposed to be 30°C – I spent a long time this evening cutting the sleeves out of all my tops.