Lovers' handkerchiefs - Lenços dos namorados

There is a lovely tradition in northern Portugal of young girls sewing and embroidering handkerchiefs for their boyfriends or potential boyfriends. It is dying out now but there are still some skillful ladies keeping the tradition alive.

It is thought that the custom began when the so-called lower classes began to imitate the use of handkerchiefs by the upper crust in the 17th and 18th centuries. Girls of marriageable age would spend weeks if not months stitching handkerchiefs to give to a boy they had their eye on. If the gift was accepted then the couple were considered to be a match and the young man would wear the handkerchief in his Sunday coat pocket, tucked into his belt or tie it to the end of a stick that he usually carried.

The girls would also wear handkerchiefs tucked into their waistbands, which at dances and festivals were often stolen by the young men who would play at being matched to the girls at the event.

The handkerchiefs are usually white with brightly-coloured embroidered symbols and poems. The words in the verses are often misspelled giving the handkerchiefs a naive charm.

See some wonderful examples for sale on this website: Aliança Artesanal.

Now I just have to convince somebody to get me one.

Café Saudade

There are some places that to me are Portugal concentrated in one spot. Café Saudade is one of them. It is somewhere to go that just lets you breathe easy and it celebrates the real Portugal. Not the Portugal of shopping centres or highways, but the Portugal of my childhood, of long trips into the countryside.

First of all it is in the magical town of Sintra, but that doesn't guarantee loveliness as many a tourist has found to their cost. Saudade, however is a veritable rabbit warren of loveliness. The building itself was once a queijada factory making traditional Sintra cheesecakes, although factory seems too industrial a word for the authentic beauty of the place.

The café's menu is excellent and offers a variety of traditional Portuguese cakes and sandwiches as well as fruit tarts, an incredible gooey chocolate cake and light lunch options. Whiling away an afternoon with a cup of herbal tea or even a single espresso - nobody will make you feel like you need to have anything more if you don't want it - is something I do far too infrequently to do this fantastic café real justice.

Saudade is the heart and soul of its owners the sunny Mary Pereira and her husband Luís. Mary is Portuguese-American and in spite of, or perhaps because of, this she actively celebrates the Portuguese heritage that so many people take for granted. Saudade sells Portuguese handicrafts - not tourist tat the real deal - and also has its own little silver store (Prataria) offering the most gorgeous traditional Portuguese jewellery.

If you have never been there I couldn't recommend it more highly.

Café Saudade

Avenida Dr. Miguel Bombarda 6

Sintra

2710-590 SINTRA

Tel: 212428804

Cork trees

I'd like to register my vote to make cork oaks one of the wonders of the world. This may seem like an overstatement, but they really are one of the most incredible, sustainable and eco-friendly resources on the planet and Portugal accounts for about 50 percent of the world's cork production.

The cork that most people know in the form of bottle stoppers (corks), floor tiles and trivets starts out life as the bark of an evergreen tree; the cork oak (quercus suber). Skilled workers strip the bark of the cork oak every nine years and the tree is left unharmed to regenerate its bark to be harvested again and again, for up to 200 years. This bark makes corks for wine by the billion.

The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) estimates that the 108,000 hectares of Portugal’s cork oak forests – the largest in the world – absorb about 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. It also adds that each cork tree sustains over 100 species of wildlife, including the critically endangered Iberian Lynx.

Portugal's cork forests are under threat, however, as aluminium screw caps and manmade stoppers have replaced natural cork in wine bottles. Next time you reach for a bottle at the supermarket choose natural cork. It's a simple step that helps preserve this small corner of the planet.

The best and safest airline in Western Europe

Say what you like about Portuguese airline TAP Portugal - I remember a joke that said TAP stood for Take Another Plane - but it turns out it's the safest airline in Western Europe and, by some accounts, also the best.

The only fatal crash it has ever had in its 66-year history was in Madeira in 1977 when 164 people died. Not wanting to make light of those deaths, that's still a very healthy safety record. In January 2011 TAP Portugal was named as Western Europe's safest airline in the JACDEC Airliner Safety Report and fourth in the world behind Australia's Qantas, Air New Zealand and Finnair of Finland.

I'll take safety over style and comfort any day of the week. It's at the top of my list for requirements for an airline, but according to Global Traveler Magazine TAP is also Europe's Best Airline for 2011. This award was given to the company based on opinions from 36,000 readers who responded to the magazine's GT Tested Reader Survey.

In 2010 it also won the title of World's Best Airline from the UK's Condé Nast Traveller magazine.

It now serves 66 destinations in 31 countries and operates around 1,850 flights per week.

It's a state-owned airline and there are plans to privatise it as part of the conditions for Portugal to receive its financial bailout package. Here's hoping that whoever takes a slice will keep up the good work.

Neonatal care

Most people would not think that hospital care in Portugal is up to much, even those that live here. Now I'm here to tell you exactly the opposite is true. That's from personal experience, too.

Back in November 2009 I was sent to hospital on total bedrest in danger of miscarrying my baby. I stayed in bed for eight full weeks in my own private room with a TV and bathroom - that I couldn't actually get up to use but that's a whole other story - all to myself. Traumatic as the whole experience was I was treated with nothing but kindness, dignity and professionalism at every step.

The point of this post, though is about what happened after that. My baby was born at 30 weeks, which is ten weeks before his due date. His care was second to none. He had access to all the necessary technology to keep him breathing and to develop outside the womb. In all, after some respiratory complications, he spent nearly four months in hospital. Not only did it not cost us a single penny - other than the taxes we pay of course - but he got state-of-the-art care and I was extremely thankful that he was born right here in Portugal. If it happened again I wouldn't choose to be anywhere else.

It turns out that Portuguese neonatal care is ranked amongst the best in the world. I know because I checked while I was on bedrest because I'd been convinced by all the bad press, too. We would have been worse off in both the UK and the US.

In terms of the overall infant mortality rate Portugal also fares better than a number of nations that you might expect to outrank it. According to indexmundi Portugal's infant mortality rate stands at 4.66 deaths out of every 1,000 live births, just behind the UK with 4.62 deaths per 1,000 and Australia with 4.61. New Zealand's infant mortality rate is 4.78 Canada's is 4.92 and in the US it is 6.06 deaths per 1,000 live births.

My son is now nearly two years old and thriving. He's had a lot of hospital appointments to check on his progress over his little lifetime, but he's doing great. We never had to fight for treatment or wait to be admitted to hospital. He's never been on a waiting list or had to be approved for hospital care or vaccines. He just gets what he needs; no questions asked.

This stuff really matters and Portugal is very good at it.

Ode to Farturas

Ok, so I confess to a love of fried dough, though my thighs might have given the game away ahead of me. Doughnuts and their like are hard to resist so during festival season in Portugal - July and August mainly - I either have to avoid the festivals altogether or give in to the greasy call of the fartura van.

Portugal's farturas are fried dough heaven and they are entertaining too. As a child I loved to watch them being made and judging by the number of kids that crowd round to see them being squirted into a giant spiral out of the giant dough gun into the waiting hot oil they still have some hold over youthful imagination. They, like me all those years ago, secretly want to be the fartura maker and get to wield that gun.

Mostly these treats are sold at festivals or markets in the Summer months but you occasionally see fartura vans in some unlikely places like outside DIY shops or supermarkets in mid-winter. They are so hot and toasty though that despite my feeling that they are out of place I can still feel tehir tractor beam dragging me

Saudade: A very Portuguese word ... sad but positive, I think

“Saudade: a Portuguese and Galician word for a feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one was fond of and which has been lost. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never really return. It was once described as “the love that remains” or “the love that stays” after someone is gone.”

Onions from down under...

Now, this may seem random, but I flat out refuse to buy onions from Australia. Why not onions from Kazakhstan or Senegal, I hear you ask (because you are asking, surely). Well, they were not actually on offer at my local supermarket, but Australian onions were. To add to the lunacy they cost €1.49 a kilo and the much larger and fresher Portuguese onions in the box next to them – admittedly not packaged in a fetching orange fishnet bag – cost €0.89 per kilo. At what point does a supermarket buyer (and by that I mean the people who decide what the supermarket stocks and not the people who shop there) think, ‘I know where we could get the onions from… Queensland’?

Since way before Portugal had to be bailed out by the EU and the IMF I’ve been an avid label reader, checking all the produce boxes for the origins of my fruit and veg. My previous argument was an environmental one and now it’s backed up by an economics argument that goes something like, ‘buy Portuguese produce so your money can stay in Portugal and help us crawl out of this mire.’ If the supermarket I’m in doesn’t have Portuguese carrots, or potatoes or whatever I sometimes buy Spanish produce and have even ventured to the exotic climes of France and occasionally the Netherlands, but shipping the humble basis of almost every Portuguese dish all the way from Oz is a step too far for me. They might as well start trying to flog me olive oil from Pakistan for all the sense it makes.

I’ll also have no truck with apples or garlic from China (and, yes, I’ve seen that too), grapes from Chile or oranges from anywhere further than the Algarve. There’s no issue with Brazilian papayas or Indian mangoes, these fruits are not, after all, grown here in Portugal, or at least not on a large enough scale to be sold to me. It is true though that I don’t often buy them because I’m certain my carbon footprint is pretty gargantuan as it stands

Call me a radical protectionist, but buying products from another country that are easily produced and plentiful in your own country is tantamount to robbing your neighbours and in my area this is almost literally the case. Where I live, I am surrounded by vegetable producers that supply Portugal’s supermarkets with huge quantities of produce. Every onion, lettuce, or cabbage I buy that is from some other part of the globe means fewer euro cents for these businesses and I could be putting people I know out of a job. This idea also extends to the rest of the country, too. So, Australia, how do you like them onions?

Baby love

I have never been anywhere in Portugal where my babies/toddlers/kids have not also been welcome.

In fact, the only time anyone has openly complained was in an Indian restaurant in the Algarve and the complainer was English. That's the only time in the last five years. Truly.

The very opposite is true in fact. Wherever I go with them and regardless of the mess they make - and they do make a monumental mess, especially in restaurants - I have had nothing but kindness and understanding.

They are always invited to weddings, parties, dinner parties, nights out and every event I've ever attended since my first was born. This doesn't mean I'm not embarrassed sometimes by their screaming or when a spoon goes flying across the room. Instead of the eye-rolling and tutting I have had in other countries, though, here I get supportive comments and people actually communicating directly with my children. Interacting with them; Wow!

This is one of the greatest blessings of bringing up children in Portugal. They are a part of daily life, seen as a part of society as a whole and barred from almost nowhere.

Sunsets over the sea...

When I was little I thought that the sun always set over the sea. Then I took a trip to Brazil where the natural thing to happen is for the sun to set behind you while you're looking out towards a dark sky hanging above the ocean. It was sad to watch the sun disappear into the landscape and especially tragic when it ducked prematurely behind a mountaintop.

In Portugal - except perhaps for some places on the southern coast of the Algarve - the default setting for sunsets is over the sea. It is a quirk of geography for a country that faces West along almost the entirety of its coast.This makes for absolutely spectacular sunsets that glimmer and glint in the water and in the height of summer you get to watch a fiery sun extinguish itself in a rainbow sea.

It is a wonder of the Portuguese natural world and it costs nothing at all.

Joe Portugal on borrowed time (not so positive)

Joe Portugal is a middle-income, blue-collar worker whose finances could be in much better shape and he knows it. He’s maxed out his credit cards, every penny he has goes to pay off loans he’s taken out, and he’s taken on new loans to pay off the original loans. He’s regretting his financial mis-management and he wants to put things right, but the sharks are circling. His friend Jane Hellas plans to stop paying off her own loans because she can no longer afford the interest rates she is being asked to pay and Joe’s lenders think he might do the same so his interest rates are rising, too.

Joe’s lenders took out life insurance, car insurance and home insurance on Joe just in case something went wrong. They want him to keep paying off his loans, but also to get their money if he doesn’t. Trouble is, Joe also lives in a world where anybody can insure his life, his home and his car and now Joe spends his time avoiding deliberate crashes, putting out fires and dodging bullets all whilst working himself into the ground to pay off those never-ending loans. Those folks holding these “naked” insurance policies actually want Joe to crash, burn and die because they get big bucks from his misfortune. Joe is living on borrowed time.

It is time to outlaw Naked Credit Default Swaps that give their holders a vested interest in non-payment of the debts they are insuring. Because anybody can invest in these derivatives and therefore insure bonds that they do not even own, there are many people that are not only hoping, but actively working to send companies, local authorities and even whole nations into bankruptcy. The amount of debt insured by Credit Default Swaps far outstrips the amount of the loans actually taken out. Naked Credit Default Swaps are so immoral that even George Soros, a multi-billionaire investor not usually known for his code of ethics, has called for them to be outright banned.

It is common to hear that Southern European countries don’t have a strong work ethic - John Stewart on The Daily Show recently joked about how Greeks retired “just before puberty” – but most of the people of Greece, Portugal, and every other nation currently surrounded by speculation sharks, do an honest day’s work for a pittance. Traders, investors and owners of these Naked CDSs do less than a minute’s dishonest work for a vast fortune.