PARADISE LOST

MY EYE WAS TAKEN OFF the political ball this weekend due to a fleeting visit to the Algarve in order to attend a friend’s wedding. Let me first state that the wedding was a wonderful affair, everything went extremely well and the day-long reception was held in a surprisingly beautiful complex in an area of Portugal which is not exactly my favourite place on the planet. My congratulations and thanks are due to all concerned.

BUT IMPROVEMENT COMES HARD to the Algarve. Michael Winner, food and restaurant critic extraordinaire, was in Portugal sometime last year I believe, and was introduced to what is supposedly the best that the country has to offer, along the exclusive Estoril Coast area. He concluded that the housing looked like every unemployed plumber and handyman in the country had been allowed to build a house in whatever style caught their fancy and that the food consisted of mainly badly prepared cod brought to us by rude and incompetent waiters. He ended his Sunday Times column with “You see a lot of cod in Portugal. But you won’t see me there again.”

ONE WONDERS WHAT SORT OF LANGUAGE he would have come up with if he had been to the Algarve. In the past the region was considered to be something of a paradise. Nowadays, for some people, it may still be so. But for those of us who like our food brought to us on the same day as we order it, like to have a shower during which we ourselves control when the water goes from hot to cold and like to think that a hotel that charges 350 euros per night for a double room might certify that there is not a cement mixer working outside our window at eight in the morning and a fire truck pumping out foul-smelling waste from a burst pipe leading from the septic tank underneath the hotel “so it doesn’t seep into the swimming pool”, the paradise is hard to find. Unless you are one of the hordes of cockroaches, rabid dogs and killer rabbits that infest the terrain.