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I woke up this morning with awful pains across my chest. I hasten to add that it is purely muscular and nothing at all serious, or to be too concerned about. It is just very uncomfortable to type at my computer. The long promised nice weather is taking its time coming to Scotland, where temperatures are hovering just below the seasonal average of mildly cold. I read in the Portuguese newspapers (wonderful thing that Internet) that the mercury continues to rise down there. So much so that there are real fears of another year of forest fires - which will be even more devastating since the country has been in a state of drought for over two years, and water reserves are very low indeed. Compare that to here in the UK. We've gone a whole week without any rain, and already one water company down in England has imposed a hosepipe ban on its customers. Heaven knows how we would cope if we had a climate similar to Portugal's. Actually, I know how we'd cope: we wouldn't. So anyway, I am sitting here in mildly cold Scotland looking out of my study window at the cloudy sky and thinking about the warm sunshine and good weekends that I had in Portugal, thanks mainly to the people in this photograph (which was taken on 28 May - the 79th anniversary of the military coup that brought Salazar to power!). Pedro, Helena and Lucas were such fine hosts, and looked after me well on the three nights that I was a guest in their house. As I kept on saying to them (and to Silvia), it is nice to get out of Lisbon at the weekends.

I saw some wild roses last year