Man marries goat

The funniest story i read this week concerned the Sudanese man, who, on hearing a loud sound outside his house at midnight one night, went to investigate and found a villager having you-know-what with his goat. The village council of elders decided that the guilty party should do the decent thing and pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars and 'marry' the goat to escape being reported to the police.

Well there's local justice in action. I offer my congratulations to the happy couple.

Talking of goats, I drove down the hill the other day and by the roundabout at the bottom of our road there was a shepherd with his flock(?) of goats, happily munching away at the grass. I regularly see another shepherd with a flock of sheep by the road as I go to get Little Stork and Dude Stork from school.

The sight of these old traditional ways is still very evident in Portugal, even though the area we live in is sophisticated and has an international population. The history of the Algarve, before the developers created the place we now know, was one of farmers and fisherman scraping a living together. In fact, i read somewhere, that the land on the Algarve was regarded as of little value years ago as it was far from the capital, Lisbon, and in a very poor area.

The money from development has, however, not found its way into the pockets of many portuguese people as Olhao, a fishing town, to the East of Faro is still the poorest place in the whole of Portugal. Olhao is a pleasure to visit. Each day the small fishing boats still bring back the catch and the wives sell the fish at the market, which is the hub of the town. You can still sit at a cafe and watch the workings of this town which have probably changed little over the past 100 years.

Part of the portuguese charm is that the country remains seemingly stuck partway between being a 'first world' industrial nation, and a 'third world' nation, where being made to marry a goat is seen as a fitting punishment for a sexual misdemeanour.