If you say ‘wild boars’ often enough you begin to hear it in Simon Le Bon’s voice and finish the sentence with ‘never lose it’.
And that is what I do now everyday. I have Duran Duran’s The Wild Boys song permanently playing in my head thanks to the wild boar population in central Portugal.
Wild boar
Tonight is a fine example, but first I need to explain our house. Typically in rural Portugal, you have to go outdoors to go down the steps to the other indoor living areas. So our bedrooms, kitchen, dining area and bathroom are upstairs whilst the sitting room/lounge is downstairs.
As Lou and I were leaving the indoor area to go downstairs to watch TV, we heard what sounded like a snuffling sound and scarpering hooves. The creature (what we think was a wild boar) will have been startled, but Lou and I were panicked too! We quickly put on the outside light and used our phone as a torch. We couldn’t see anything.
We decided that we wouldn’t take our chances with a 200 kg wild boar in the vicinity so we went back inside. The Apprentice wasn’t going to be a big enough draw for us to chance making It to the sitting room!
Wild bore
And so that means it leaves me writing this little blog and Lou shouting the occasional wild boar fact at me as she researches wild boar on the Google thingy, hence the weight that I gave earlier.
Interestingly, wild boars never chose this way. Wild boars never close your eyes and wild boars always shine. Who knew?!
It’s funny creating a well-being centre. At the moment I don’t have the feeling of ‘being well’ at all! With the budget getting a beating everyday, which requires Lou and I having emergency budget meetings as our evening entertainment, we have certainly entered a critical stage of development.
And yesterday was a 12 hour day of filming too. Although the camera was not rolling continuously, anything that I said to the camera man that could make good telly made him grab his camera as he asked me to say it again for the camera. But, in fairness, it’s a fantastic experience to be filmed for one of the most watched programmes in our house. And Zak, the camera man, has been brilliant with the kids.
Finlay had the opportunity to hold the camera and film me strimming some of the land. I’m not sure what would’ve looked more odd to any passers by. A man strimming 2000 square meters of overgrown land with a battery operated strimmer that lasts for half an hour before needing recharging or a 7 year old filming it with a 7kg professional camera on his shoulder. Probably both.
But for anybody that points out that I need a bigger strimmer I quickly remind them of our emergency budget meetings! So the battery operated one will do for now. Plus it makes good telly.
Things are progressing well. Even the geckos have been interested in how things are going. If we continue at this pace then we will have a guest house to rent out for the beginning of summer. The out building work will begin after but this will be a much smaller project with, we hope, an income to plug the holes in the leaky finances. So we might have a little more breathing space by then.
A gecko looks on from the window shutter.
In the meantime Zak, or indeed Finlay, will continue to film the ups and downs of our creation. All being well.
As Zak, the camera man, mic’d me up and briefed Lou and I on the sort of questions he would ask once the camera started rolling, a million answers whizzed through my head.
I had prepared for this moment, after all I was a dedicated viewer of A New Life In The Sun after watching each series multiple times. I knew the sort of footage they were wanting.
And then the red light appeared on the camera as he asked, “So, why did you move to Portugal?”
“……………” The moments after that were a blur. Seconds felt like hours as I tried to find a word or two. I looked at Lou as she eventually began to answer.
My big TV moment flashed before my eyes as I nodded and agreed with Lou’s reply to the question.
I had answers to his question. Quality of life. New adventure. It’s a beautiful country. Good food. Sun. Brexit. Business opportunity. The answers were there! But not in that moment.
I did, however, pull myself together to film what was 9 hours of potential footage for the programme. By the end of the day It felt more natural. He will be filming until September by which time I fully expect that I’ll be such a professional in front of the screen I’ll be demanding 138 green seedless grapes and my fan letters to be left in my room each day.
But there’s important stuff to do. As much as the filming seems like it will be an enjoyable experience and the exposure for our business will be great once the show is aired, there’s 20,000 square metres of land to sort out. This includes three forests, two houses, multiple out buildings including a pig pen, chicken coup and other storage units.
It’s the forests that kept me awake last night though. Unkept, these can be dangerous when the really hot weather comes. Wild fires are frequent in the Portuguese countryside and can have devastating effects. I’ve already downloaded an app that tells me when a fire is reported and by how many of the bombeiros (fire department) are dealing with it.
By the end of April, landowners are legally required to have their land prepared for the summer. The government threatens fines of up to 10,000 euros for those who do not comply with the ‘land cleaning’ rules. Luckily, the local community is very helpful and knowledgeable at dealing with this issue and are wanting to offer their time and equipment to sort out the land for their new ‘estranheiro’ neighbours. After all, it benefits them too. They don’t need a city slicker from England like me causing any wildfires in the village!
The past week has seen lots of development on the cottage house. This will be rented out and with finances dwindling the finished article can’t come soon enough. If we can open for the summer season then that will be a welcome boost for our funds to be then able to continue the work on my gym studio, Lou’s therapy room and bar/patio area.
Zak, the camera man, will be back on Monday and Tuesday to follow us working on it all again. Hopefully I can hold it together and answer simple questions this time.
But for now I’ll leave you with a few more updated pics from the week that was.
Massage room and bar/patio area with the gym studio in the distance.Builders taking down a water tank from the roof of where our bathroom currently is.Without the unsightly water tank and with a lick of paint.A new concrete floor laid in the rental cottage.The first floor window is getting prepared for a door with a Juliette balcony.
In my line of work, a progress picture has always meant stripping down to your undies and taking a photo of yourself every month or so in order to see the progress you are making in your fitness goals.
Whether this be a bulk, a cut, muscle build or fitting into a certain outfit, I find that progress pictures can be a much better way of evidencing your efforts than the weighing scales or fat calipers.
But I have a progress picture of a different sort at the moment and it is a building. The essence of the progress picture theory remains the same in my eyes though, and that is that whilst it is good to keep a check on your work, you must always remember the end goal. You might be unimpressed for some time, but if you trust the process then the outcome will be pleasing to you.
So, what is the process? I have a realistic plan in place that I can stick to with timelines and budgets. I involve professionals where necessary. I understand that the outcome of the process will make me very happy instead of being extremely unhappy in a previous life. This happiness means a better life for me and my family. That becomes my daily motivation. When things don’t go to plan or I’m not happy with a progress picture then I can rationalize with this. It is for the greater good and I continue to trust the process that has been laid out by myself and the professionals.
So, whether it’s a fitness plan or building a rental property, there are parallel lines that can be drawn. Either way, determination, tears, asking for help and documenting the progress all seem to be good ingredients.
I’ll leave you with a few progress pics of my own and keep you updated. For now friends, have a great day.
The building before work started.One of the downstairs rooms.A view for the top floor.A bit of a clear out needed in the bottom room.After a day with the builders, the areas are emptied and the interior walls knocked down.A new roof is on our to-do list.The roof and door will be raised and a new first floor will be created.A picture of what will be some lovely double doors leading onto the courtyard from the bedroom suite (right) the small door will be filled to create the bathroom area.
A weird day today. The rain has not stopped here in Sertá so our plans on painting our house and doing out-doorsy type stuff were postponed. And we don’t have internet at the house yet either, so I’ve been starved of the BBC football news feed all day. And the rotten luck is that when I did get a moment with the WIFI thingy in a cafe the footy headline was that Thiago was injured. That’s not news. Him being available for the weekend would be news.
Anyway, we drove to a cafe not for me to faff on with the BBC Sports page but to get reception to have a phone call with a producer from A New Life In The Sun.
We heard yesterday that our builder is ready to begin work on the second house (to be turned into a holiday rental) on Monday. This was music to ours, the bank manager’s and the production team of A New Life In The Sun’s ears. After all, we need an income, our bank manager is concerned about our dwindling finances and A New Life are wanting to begin filming the mugs who are about to have a breakdown on TV. Everyone wins.
The producer told us that they would send a camera team next Saturday. Exciting stuff! Let’s hope the weather improves. A New Life In The Pissing Rain doesn’t have the same ring to it.
The kids have been great again. They’re coping really well with so many changes. Finlay keeps getting letters with love hearts on them from a girl in his class. He has no idea what she is saying to him, but it’s sweet.
We bought a raclette today. It’s our only cooking device at the moment so I had a square egg sandwich. I’m sure there are many things that can be cooked on a raclette, but if you add ketchup and a slice of cheese to the bread bun and egg you get an egg mcmuffin. We’ll become cultured another day.
Lou and I are playing Solitaire this evening. We will eventually erect a darts board in the courtyard when the rain stops as that is a game we love to play. But for now I’ll have to keep beating her at cards and Scrabble (I hope she doesn’t read my blogs).
But for now, I’ll say ta’ra and spend the rest of the evening saying ‘erect’ over and over in Maranda Hart’s voice.
0700 I’m making the kid’s breakfast. The meeting in Vila de Rei at 10 this morning is on my mind. This is when we officially make the house ours, meet the current owners and exchange the deeds. There’s a lot of money on this and it’s a life changer. Soon, we’ll be home owners in Portugal.
0840 sitting on the balcony of the rented apartment waiting for our 9:15 lift from the estate agents. The view is of a typical town street in Sertá. It serves me some thinking time. Some reflection on our journey so far. Blimey. This time last year we were trying to find out what VISA we needed to live in Portugal! Now we’re here. Its real!
1233 the house is officially ours! The meeting was long and in Portuguese (of course) so it was an odd experience when you’re handing over a lot of cash! However, my language learning has paid off and we stumbled across the finish line.
Officially Knackered
Since the end of 2022 we have been slowly creating a pathway to our new life in Portugal. The hours that have accumulated into days of house searching online (plus two visits) have led us to this point where we can actually say that we have our home and business in Portugal.
But it has also meant taking away the bricks that have been safely built back in England. I gave up my PT business. Lou gave up her treatment room. We took our children out of a wonderful school and we sold our home in Scarborough. We tested our marriage and our mental health and, most terrifyingly, our children’s well being. After all, they are at an age where they had begun to make good friends and they knew adults such as teachers and grandparents who they could rely on and feel safe with. And now the four of us have to start again. Building up relationships, businesses and our home.
Lou and I are officially knackered. I’ve often said that social media can give the wrong impression of events. Recently I’ve shared pictures of myself sitting on the balcony sipping wine, but I didn’t post a picture of me and my wife having a meltdown when our UK house sale fell through.
On Instagram I have posted videos of the wonderful scenery of the local area, but I didn’t post videos of Jonas crying himself to sleep when he was scared of missing his UK friends.
And, on this blog, I have posted a picture of Lou and I holding up the keys to our new home and business. What I won’t post is the picture of us looking over our finances trying to figure out how to get enough clients to pay for it.
So, for all that I can honestly say that we are happy with what we have achieved so far, it’s been a long journey with much further to go before we can really begin to take a step back and fully enjoy it.
But for now, one step at a time, the house is ours.
Above is the Facebook link to mine and my family’s journey in creating our home and business in Portugal. If you haven’t already, take a look and join the group if you are interested to see further developments. There will be a big update over the weekend as we try to get the living areas ‘movable inable’.
Furniture building. We smiled for the camera, but the rest of the time we were cursing the instruction manuals.
A few years ago I trained a man who weighed more than he was happy with. And this wasn’t just an aesthetic thing. His doctor had told him that his BMI was high which categorised him as obese.
During his consultation, he gave me an idea of his eating habits. Along with the convenience and takeaway foods mentioned he also announced that he ‘ate a banana every day, sometimes two.’
He then suggested that maybe he should stop eating bananas in order to cut down the amount of calories he was consuming each day.
Immediately I could identify the problem. He wanted to pass the bananas off as the one food item that was tipping the balance between him gaining weight and losing weight.
A banana has around 100 calories. So potentially he is consuming 200 calories on this tasty, nutritious, vitamin packed fruit. That is 200 calories well spent, but he didn’t want to admit that it was. He wanted to hear that the crisps and chocolate were well spent. He wanted me to tell him that 3 takeaways a week was normal and it’ll ‘save on the washing up’. But he didn’t want me to tell him how many calories are in the five pints of lager he regularly drinks at the pub.
Of course, I told him to keep the bananas. I also told him to keep some of the food that wasn’t so nutritious. After all, takeaway foods aren’t the whole problem here, it’s the amount of takeaways.
But I knew that I had to work on his attitude surrounding food much more than I had to work on his training program. He was a good trainee. In fact he has been one of the most hardworking trainees I have trained in my ten years as a PT. He was always on time. He learnt good form quickly and he would spend extra time in the gym and go for long walks on rest days.
But the bananas had left his diet. In fact most fruit had. There’s this misconception that fruit sugars are bad for us. Fruit is indeed high in natural sugar, but this enters the bloodstream at a much slower pace than refined sugar. That is why we get a sugar spike from a sweet treat and it can often be an overload on the body.
My client had targeted the banana as the problem. This is absolutely normal and very common.
It seems to be human nature to blame the one thing that is easy to get rid of rather than tackle the bigger issue.
When I lived in Scarborough there was a news report that said that the council had identified seagulls pooing in the sea as the major reason for the sea pollution in South bay. The pollution meant that the beach did not receive its blue flag award.
So if it was the seagulls causing the pollution then the public no longer had to be concerned about the chip factory that had been discharging starchy waste into the sea for the past 50 years.
Those damn seagulls. Flying around their natural habitat. Pooing.
But I understand the problem for the council. This factory is a major employer to the local community. It is important to have a thriving industry in the area.
The culling of seagulls is easier to address. We all want to believe that this will solve the pollution problem.
I have had a recent issue in not being able to come to terms with a problem. Having just bought a trendy coffee machine where I put a capsule in and out comes a silky smooth coffee I began to drink more caffeine. These capsules had an ‘intensity’ of ten which, by all accounts, is strong! I quickly became addicted to drinking this deliciously intense coffee.
By midday I was bouncing about my apartment like Michael Gove at a rave.
But recently I have been getting pretty bad headaches. At first I blamed the atmospheric pressure, then my sleeping pattern, my contact lenses, the sun, my aftershave.
I briefly considered it to be the coffee intake but I shrugged it off and brewed myself another shot of espresso. That is until Lou sat me down and had to break the news to me.
She believed it to be the coffee and told me to halve my coffee consumption and see how I feel. Of course, she was correct. I just didn’t want her to be.
The daily banana is in no way to blame for obesity. The seagull crapping in the sea isn’t to blame for not receiving a blue flag beach. And a few splashes of brut behind my ear is not the cause of my headaches.
In each case, something that we want and feel that we need is a much more contributing factor. And you can bet that in every similar scenario there is a resolution and a compromise. We don’t need to give up something that we enjoy completely.
After three years of working with me, my client changed his weight, his attitude to food and his whole life. And we did it all whilst allowing the birds to crap in the sea.
I like Christmas. Well, I don’t mind it. The enthusiasm has come back a bit since becoming a dad. But every year when December hits and I hear the first dulcet tones of another festive Bublé effort, I strap myself in for the month ahead and hope I don’t lose my mind.
The week between Christmas and the new year hits me the hardest. It doesn’t even have a name. It’s just known as ‘the week between Christmas and New year.’
“Oh, Shay, when shall we have a catch up?”
“I dunno, should I just contact you the week between Christmas and New year?”
It’s like purgatory.
The day after boxing day is when we restock the alcohol, which is incredible really, seeing as we seem to buy the whole stock of a Wetherspoons pub on Christmas eve. This is a Christmas eve tradition as we always believe that the supermarkets are closed forever after Christmas eve when, in fact, they reopen on boxing day.
I need a stiff drink to get over another play of ‘Santa Baby’, so leading up to Christmas is when I start to drink stuff that I wouldn’t think of drinking at any other time of year. Brandy and Irish cream goes in my coffee. Whisky and dry. Jack Daniels. Snowball. I mean, WTF even is that?!
The week between Christmas and new year takes a similar path. We also discovered that many of the locals in rural Portugal have basements dedicated to brewing their own wine. So by the time Antonio had given me his last drop of rocket fuel on new year’s day I was ready to have some time away from alcohol.
A week has passed and I am still in no way ready to drink anything alcoholic.
But there is usually a strange excuse for me to have a little tipple. A birthday, a weekend, a birth or the sunshine. And I sometimes commiserate with a drink too. All it takes is for a soppy movie about a dying dog and out comes the crate of Sagres.
But, for now, it is a dry January. After all, I’m making up for a very wet December.
Never Give Up PT 