We came back from a fortnight in Estoril in Portugal on Wednesday. I have written before about Estoril (PC 454 in August 2025) and am reminded on my morning walk through Estoril and Monte Estoril that ‘it has been home to numerous royal families and celebrities, is one of the most expensive places to live in Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula and is home to a sizeable foreign community.’ It’s sad to sense that so many of these enormous houses are empty, have that unlived-in feel about them, maybe a second or even third home, at a time when ordinary folk struggle to afford somewhere, anywhere to live.
As always, it’s good to come home, providing of course ‘home’ meets your needs and your wants. For Celina and me, our large apartment in Hove ticks many boxes; spacious, high ceilings, dual aspect, modern insulation and the sea is two minutes away. We thank our lucky stars that in the unusually warm weather we have had this summer, our bedrooms are downstairs, in what might be described as ‘lower ground’. They are about 3C cooler than our living room! William and Stefano are renting the apartment above us in Amber House. One day in desperation they asked whether we had a fan! A neighbour kindly lent them her two.
After the delivery of our Waitrose shopping, I popped into The Hope Café mid-afternoon yesterday to catch up with Sami, who I hadn’t seen since mid-June. Amazing where the time goes huh! I joined Sami at a table, having got a double espresso from Josh, who’d asked whether I knew anyone who they could hire, as Libby is finally going to retire.
“Do you?” asked Sami.
“No one springs to mind and this is a difficult time of the year, what with the new Academic Year, a new school for some, others to university or Sixth Form College. Lots of people already committed.”
“I liked your last postcard, Richard, (PC 506 Be the Person you want to be) and that final paragraph when you said ……. let me look at my WhatsApp ….. here we are: ‘We are social animals; we want to fit in, not brave it out, not branch out, be the odd one out. But understanding ourselves better, our extraversion or introversion, the degree we engage/need to engage with others, with our families and with friends, or preferring our own company ….’
We all find ourselves not being who we want to be, presenting an untrue image, hiding behind a façade, and I found this from some psychologist:
‘Some people call it a division between the ‘original self’ and a ‘pseudo self’. A person exhibiting a ‘false self’ occurs when other people’s expectations override the spontaneous expression of the ‘true self’. The ‘false self’ is a kind of masquerade, a self that is presented to the world, a ‘social self’. Not the true, private self, the one ‘inside’.’”
“I am pleased …… and I assume I am talking to the true self, Sami, not some cardboard cutout?! Haven’t seen you since I completed my two linked wooden spoons, have I?”
“You showed me the enormous one you made for your daughter from a discarded scaffolding plank, but this is something else?”
“I had the idea I could fashion two spoons from one plank, the loop at the end of each linked. Once the idea got embedded, I thought long and hard about how I would carve that; this is how they look:
To get there I made a model out of some plasticine; hadn’t bought that for decades although you can still find it! Eventually I got to this point ….
Then spent some time thinking about how to untie the knot, as it were; slowly but surely managed to separate them. Some wood filler, stain and wax and we’ve ended up with exactly what I imagined!
“Wow! They’re amazing Richard. Well done you! By the way, I know you read a lot when you’re in Estoril ….. and before you tell me about your stand-out book, I need to tell you about mine. I’ve caught your habit of glancing through the newspapers’ obituary column and found that a chap called Philip Caputo had died.
“Who? What was his claim to fame?
“He was an American author and journalist, best known for his best-selling memoir of his experiences during the Vietnam War, ‘A Rumour of War’. In 1973 he was part of a writing team that won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on election fraud in Chicago. You had written a couple of postcards (PCs 493 and 494) about your stepfather’s deployment to Malaya in 1945 as part of Force 136 and I was curious as to Caputo’s time in Vietnam; I ordered his book and finished it a couple of weeks ago.”
“Wasn’t that the first modern war that the USA lost?”
“Yup! And they left with their tail between their legs, their departure from Saigon (renamed Ho Chi Minh City) in 1975 reduced to a rout.
Caputo had been a Marine Second Lieutenant in Da Nang Province in 1965 for just over a year and his memoir is widely regarded as a classic in the literature of war, being compared to ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (Note 1) What I found fascinating was his ability to describe the rigours of jungle warfare in every gruesome and human detail. For instance, the Marines were provided with three sheets of loo paper ….
“The British Army had the same, part of a one’s field ration pack, except ours was made of that hard, unabsorbent, paper. The common saying was: ‘One up, one down and one polish’! Sorry, I interrupted you, Sami.”
“That’s OK. Caputo described how you could never get your arse clean, most soldiers suffered from permanent Diarrhoea, and how you lived and fought in the rain, covered in leaches and being bitten by mosquitoes. He also observed what fighting, kill or be killed, does to the human soul.”
(To be continued ….)
Richard 4th September 2026
Hove
Note 1 A semi-autobiographical novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War!1, billed by some as ‘the greatest war novel of all time’.
postcards 