GET ORF MY LAND

It has been several generations since a Ward has been able to raise this blood-curdling cry to riff raff, armed only with a flintlock blunderbuss and a baker’s dozen ravening hounds, but it seems this branch of the family’s fortunes may be on the turn after years in the urban wilderness. Our unjust exodus from the country, involving a gentleman-farmer ancestor who drove our clan from the Berkshire Downs with a heady mixture of an ignorance of contraceptive methods, excessive port consumption and an insistence on the employment of a coach and four even for short family trips to public floggings (despite the elevated costs of stabling), may soon be righted, if on an entirely different continent.

Show recently went to town (São Paulo) with her credit card firmly clamped between her teeth in search of Christmas bargains at a bazar, a place where well-known retailers of haberdashery, drapery and the like offer their wares at knockdown prices, whilst I spent a frustrating afternoon on the phone to Visa trying to get her credit limit reduced. However, on leaving said suq she filled out a coupon to compete in a raffle whose prize was a plot of land in a condomínio, a secure compound within which the wealthy can live like Americans without fear of judgement, condemnation or armed assault. Imagine our utter stupefaction when she received yesterday a letter stating that she was indeed a winner, and that we are now the proud owners of a valuable square of grass in Águas de Santa Barbara, which lies about two hours north-west of our current place of residence, and which boasts, amongst other amenities, a “twenty-four-hour supply of mineral water”. Show, like me, hasn’t previously been exactly blessed in matters where good fortune plays a part, though I have won a tenner on the National Lottery twice, and once had fifty quid off the Premium Bonds. But this is a whole different level - we can now dream of being neighbours with footballers, company chief executives (to whom I will be slipping a suitably massaged CV), even actresses and TV presenters, all of whose private lives I’ll be closely monitoring and whom I’ll be photographing secretly, selling on the resulting images to the highest bidder.

It is one thing, however, to have a plot of land, and quite another to have the financial resources to build a house on it. Having read the complex and frankly pedantic regulations of the condomínio, I have found nothing specifically forbidding the parking of caravans or the construction of sheds, and I plan to fully exploit these loopholes. Then it’ll be out with the flat cap and the tweeds and a triumphant return to the days of yore, when trespassers were mangled in mantraps and the port flowed like the crystalline mineral waters of which we will soon have a twenty-four-hour supply.

Have you ever won a piece of land? Have you got a twenty-four hour supply of mineral water? I have.