The community spirit in this very hidden part of central Portugal is remarkable. Although very rural, there are houses around us with some very lovely neighbours. Down the road is Jenny (it sounds like Jenny so we just call her Jenny) who often drops in early morning to give us bread before she goes to the market to sell what she has baked through the night.
Around the corner of our property is Ricardo, Isabella and their two children of similar age to our lads. They live in Lisbon but return to their Sertá home during the holidays. In the past week they have given our boys two bikes and invited them to watch Portugal V Croatia while having dinner.
And across the road is Antonio. An elderly gentleman who invited us to celebrate his 78th birthday with his family a couple of weeks ago. He seems to have taken to us. A few weeks ago he said that he smelt the paella we were making wafting towards his house so he invited himself for dinner! He often visits for a chat throughout the day, although he only speaks Portuguese and we attempt our very sketchy version of the language. He doesn’t seem to mind.
Lately, he has been coming daily to get his blood pressure monitored. It’s a request from his doctor to get a daily reading and he chose us to help him with this. We are honoured to assist in any way we can. That’s the community way here.
In return he brings us a bag of something that he is growing in his garden. It’s usually tomatoes but yesterday it was figs. Hmm, what to do with figs!
Something we have tried to keep a constant in the mayhem of our lives during the past 12 months is to prepare a smoothie each morning to give us that healthy kick. It feels like, even if the rest of the day doesn’t go to plan regarding a healthy diet (and let’s face it, it doesn’t always) at least we have had a nutritious boost in the morning. Figs, so we found out, made a great addition!
Here’s what we put into the Nutribullet for our smoothie…
Two bananas, five figs (skin on), Greek yoghurt, two scoops of peanut butter and a bit of water.
The results were amazing! Even the kids loved it as it was just like a creamy banana milkshake.
Each day we keep learning about different nutritious elements that we can add to our lives, but the biggest addition to our lives is that of community. A togetherness that, no matter what colour, language or creed, we can all add something special to each other’s lives.
If only the rest of the world could add those ingredients. What a wonderful place we could have.
We have been so busy dealing with all other aspects of the property we bought, we haven’t given our own house much TLC. On the day we got the keys we ensured that we made the inside of our house liveable for us and the kids which we did straight away. It is a comfortable space with extra outdoor areas such as an outdoor kitchen and sitting room that can be utilised for most of the year due to the weather. We have also created a TV room/games room and utility room in the downstairs areas. But the façade needed work.
The building is an old farm building. It will always be rustic. But it was all looking a bit too tatty for our liking. This week we set to work on improving its look. Here’s a few before and afters…
After a jet wash
So obviously it didn’t look as bad as this before the jet wash, but we needed to get the flakey paint off.
A primer coat
After applying a primer we were happy with the progress.
A first top coat has been applied, plus the doors have been painted.At night
We still need to apply a few decorative bottles with lights and stuff but, as you can see, our house looks much better after a week of work on it.
This week the UK government said that it wants to ban cigarette smoking in pub gardens, outside nightclubs and around children’s play parks. Now, it would be hard to find a reasonable argument for being allowed to smoke in or around a kids play park, but I’m not sure about elsewhere. Here’s what I think…
I am living in central Portugal. Cigarettes are still sold in cafe vending machines. Supermarkets have Tobacaria shops inside them and even cafe bars attached to them. Doing your weekly shop, stopping for a smoke while downing a beer or wine before loading your car and driving away is common.
I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore but do occasionally vape electronically in private. I haven’t openly smoked anything since becoming a dad and a Personal Trainer. Smoking while doing either of those jobs is not cool. But I don’t begrudge anybody else smoking. In fact, seeing people sitting around a table outside a cafe in Sertá, chatting and laughing in different languages makes me feel happy and truth be known, before I moved here, it was one of the images that I went to sleep imagining. The cafe music, the different languages and the server bringing out olives and wine on a sunny day, all under a cloud of Marlboro is all very European. That appeals to me.
Some of my best memories of holidays abroad haven’t necessarily been on a beach or doing karaoke at an all inclusive, but visiting an art gallery or castle in Europe. And it was always followed by sitting outside a cafe to talk about what I had discovered, either with my family or with complete strangers.
And although in the beer garden at Wetherspoons there was plenty of alcohol and smoking, I never did get onto the subject of how the Duomo bell tower was constructed with its customers.
Outside a cafe in Sertá
Ah yes. Wetherspoons. Where you can openly shout about hating foreigners while drinking Belgian beer. After that, you can go for a Turkish kebab, watch American TV or cheer on a few Africans in your favourite football team on your Japanese TV while sitting on a Swedish sofa. In the morning, you can drive your German car and if you have an accident you will be seen by a Spanish nurse. Once you are better again, you can go back to Wetherspoons and shout about those ‘bloody foreigners’ in a building most likely to be funded by the European Union. Just remember to wipe your feet on the way out.
And before you start criticising me for being down on Britishness, Wetherspoons is and continues to be a very big factor in what is the cause of a loss of Britishness on the high streets. The Wetherspoons franchise has slowly dismantled the great British pub. You can’t get your piss stained peanuts from a bowl at the bar while drinking a pint of Best at the local Fox and Hounds anymore because Tim Martin came along with his cheap drinks and all day breakfast.
Traditional pubs are ceasing to exist anymore and for all we can blame smoking bans and energy costs, the fact remains that Tim Martin will always be able to make his food and drink way cheaper than Sandra the landlady at The Fox And Hounds.
‘But what about this new smoking ban, Shay?!’ I hear you all ask. ‘Surely it is better for our health and will be less of a burden to the NHS?!’
Smoking is not the number one factor in what causes the two most deadly killers in the UK (heart disease and Alzheimer’s). In fact, everything else they sell in a pub or nightclub are by far the major reasons. That all day breakfast? The Belgian beer or the pint of Best?
In 2022 there were just over 10,000 alcohol related deaths. Obesity causes 30,000 deaths each year. Food and drink related deaths are on the rise and will soon be above smoking related deaths in the years to come. I’m not saying that smoking is better, but it does seem to be the scapegoat when the government talks about unburdening the NHS.
When I watch UK TV I am bombarded by adverts telling me to eat fast food and drink alcohol. Not only is fast food or alcohol not banned but perfectly celebrated as the stuff we should be doing, promoted on national TV!
So eating and drinking crap in a pub is fine, but dare to step into its garden and light up a cigarette and you’re a pariah. You see, it makes no sense.
When I became a PT I wanted to give a different message to what I was seeing and hearing from mainstream gyms and media. It is also how I’ve continued to work at our health and wellbeing centre in Portugal. The misunderstanding from gyms and the media is that health and wellbeing is all about physical health and wellbeing. But I think a little differently.
If society (or your PT) is constantly berating your lifestyle choices such as what you eat, drink or smoke, then this is not going to be a positive contribution to your mindset or your life. You don’t employ a PT for them to tell you that lettuce is better for you than a pizza, or water is better for you than a gin and tonic. Nor should you employ a PT to tell you that not smoking is better for you than smoking.
Balancing these better for you things and the not as good for you things, for me, is the much better position to be in regarding our mental health. This, in turn, can contribute to a more active lifestyle and produce better physical results.
Smoking ten cigarettes a day instead of 20 is a fantastic start. Having a fortnightly takeaway is better than a weekly takeaway and drinking a few beers three nights of the week instead of five is going to positively impact you further.
No bans. No stress. No guilt. Just small things that we call balance.
So, my conclusion and my two penn’orth in the smoking debate is this…
Keep cigarettes, takeaways and alcohol and get rid of Wetherspoons. Society in the UK will seem like a much brighter place.
It might seem excessive to be creating a car park (estacionamento) at our property for ten cars. After all, so far we only have one holiday rental home with one bedroom. But we are in the process of readying ourselves for the bigger picture.
That picture involves private parking for our own vehicles, the guest’s vehicle, space for the private gym and massage therapy room and small group training. There’s also an opportunity to expand the holiday rental side with another small building which is probably way down the line. We need to make the first one work first!
Here are a few pics of me clearing some space by the road side and filling it with stone dust. Also, we have recently dug up the stretch of land (with the help of a man with a tractor) which is a football field long and home to fruit and olive trees. It is also a great space for the boys to ride their bikes!
Today was another ‘lifestyle’ shoot with A New Life In The Sun. We decided on a trip to one of our favourite cafes, Cavalha, to get a few shots of us sipping wine and drinking coffee. The long coffee drink in Portugal (as opposed to the espresso shot) is called an abatanado.
It was also an opportunity to film along the Ribeira da Sertá, which is a stunning, clear river running through the centre of the town. We never tire of this part of Sertá. It’s where they held their four day Festa just a couple of weeks ago, it’s where the very safe play park is for the kids, it has cafes aplenty and it is the go to place for when Lou and I want to sit by the river after dropping the kids off at school. Many plans for the day have been drawn out sitting by the river before we head back to our property to begin work.
Lou and I haven’t managed that headspace for a couple of months now though. The boys broke up from school in mid June and they’ve still got 3 weeks left of their summer holidays. School summer holidays are long in Portugal. This will be fantastic when we are established, but this year has been tough to fully appreciate our times together.
Also, filming can become a long, stressful process too! Don’t get me wrong, it’s a box to tick in life. After all, ANLITS is the most viewed programme on Channel 4 in the UK and is repeated on various platforms. Last night I spoke to a previous contributor of the show who moved to Portugal to set up a glamping business on series 7. We agreed that while filming is fun and it will give a business much needed exposure, it can also take up a lot of time out of the day. And when there are the obvious pressures of starting a new life and business abroad to contend with, sharing an ultra stressful day with the world on camera can be difficult.
Our biggest stress at the moment is about getting our first booking for the holiday home. We recognise that we have missed most of the summer and people usually plan ahead when booking such places, so we’re hoping for scraps in September. But I refuse to become too anxious about this. We are brand new. It will take time for people to know that we actually exist. As long as we follow the process it will be fine.
I also appreciate the quote from writer Kahlil Gibran, who said,” Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to to control it.”
I much prefer to think about the future than become bogged down by past mistakes, but it is important to know that I can’t always control the outcome of the future. Sometimes, once I know that I have done my best, I just need to ‘let it be’.
I also remember the Field Of Dreams quote. “If you build it, they will come.”
Although I much preferred the Wayne’s World version!
The next planned filming is scheduled for our first guests arriving. ANLITS, if you’ve seen the programme, like to film this exciting and nerve-wracking occasion for the participants!
My hope is that this next filming won’t be too far away. After all, we’ve built it, surely they must come!
Held like we’re holding the mixed doubles plaque at Wimbledon, here’s the sign for our Alojamento Local rental property that we need to display to show that we are a registered guest house!
And it feels like we’ve had a few epic matches to reach our finale, but we are officially on booking sites such as Expedia, Booking.com, AirBnB, Hotel.com and Holidu.
It’ll take time for the bookings to start coming as we are towards the end of this summer and most people have probably planned their stays already, but we’re still hopeful for September and the winter months. Also, it’ll be nice to receive bookings way in advance for next summer and prepare the rest of the business!
Indeed, we haven’t won any trophies yet. We’re just a couple of wildcards new to the circuit. But we usually do well when we support each other, making us a formidable doubles team, even if the odd racket gets broken through frustration along the way.
This week we signed up to a site that will promote our holiday home on several platforms. Although they said that it will take up to ten days to be on all of their participating platforms, we have been getting informed when a platform is showing our property online already. So far we are going live on Travel Nest and Holidu. Here’s a link to Holidu…
We are still working and developing the interior and exterior, so the photos aren’t perfect, but we just needed to get the property up and running. We will be updating our pics as we keep putting stuff in place (I never knew how much brain power it would take to decide on where to put a coffee machine).
And when I say several platforms, we are literally going to be shown everywhere. So much so that I expect the Mashco Piro tribe in Peru to get an alert once our pics are updated.
We still have a massage therapy and shop to reconstruct, plus a possibility of a second holiday home on the property but, for now, for the sake of our sanity, our first job is complete.
A few from our latest Festa at Cumeada. We’re finding one a week at the moment and each one is unique to their community. A few home brew wines, but I’ll be fine tomorrow!
We’re having to get extra stuff done today. We have declared next Wednesday ‘photo day’, where we will take photographs of our Alojamento Local rental property and put it onto booking sites.
But there’s still a bit to do such as varnish and put up the furniture, sort out the decorative side of it and touch up any scuffs and scratches. There’s a stack of paperwork that needs doing too.
But tomorrow we aren’t able to do any of this due to A New Life In The Sun arriving for the ‘lifestyle’ shoot. This is the day Lou and I get to hold hands and skip along the beach while the kids splash in the river surrounded by a picturesque mountainous backdrop while being filmed for TV.
So far they’ve just filmed us clearing the forest, doing building work and generally getting stressed about timelines and budgets. So tomorrow will be nice to see a different side to us and the meaning of our move to Portugal. We want to work hard and be successful, but our family and quality of life is important to us and getting a reminder of that with occasions by a river beach or at a lively festa is integral to that.
But we’re obsessed with making this whole move work. Which means working harder than we’ve ever had to work, mostly done in heat I’ve never encountered before. If we want to enjoy more days at the river beach, then making the business a success is vital. The master plan unravels without it. And Ralph Waldo Emerson was spot on when he said,”Always do what you are afraid to do.”
Being afraid keeps me hungry. Less complacent.
So anyway, I’ll leave you with a few pics from today. It’s not the finished photos for the booking sites, of course, but it is starting to take shape!
One of my favourite memories as a kid is collecting the football Panini stickers. I never did fill an entire album up, but those in my collection were English football league, which always included the Scottish league as well (I was always disappointed when I got Willie Watters from Kilmarnock instead of Ian Rush) and then there were the World Cup and Euros editions.
The 1988 Euros was my first one but, for anybody my age, the Italia 90 World Cup sticker book was THE collection to have. Panini really stepped up for this particular collection but the event itself was also fantastic as there were so many great teams competing around that time. Brazil, West Germany, Italy, Argentina and the Netherlands all had incredible talent in their squad and, of course, England had Gazza.
Gazza stole the show, but David Platt’s sublime volley against Belgium was a highlight. It was the only match that I missed. For some reason, my school decided to have a parents evening that night. My parents wanted to watch the match too. I remember my mum quickly asking the music teacher if I ‘sang like a bird’ before making a swift exit to get home to see some of the game. We listened to the patrons shouts of anxiety come from the pubs as we walked past each one, so we knew it was a close game. I think, if memory serves, I got to see the goal in extra time.
As it is tradition, I got my two boys their very first sticker album for Russia 2018. Jonas especially has been hooked on football since and I sometimes still see him looking through the pages of his unfinished collection (does anyone ever complete the whole book?!) but as a parent I now realise that these little packets of stickers are an expensive do when your child wants a pack every time they pass a shop.
And the quality isn’t what they used to be. The books aren’t as good somehow, the stickers aren’t as sticky and they don’t include the same facts as the ones I had. I don’t know why I needed to know the height of Toto Schillaci but the information was appreciated.
Jonas and Finlay still ask for Panini sticker albums for major events but they also want to collect Pokémon cards, Brawl Passes, Fortnite Skins and any other tat the shop sells by the tills. Where do we draw the line as parents?!
Anyway, the stickers for the Euro 2024 are also very popular in the Portuguese supermarkets. What information would Panini put on Trent Alexander Arnold’s sticker? Do they put him as a defender, a right back, a midfielder, a DM or an inverted full back? Nobody knows and, more worryingly, neither does Gareth Southgate.
Southgate seems like a great guy. I met him once. Well, I say I met him, but I actually drove past him on the motorway to Middlesbrough. And it might not surprise you that, despite his expensive range rover and my 1.2 Swift, I still managed to overtake him as he hogged the middle lane at 50 mph. True story.
And so then, his conservative approach to his coaching tactics doesn’t surprise me. He is very safe. But to continue the similarities between his motorway driving and his coaching, he might play it a little too safe but he has a knack of getting to his destination. Three years ago he led England to their first major final since 1966. And this year he is trundling along the middle lane in a souped up muscle machine as he gets to his destination. He might be grinding the Bellingham brakes and grinding the Gallagher gears but, I can’t deny, he’s still en route.
Apart from Italia 90, I don’t ever remember really ‘supporting’ an international team in a tournament. Of course I’d like to see England win, but I just don’t get as excited as watching Liverpool in club football. But now I’m living in Portugal, I can just imagine the festas if they were to win it! So England or Portugal for me.
Watching the games with Portuguese commentary has really helped me in learning the language. I’m not sure where phrases like ‘goal kick’, ‘two minutes to go’ or ‘they’ll have to check if that was ball to hand or hand to ball’ will get me in life, but it’s a start.
It’s the quarter finals next. The event has been a nice distraction from the work we have to do here so I’m really enjoying it. But I hope to see two things happen…for Ronaldo to start scoring and for Southgate to risk leaving the middle lane. It’s the only way either of them will see the final.
Never Give Up PT 