The Virtual Valley
Meeting the message groups amid mudslide nightmares
What’s the connection between an orphaned hedgehog, jade eggs, a large pine tree with many nests of the bad caterpillars and a wanted poster for a bloke called Olaf?
They’re all subjects that have popped up on my phone notifications in the past week.
It’s been odd moving to a new place during the pandemic as we’ve obviously been forced into only meeting a lot of people virtually.
But it’s been fabulously eye-opening to explore the wider community of English speakers in our region by joining various messaging groups.
And I’m learning an awful lot about who’s living in Alentejo from the notifications pinging up on my phone every few minutes.
It’s been a great distraction from this week’s stress dream – that the house and all our land is going to be swept down the valley by a massive mud slide.
I’ve seriously been waking up in the night thinking about our rain-sodden hillsides and what might go wrong unless I somehow try to do something to direct rainfall to the lake and down the valley.
It’s part of my new approach to problems: try to work out what might go wrong before it does and spend more money on maintenance and less on replacement.
Speaking of which, the German boiler parts arrived at the local post office and the fabulous Guido the German boiler expert is coming over to (hopefully) restore heat and hot water just in time for the cold snap to have passed.
Some parts are for repairing the problem, others are to service the machine with the aim of lengthening its lifespan…planning.
Oh, and for some reason the new solar batteries are not holding charge from the generator…what am I doing wrong?
Or rather, what has gone wrong that I didn’t work out was going to go wrong before it did?
Walking the land stroking my increasingly ridiculous beard (I would cut it off, but stroking it and going “hmm” really does help me think harder), I realised there was evidence of a previous little land slip and that got in my head.
So many places are overgrown, and there’s been so much welcome rain that puddles form in the road from the shortest shower and the deep well is almost overflowing.
That’s great news after a few years of drought, but maybe I should be cutting channels to manage the water better?
What will happen if I don’t? Any advice welcome…
Hopefully our friend with a small digger will have some ideas before my dreams come true and we slide off down the hillside!
Back to the messaging apps…and every day really is a school day.
It began with WhatsApp, but since the Facebook update privacy warning, the buyers and builders, hippies and conspiracy theorists, spiritual practitioners and those promoting vaginal wall strengthening have been fleeing to Telegram and Signal.
The drama of the baby hedgehog rescue had a happy ending and I’m watching closely to learn how to take out those bad caterpillars after my run in with one (although in retrospect it was probably a centipede).
Who doesn’t want to know how to skin a fox roadkill (including pictures), but I couldn’t understand why another member was selling an electric control panel for a camper van and three pairs of shoes.
I mean are they going totally off the grid and barefoot, or are they giving up a transitory lifestyle and going the other way? Hard to say.
This week’s workshop invitations included dome building, personalized healing salve production, and tantric sexuality coaching with womb work.
They’re not all my thing, but judging from the flutter of heart emojis, these are popular local attractions.
There’s also lots of practical stuff like how to transfer car ownership, change batteries in boilers and know the difference between a caldeira, a salamandra, an esquentador and a bailarina.*
And I’m loving the where are the police checkpoints live updates area, the natural building and practical building groups, but haven’t yet joined the hummus people.
I would never knock anything until I’ve tried it, and I hope I’m not upsetting any of our new community by writing about them.
There’s something there for everyone with an emphasis on mindfulness and openness to ideas…and yes, it is all a bit hippy.
But I’ve already bought a new water filter with a 5% discount, courtesy of an active member of one group who lobbied the company on the community’s behalf.
It is certainly a different world that we have moved into…but it’s a fun and exciting one, and it’s been interesting to follow the tension in the message groups over attitudes to COVID-19.
Some people want to wax lyrical about how the pandemic doesn’t exist and question mask wearing, while others shout in CAPITALS that it’s the law and they’re idiots not to wear a mask.
When groups contain of hundreds of people, it can all quickly descend into rants and down rabbit holes just like other social media.
There’s a bigger point here about the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
When we’re isolated – in the Portuguese countryside, or in our homes courtesy of the lockdown – virtual message groups can become a real-life support network.
People have been asking for tractors to come and help them dig their cars out of the mud, but there’s also a load of false information being shared.
And when the place you go for help is the same place that unsupported rumours are presented as facts, everything gets very confusing.
The administrators try their best, and there have been some great lines to try to corral opinions into other more open-minded groups.
This is not the forum for discussing views/opinions/beliefs about pandemic bullshit
NO discussions or opinions about: coronavirus, 5G, social media etc.
For train and bus schedules, check the internet
A few changes to ensure the coherence of this space…no open discussions about life, covid etc
And I loved the the passive aggressive meme: “Keep it Practical here please…peace”
There is a lot of pandemic-denialism around these parts, despite Portugal now having the world’s highest seven-day average of COVID-19 cases and deaths per million people.
(It’s a country of only 10m people…so the actual numbers are not as high as many places – 291 people died in 24 hours taking the total number of deaths since the pandemic began to 11,000).
When people know my BBC background I will probably be seen as part of the problem and my arguments to check sources and rely on facts rather than opinions may fall on deaf ears.
As I posted last week, when truth is questioned and “fake news” is called, nobody knows quite what to believe any more.
If you’re interested (and perhaps don’t trust the BBC), please check out First Draft.
Someone asked me how to deal with a friend caught up in the QAnon conspiracy and I suggested this article from the Guardian.
And Breaking Harmony Square is also a great game to help people understand how social media can be used to manipulate groups.
Just to finish off, I have to share a particularly fabulous juxtaposition of messages overlapping each other in one group, and the new narrative they created.
“Anyone know how to clean mould?” came the first question.
“I did it last year with vinegar and borax,” was quickly followed by a “Taoist jade egg” that can “connect deeply with your sexuality and…enhance strength, tone and sensation in the vagina.”
Cue: a comedy double take over the perfectly timed arrival of an ad for a women’s introductory workshop.
And I’ll be honest, at first I wasn’t sure whether the next “I use a mix of bicarbonate of soda, vinegar and tea tree oil” was related to the jade eggs or the mould question.
And Olaf? Wanted by police on suspicion of an assault apparently…and what a great forum for getting the word out.
* I’ve no idea…they’re all devices for heating the air or water with wood-burning stoves, but I haven’t yet worked out the difference.