Life in Le Marche

Our Garden Studio at Sambuco

2011-05-31T09:29:00.000-07:00

Our garden studio is a delight, so peaceful and tranquil with views across the Sibillini mountains which take your breath away. It's the place to come too to read all those books you've never had time for; to walk unhurriedly though woods and pastures and trek along mountain paths and gorges too. And swim in the sweet water of Lake Fiastra; so blue and clean, or take a canoe and picnic on one of the many little coves around the lake edge.
We are just 12K from both Sarnano (which we overlook) and from Amandola. Both are very pretty medieval towns which come alive in the summer months with festas and fieras, music and theatre as well as antique fairs and food festivals (Amandola is famous for its truffles)
The garden studio has two bedrooms and can sleep five people. Our neighbour, Bernie, can sleep the same number, so we can cater between us for two families or a group of ten. The kitchen is quaint and modern and there is of course a lounge and bathroom. We have wi-fi and a good collection of books left by past guests.

You can also have group or private lessons in Longevity Energetics and Creativity during your stay.
Michael is Professor in Painting at Siena Art Institute and a trained Creativity Coach. Liliana is a trained Instructor in Longevity Energetics.

Rental from E450 pw self catering.
Happy to provide meals should you wish

The garden studio terrace

one of the gorgeous bedrooms

Dawn at Sambuco

The garden terrace

Sambuco from the lovely garden

The garden looking towards mountains

Sambuco

typical sunset

Cabin fever

2011-03-09T06:17:00.000-08:00

The snowfall lasted 12 hours, silent and windless which meant it did a lot of damage to trees, blocked roads and caused a lot of accidents. I usually do my mole act at such times and bury myself beneath DVDs and crisps. But this one took a pylon down up above Garula and we (or should I say I) were without power for 5 days.
Five days in which I got colder and colder (no heating except a small stove).No TV, no music, no shower or hot water, no electric blanket, so cold bed, Yuk!
Couldn't escape because we have five animals and I just get them all into the Kangoo at the same time. You know, like trying to fit a dozen eels into a jamjar (great pun Mice!) I was finally rescued after five days by hero electicity engineers who had descended from somewhere in Paradise to save me. Took a look at myself in mirror on day six when power and wife came back and I generally agreed with my reflection that I looked very much like a dead worried sheep. especially after an improvised bath which I did a Boy Scout task on. Seven huge pans of boling water poured into bath and washed myself like Clint Eastwood did in those movies. Couldn't get soap out of my hair though, darling, and hence dead sheep impression.
Now, two days after, wife back, sunshine back and deadsheep look slowly diminishing
Tell you what though, it doesn't half make you appreciate the taken for granted things like electricity, heat, water, music, porridge.

This lunchtime...cold air but warm sunshine.mmm

Snow’s here

2010-12-14T06:57:00.001-08:00

Hope it doesn’t last though, gotta get over those mountains and snow chains are dangerous.

This is a new painting inspired by a visit to the Tate a few weeks back. Turner struggled with his paintings and so I thought I’d do the same. This one was a fight

Not much different form what’s going on outside. Minus 3 and the stuff is settling ominously.

Bewitched I am

2010-11-06T11:08:00.001-07:00

Bessie comes up and nuzzles me for her walk just before sunset.

She gets cross when I start to take photos..and barks her head off.

She always gets her way but I manage to sneak a few shots in.

Temperature

2010-07-27T01:13:00.001-07:00

Drops from 35C to 23C.. and which do I prefer having cool English blood?

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Sibillini Nights

2010-07-19T10:52:00.001-07:00

I bought the T shirt, I did! I never do that, ever.

But this was my friend Giorgio's organised weekend of Sibillini Nights.

Now the Sibillia (as you all know children) is the seer, the Sybil, the Goddess, prophetess who abides in these parts.

So, we attended the film 'Il Cecco' on Saturday night. He being the medieval intellectual and free thinker who was declared an heretic and executed by the Church. Then this was followed by a very late ending dinner half way up mount Sibillini.

Then up at the crack of dawn Sunday morning for the great trek up to the Sibilla's cave. It was hot, some 30C climbing up but the wind switched to the NE as we began out descent and dropped to 21C.

Being understandably knackered, we zoomed back home for a snooze then zoomed back to look at the colours of Casteluccio (these pics)

and delightful they were too. then back for a meal in Monte Monaco, then a gorgeous short film by Giorgio; his look at Il Cecco's life in poetry and image. Then music in the park where I sank a Beck's and then got drowsy. So we slunk away about 11.30. Still knackered I am ...and thank God it's rained for twenty minutes today. Delicious!

Gmail - Our Autumn Workshop - micermice@gmail.com

2010-07-17T06:22:00.000-07:00

Gmail - Our Autumn Workshop - micermice@gmail.com

The Montefiore Workshop ‘Falling in love with ourselves’

2010-06-27T11:37:00.001-07:00

Everything has a beginning, a middle and an end, except of course if you are a butterfly or a salamander.

I must tell you from the outset that the middle bit, the workshop itself, was fantastic…and I’ll come back to that later, just to keep you in suspense.

The beginning

A disaster on wheels

This was the plan. To pick up the English girls (or should I say our UK workshop lady participants) from Falconara Airport. Now, I must tell you that just writing those two words sends waves of hatred through my entire nervous system because whenever I approach it, it is waiting for me with a pre-planned disaster in store.

And this day was no exception. OK, I was late; the whole day so far had stacked up against me. But the plane was late too and I had to get the girls to Falconara station within twenty mins or never…ever. So I packed their luggage into my van, stacked them in a taxi with instructions to the driver to go go to the station with me racing behind. Except that I wasn’t… Any way, this is dragging on. So to cut it short, this is what happened. I lost my parking ticket and couldn’t get out of hated airport. Lost the girls, they weren’t where I thought I’d sent them (they were fiddled by taxi driver and taken to Ancona station) Found them there.

Had five mins to get them tickets so Mags parked my car (what? at Ancona station? That’s madness!) Got to ticket booth, didn't have enough cash but ticket man said go go. pay me later (phew! an angel)…Rushed to see girls on right train (they were all as cool as cucumbers), zoomed on to Autostrada to get to meet them at Pedaso station, only to find myself at pay booth at Pedaso at a new automated exit. Cash only! Robot tells me I’m short of 25 cents. I say look robot, I’ve had a rough morning. He booms out’ Don’t leave the car, Don’t leave the car’ in a high metallic voice. Oh, now why would I leave the car for heavens sake? Voice says put in credit card. I do but robot refuses it. I bash help button and a human comes on speaker; tells me to put cash in box, I say I have but I’m 25 c short. Meanwhile 20 cars hooting up behind me as the robot spews out a fine to be paid he booms within 15 days. I zoom off.

Now wasn’t that great?

Now for the end bit

No no, this is expecting too much of your patience. Enough to say that my 0830 am departure from Montefiore ended up being midday and it involved TrenItalia timetables and a lady in the bar opposite the station who only had 2 tickets left for 5 people. (and of course you get fined 50 euros if you’re on board without a ticket) Don’t ask, don’t ask!

BUT…The middle bit: the workshop (which it was worth suffering either end for)

Loved it, every bit of it. The place, the hospitality, the food, the sea, the dancing, the laughter and most importantly, the passion and heart that folks put in to the workshop program. Maria and I were each of us profoundly touched by being and working together and the experience still resonates.

Here are some photographs

I think this was a triple Tango

Lunch time

Dinner time

A poetic moment

I Cigni, Montefiore

Next workshop Oct 14 weekend at Montefiore

The Montefiore Workshop ‘Falling in love with ourselves’

2010-06-26T11:43:00.001-07:00

Everything has a beginning, a middle and an end, except of course if you are a butterfly or a salamander.

I must tell you from the outset that the middle bit, the workshop itself, was fantastic…and I’ll come back to that later, just to keep you in suspense.

The beginning

A disaster on wheels

Now wasn’t that great?

Now for the end bit

BUT…The middle bit: the workshop (which it was worth suffering either end for)

Loved it, every bit of it. The place, the hospitality, the food, the sea, the dancing, the laughter and most importantly, the passion and heart that folks put in to the workshop programme. We were each of us profoundly touched by being and working together and the experience still resonates.

Here are some photographs

I think this was a triple Tango

Lunch time

Dinner time

A poetic moment

I Cigni, Montefiore

Next workshop Oct 14 weekend at Montefiore

Marche in Maggio

2010-05-03T05:57:00.001-07:00

Read this morning on BBC site that according to medical experts, a walk in the countryside, in the fresh air, is good for us psychologically; makes us feel happy and healthy
So now we know. fresh air and countryside walks are good for you? get this..

'Just five minutes of exercise in a "green space" such as a park can boost mental health, researchers claim.

There is growing evidence that combining activities such as walking or cycling with nature boosts well-being.

In the latest analysis, UK researchers looked at evidence from 1,250 people in 10 studies and found fast improvements in mood and self-esteem.

The study in the Environmental Science and Technology journal suggested the strongest impact was on young people.

The research looked at many different outdoor activities including walking, gardening, cycling, fishing, boating, horse-riding and farming in locations such as a park, garden or nature trail'

What? Do we really have to be told that? Tragic state we’re in if that’s the case.

This is a photo from yesterday, our CAI trek up to Garula.

I love it! Being part of this great group has opened my eyes to things I would never see alone.

We were 15 in number, including three kids. The entire trek took four hours because we stop every ten mins or so to be educated by our guides.

And what’s this?

Looks like a hole in the ground eh? Yes, t’is!

But according to our Archeological guide it was a communication point. A thousand year old Facebook, one of thousands spread across Le Marche which allowed messages to be sent ; bit like NA Indian smoke signals. Kids weren’t too impressed on this one.

Le Marche, mountains and sea, that’s what it is

Creativity workshop in Appignano

2010-04-20T05:27:00.001-07:00

Though I’d thought of everything; catering, leaders, materials, wine, biscuits. But a volcano! a volcano! Would you ever have imagined it?

It meant we lost five wondrous people from UK whose flight was cancelled at the last moment. It made for a sad start but we held a wine and biscuit ritual to mourn their absence and we soon recovered. A near thing though. So there we were, a bunch of 13 of us.

The general theme was ‘This moment of NOW’ where we learned that being present in the NOW is a gateway to creativity and life adventuring; where creativity awaits us and where the voyage towards its very heart begins

The above image is from the story writing part of the weekend, although you would never guess it would you?

And this part is called ’Painting attack’

So this was a voyage into the NOW, the present.

And now you are itching to know what our next workshop is about, aren’t you? Well, it’s a journey into past, present and future; how the one fuses with the other to form what we are, how we pattern our lives.

Maria collects treasures from the past; Italian customs, culture, cuisine and saves them in her Magic Box to share with you. Mice takes you into the NOW of creativity on a wondrous voyage of self discovery and Ant into the Future where you design a Planet worth living in for yourself and your love ones.

It’s June 11 to 14 in the beautiful agritourism of I Cigni in Le Marche, Italy, on the edge of the sparkling Adriatic Sea.

Info on our site www.starstone.me or call Mice on +39 3535358 if you want to chat about the workshop in English or Italian. Or you can email him on micermice@gmail.com

The Meteorite

2010-03-30T12:12:00.001-07:00

OK, what’s this?

A truffle!

No!

Look, you’re not gonna guess, so I’ll tell you. It’s a meteorite, found on the mountain this Sunday when we trekked up Mt Amandola with our CAI group (Club Alpini Italia) and were rewarded with a the most spectacular views across the hilltop towns of Le Marche to the sea, as well as a meteorite. Isn’t that marvellous though? To find a meteorite? We climbed to about 2000m,

……….ate a banana and a packet of crisps (classic) and rested awhile on one of the peaks before climbing down slowly to the trattoria where we’d left our cars. Then a long and dozy lunch. And the day before I was at the sea spending the morning costing our June workshop with Patrizia the owner of I Cigni, . It was almost tropical in comparison.

This part of Le Marche is where the mountains pushed towards the sea millions of years ago. In fact a great part of the sea was itself thrust up trapping a species of red shrimp in what is now a glacial lake (Lago di Pilato) in the process. Red shrimps and meteorites.

So, lucky we are, to have the mountains and the sea within a short driving distance of each other.

So, here’s an idea. Spend a fantastic weekend on our workshop and spend the rest of the week touring this beautiful area; even go meteorite hunting up in the Sibillini mountains. You’ll find one, you will, with a bit of guidance.

Room On The Edge

2010-03-09T06:10:00.000-08:00

Room On The Edge

Invisible Mice

2010-03-08T12:42:00.001-08:00

I know what you're thinking; that it's me , invisibilised!
Naar, it's not.
It's my jeans that I put out on the line to dry and they froze! Laugh you may, but they almost snapped in half when I tied to fold them over a chair.
Life does have its little adventures doesn't it?
Cabin fever? Could be with half a metre of snow forecast, wife away and chips running out fast. Got some beer in though

Alba

2010-03-03T09:28:00.001-08:00

6.30 am 3rd of March 2010.
A delicious sunrise

Christmas pudding

2010-01-10T05:55:00.000-08:00

Just blown up the microwave with a Christmas Pudding!
My fault entirely which I share with the microwave and the Christmas Pudding.In my defence though, what do I know about Christmas Pudding?; haven't eaten one for years (they're banned in house) and what do I know about microwaves?..we have one but never use it. OK, you guessed, Lili's away in Bari and it as my usual egg and chips wkd and there was this Christmas Pudding on the shelf given by an English friend and somehow overlooked (otherwise ir would have beem binned). So, I'd peeled off the cooking instructions, in pieces and mistread the instructions; thought it said 50 mins.
Was on SKYPE with mate Jack from SF and there was this smell, and then smoke and then billowing smoke.
I'd often wondered what the meltdown at Chernobyl actually looked like. Now I know.
When I woke up to what was happening I rushed to the kitchen I found the inside of the microwave was a molten white crucible of fire. Switched power off of course and then rushed to open all windows and doors to clear acrid smoke.
And retreated.
An hour later I ventured back in and oh my Gawd what a mess.
The microwave? Just burning bits.
The Christmas Pudding? not a trace.
I think the ex-microwave might still be radioactive.
I re-read instructions. It was 50 secs!
The wife's gonna kill me

The Solstice

2009-12-15T05:23:00.000-08:00

Just six days and the light returns.
This is the time of Year when my energy flows slowly and I have to push myself and don't feel pulled by life. Doesn't help that it's snowing like crazy outside and far too cold so suddenly. Our woodstove is eating up our winter's supply and it's a battle to keep the house suitably warm.
But there are good things too.
The sun being at its furthest south, we are getting sunsets lighting up the sky at Mt Vettore.

Then there is the fact that we have joined C.A.I. (Club Alpini Italian) which makes me laugh no end, firstly because most of the other members here are amazingly fit and sportive and secondly because their membership card and badge are left-overs from the Fascist era (Mice's guess!)

and then, and then,...on a 20K walk on Sunday (don't ask) we walked past this house on the way to Monte San Martino.
And look what it says splashed right across the front of the building 'Duce a noi' which more or less 'We're with you all the way, Duce' (you need to screw your eyes up to see it mind)

It's all bubbling still, under the surface here in Italy. Communism, Fascism; like old ghosts lost in time forever, And all this couples in my mind with the attack on Berlusconi on the weekend where he was coshed with a model of the Milan Duomo. It's the circus of Italian politics which have never matured out of the ruins of the second World War.

six women

2009-11-14T09:38:00.001-08:00

This weekend in the house six women.
Now I know why man became carnivore

It was Mexico

2009-10-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

Well, it seemed like it at the time.
I was walking up Bernie's garden to take a look at the sea and I heard shouting and laughter; looked up and saw UFO's whizzing across the sky. Then I walked into a bunch of Mexican cotton pickers, but they weren't.
Does that ever happen to you though? You suddenly think you're in another country?
Anyway, a voice shouted 'Michael!' and I was brought back to the here and now.
Guess who it was?
You're dead right, it was Mari, Jo, Vittorio, Quinto, Pepino and Lorenzo. Not pickin' cotton but sweetcorn (UFO shaped)It's 25C in the sunshine and they're complaining of the heat...

Here they are, look, it's them it is.

Next day temperature drops by 20C and we are plunged into winter and the Sibillinis have their first dash of snow. John pops in, carves a huge hole in our laundry room wall and walks off shaking his head. It's like that when the seasons suddenly change.
No wonder the British went mad in India (A thought that briefly sails though my mind)

a mountain view from the garden, the first snows

Our summer of trekking

2009-09-11T01:55:00.001-07:00

I know what you're thinking! You think I'm going to write about my fantastic tomato crop, or our splendid figs or the to die for potatoes.
But I'm not.... and who would die for a potato anyway? (don't answer that one, please!)

Instead this little story is about last weekend's trek/mountain climb up to the source of the river Ambro which is a hike and a half above the Sanctuary of La Madonna dal Ambro (who is really the Sybil as well we all know)
Our trusted guide and leader, Giorgio Tassi, had persuaded us that this one was a doddle; tough first ten minutes, then flat all the way. We know him well enough to translate this as (a confidence booster which really means) 'life threatening experience, stay in bed, it's safer'

The river had to crossed at least a dozen times; our Mexican friend, Sofia took the first dive and one by one we succumbed, each of us wet from the knees down, but it was OK.

The scariest part was climbing up (and then down) a sheer precipice, our only way of circumventing a blocked part of the river bed.

Here you got to wonder at the way water had eroded the gorge over millions of years and here it took some time to get the twenty of us to the top of the rope where our wondrous leaders were perched (we had four guides)
When we reached the 'Throne' itself, after more or less another hour of climbing, I know we were all in complete awe of this majestic place. My God! We've lived here for seven years and didn't have an inkling of such splendour.

So we celebrated this feeling (a sort of benevolent dreamy state) by eating a gorgeous lunch consisting of bacon and tomato rolls, Sheep cheese and a bottle of coke. Then chocolate to double up on the caffeine intake.

The journey back down was easier, except for having to re-negotiate the precipice and by this stage most of the group had given up on trying to navigate the stepping stones to cross the river, and just waded in. I think. for me at least, one of the most beautiful parts of the trek was walking besides the sound of rushing water through the sunny glades which stretched the length of the river. It's a lovely experience because eventually the mind empties itself of everything except to sounds and sights around.

So we've got the bug and we are going to join the trekking group. And this coming weekend? a trek up the Fiastrone. What a wonder that will be.

Finally a photo of some of the group taken in front of the Sanctuary

Yesterday

2009-08-07T04:00:00.000-07:00

Now I'm not a great lover of shopping. In fact I lose a year of my life when I'm trapped into the horrors of it. Yesterday was a prime example (or so I thought at the outset). The objective was simply to buy a pair of trekking shoes for my kindred soul. You know the story.... 5 hours later with bags full of bargains (but you have to buy this because it's half price and will last you forever!), we by chance, looking for the beach at Porto Sant Elpidio, drive into yet another Shopping Mall. By this time I've lost two and a half years and seven days--- but this Commercial Centre is new and I swear it's the first one ever that has been designed with the mind of man in mind (oh, I like that!).
It's got whole areas for tools and tents and camping beds. And what'smore shops for hikers with 50% reductions. Computer and telephone sections with huge screen TVs and and thoroughly modern Sainsbury type Trustbuy scheme where you just use your credit card as you you zoom through and avoid checkout. On top of this there's a pub in the corner with a vast selection of beers and pizzas and there, as you walk out, is a multi screen (12) new Cinema.
I'm not making it up, honest.

La Sibilla

2009-07-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I joined a brave set of souls on a hike up to the cave of La Sibilla, who, as you know, is the local goddess, and ex-prophetess to the Roman Emperors. It was great and something I've always been meaning to do. The day was organised by Giorgio Tassi, a local photographer and nearly new Mayor of Amandola (he missed out by just a handful of votes)...

Jo is an experienced mountaineer and a great direction giver for those in need of advice.

It was a day of swiftly changing weather conditions, hot sun, then sudden drifting fog with chilled us but which had its own beauty as sheep, climbers, mountain shepherd dogs drifted in and out of focus.

We reached the Sibilla cave after two hours and ate our sandwiches and drank our energy drinks. I missed Bessie and sort of wished I'd brought her along but she would have casued mayhem; bashed up Holly, attacked the sheep dogs and pestered me for a slice of sausage. Then guess what? We were given a lecture on the history of the Sibilla by a historian, the upshot of which was that it was generally agreed that the Sibilla was still present as witnessed by many a sober soul during nights spent alone up there. This spot is, according to those who know this stuff, a portal to the Cosmos.
Told Lili about this and she wants to go up there too (she was in Naples that weekend). Not sure whether she means to Cosmos or Mount Sibilla...I'll ask before I make any plans

2009-06-17T13:52:00.000-07:00

I've had better days.
I've had worse also.
I want firstly to say sorry to this snake

I'm sorry snake, I didn't want to kill you, please forgive me!

It happened like this..
It's been unusually hot this last week, temps hitting 34C, and if you know anything about snakes, you know they love it hot. Baby snakes hatch in these conditions: baby vipers are born live, up to a hundred at a time.
leela has already marched into the garden with a snake in her mouth and this morning it was the turn of Socksie who (as a present to Lili) dragged in the chap above into the house and placed it, still alive, under our bed.
It was a metre long.
Shrieks in the house!
I managed to clunk a glass cake cover over it and slide a piece of cardboard under its body (all this under the gaze of the feline sharks); to then slip it into a large glass jar which I sealed with a fitting glass top.
You're so brave!
Yes I know, but to continue...
I take the jar down to our neighbours thinking that they might at least tell me if it was a viper or not and they say yes kill it. I get this feeling that they call every snake a viper and kill it whether it is or not so I walk back home with snake in the jar looking at me with quite a sweet expression on its face and back home leave it on the garden table with the plan of taking it to a chap we know in town who really does know a snake from a cake.
Then...shrieks, even louder than before.
'It's escaping' Lili cries.
I rush downstairs and find she has taken the lid off to give it some fresh air!!
By then it is zooming in every direction and decides to bury itself in the dead leaves under the wisteria bush.
We are already getting late for appointments and the domestic sharks are waiting to go in for the kill. And I can't risk that it might indeed be a viper and the death of one our pets.
So I had to kill you poor creature.
I'm sorry and Lili is sorry too
Particularly because when we took you poor remains in to show snake expert he tells us that you were just an harmless grass snake.
We have decided to take a course on snake recognition

Fireflies

2009-06-04T03:19:00.000-07:00

They're back!
How do they know it's the 4th of June? They're amazing, that's what they are. It was the first time Tikka had experienced them. and what with them and a couple of Dinos (Bambi-like deer) at the bottom of the garden making their cooing noises, she was astounded, in awe, hopping around from shrub to shrub. And all this after two days of torrential rain. Just look!

Twenty centimetres of rain! Mudslides everywhere!

Update

2009-05-22T01:30:00.000-07:00

OK, I know, you're right....I'm lazy!
I could, and I should, write a blog everyday and....well, what I usually do is wait until something completely absurd strikes me, (usually about the trials and tribulations of living in Italy), and then I pounce! (for all that the world cares)
But recently there's been so much, so much, that my critical mind has been swamped and overwhelmed.

Oh! You're wondering what the photo is all about? No connection really but..
It's me eight years old. I was so sweet! My sister was down in Le Marche and she brought me a DVD of old family photos. I remember this one quite clearly. It was taken in Kent, in the hop fields. My mum and dad were Battersea Cockneys and hop-picking was what you did if you were poor by way of a holiday. So where was I last weekend? In Kent, in the same area where this photo was taken. Oh, this time with friends Tony and Sheila in a posh pub with a refined menu and a polite Polish waiter and a rude English waiter too. I remember also a family of foxes playing in the garden of the cottage where we stayed and the owner bawling me our for hobbling around in his wellington boots. But I was a happy little chap and told this story to a group in London that same weekend; I'd gone on a workshop weekend and we were asked to remember a happy time in our lives.

So, here I go again with a simple tale of yesterday. And you can take this as a metaphor for all the thousand and one tales I'd like to relate to you but haven't the time. (for example the one about the traffic cop with dark shades).. or last weekends riotous Pizza party at Bernie's...Wow!!

Now you're going to wonder what all this has got to do with the following tale of yesterday. Not quite sure myself but I think it's as J.P.Sartre said, hell is other people. Of course he was referring to the French so he was spot on there but sometimes, sometimes, Italians are a pretty close match.
So back to yesterday, we reach the end of our little road and there, wonder of wonders is a team of workmen laying tarmac. First of all, let me explain that a year back all of us in our little community of Sant'Ippolito signed a petition appealing to the Mayor for a tarmac road because our sand road is a perpetual disaster. And yesterday there they were! Sealing the road. And as we gleefully drove on to the fresh tar, the workmen started to yell at us and the boss came hurtling over to the car shouting 'Get off, get off!!'

The conversation

I said what do you mean get off? where to?
He says 'Didn't you see the sign?'
What sign? where? I ask.
The one at the other end of the road, he says.
The end of which road?
The one two K along this road
Why did you put it there, nobody uses that road? All of us (some 50 people) use this one. So how would we know?
Well the sign is there he says and you should have seen it and now you're ruining this fresh tar.
You're not listening to me and why are you doing this part of the road? It's been fine, it's the rest that needs attention.
He shrugs his shoulders..
We've only been told to do this bit.
But it's a waste of time and money.
What do you expect, this is Italy?!

Now if there is one phrase which guarantees a complete meltdown in my brain it's this one.
But Lili touches my arm and says 'Go!'
So I take a deep breath and drive off.
I spend the next half hour repeating 'This is Italy, this is Italy, this is Italy!'
Calm down, she says, let's go for a swim in the lake. So we do, and it's gorgeous. Deep clear blue water and not a breath of wind.
This is Italy too, she says.

Like our new road?
It ends 100 metres along from here. just look.

Oh, and guess what? The local elections are next week.
Got the connection? As voters drive past they will think 'Hey, that Mayor is good, he's fixed that road at last'

Benjamin Button

2009-02-25T05:58:00.000-08:00

Last evening we went to see the film Benjamin Button at the Multicomplex Cinema in Piedripa. If you've seen the film, you'll know the narrative was set during the hurricane Katrina. What we took as sound effects however, was in fact a thunder storm which was passing overhead. When we got out of the cinema the whole parking lot was flooded and as we drove home and got nearer our mountains, the rain was snow and at home we were under another foot of the stuff.
Just look!

But I've given up on snow...too tiring. We're exhausted after so much of it; best that it stays on the mountain.

The Railway Man

2009-02-20T04:20:00.000-08:00

This is a book written by Eric Lomax about his experience in Japanese prisoner of war camp in Burmah and then in Singapore. Happened to pick up the book in a new s/h bookshop here in Sarnano opened by a friend who is selling up having been broken by the Italian system. This... and yesterday....yesterday.
One of the principle points of the book is how Lomax describes closing down; cutting off his feelings and emotions because this was the only way he could protect his fellow inmates when under interrogation. So he learned how to stay mute and govern his natural reactions...and he did so successfully for three years, suffering finally of course when he tried to settle back into normal life and couldn't undo the damage.
Not that I'm suggesting that a visit to a Comune tecnico's office is in any way similar to the experience of being tortured in Japanese prisoner of war camp, this would be insulting to all those brave abandoned men, but here is one similarity; a desire to kill. Lomax even after 50 years had nightmares about his torture and harboured a desire for revenge. You're losing the thread of this one aren't you?
Two events in one day might link a thread or two. Ok, of course I'm exaggerating, as is my wont, but the knowledge that you are powerless in the face of ignorance can do internal damage whereas a swift punch on the nose would feel so good.

The events
Our last winter's gas bill did away with any hope of a holiday and we have switched to our wood burner for most of the winter. But I've been trying to call our gas supplier for ages but no one ever answers the phone. I wanted to know the current price of GPL. This is derived from oil so my guess was that the price must have come down somewhat in line with oil, maybe not 75% but perhaps half?
I get through eventually to on of the managers of Liquigas

The conversation

Hi, just wanted an update on the current price of gas,

I can't tell you right now because I'm not in the office, can you call me tomorrow at 8.30 am?

But it's only the cost of gas I'm asking, surely you know that?

Not off hand, call me in the morning

Next morning

Boungiorno, It's me again..about the price of gas.

Oh yes, give me your a/c number and I'll tell you

What's my a/c number got to do with it, I just want the price of gas.

Ah, yes, here you are, the current price is E4.04 a litre

But that's the same as a year ago!

Well, you'll see when your February bill arrives that there will be a reduction.

How much?

Eight cents

But the price of oil has come down by almost 75% in the last year.

Has it?

What do you mean 'has it?' Everybody knows that.. and your product is derived from oil and it's the same price as a year ago.

Well sir, would do you suggest? What price do you think our gas should be?

At this stage, I give up , he is taking the piss, and post it all into my anger box along with my experience in a comune later that day (which you wouldn't believe unless you'd been brought up on a diet of Kafka novels). Internalised anger= damage.

So I concentrate on a fresh wave of snow and Bessie who simply adores it, and hasn't to deal with crooks and idiots and has fresh bones delivered to her kennel door every morning by a devoted friend

2009-02-10T11:52:00.000-08:00

It's Tuesday 10th Feb and it's Jahli's birthday and a full moon is up and guess what?
I went outside to check my bonfire as a fantastic scirocco is blowing, looked up and saw a moonbow. A moonbow? a rainbow caused by the moon's light passing through an approaching shower blowing in from the mountain. A first. Never imagined such a thing!
Went to grab my camera (doubting all the while the moonbow could possibly register), someone calls from New York and in those few seconds the moonbow disappears. But it was there, honest. A magic moonbow for Jahli.
Moral of story: Never let a phone call get in the way of a moonbow.
This morning I checked on Google and look...well this link won't come up, but it's
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/rainbows/bowim51.htm
I feel privileged I do.

The month of January

2009-02-03T07:24:00.000-08:00

I know what your thinking...another story about cats (what is it with this guy?)

Well this is a picture of..what? A bonfire? Yes, it's a bonfire but also a ritual. It's what I do on the 31st of January every year to destroy the dark God of winter and to clear the way for the changing of the light.
And I won't even go into the fact that I was ordered to stay next to the fire throughout to make sure Tikka didn't jump in it.
I mean, as if she would ?

sockser

2009-01-29T03:46:00.001-08:00

Looks innocent doesn't he?
But not only is he a type of domestic shark who spends most of his time up one tree or other in the garden waiting for birds to pop into his mouth, but he disappeared the other day; didn't come home for a day, which he hasn't ever done in his life before

I did the usual 5K search (a family ritual when any one of the animals goes missing). This Bessie enjoys immensely, it being an extra walk on top of her evening stone chasing event, all the time thinking he'll be back later and not worrying too much about it. But then, but then.... I come across this pile of, well I don't know what it was..excrement, vomit? in the grass in the upper garden. And oh my, it looked like bits of Socksie, black and white fur, mixed in with whatever it was. I didn't dare say anything to Lili and went back two or three times to check again, even much later in the night with a torch.. rifling through it with plastic gloves on and finding bits of bone and gristle.
At that stage, I began to lose it, convinced as I was, that he's probably been eaten by a crafty old fox: not unknown during these dark January nights when the animals are starving. Thought I'd collect his bits together and take them to the local vet in the morning for analysis, (yet again to suffer her annoying habit of always replying to my bad Italian in bad English).
All these things running through my head as I prepared to give Lili the tragic news.
I take a deep breath, and ..and......
At that very moment he walks into the kitchen!
Socks!!
The prodigal Socks.
Hugged and squeezed and triple fed, bounced around and cosseted.
With a 'What is all the fuss about' look on his face

Christmas 2008

2008-12-24T10:03:00.000-08:00

Bravo Fortù

Forch, two days after op.

This is for all fans of Fortunato (aka Forch or Fortù)
Two days ago he had a major operation to remove his spleen. He was back the same evening raring to go and hungry as a horse. His tummy is shaved naked and he's got stacks of stitches and we think he is suffering some post-op pain. But he is oh so brave and an example to us all.
Snow forecast tomorrow, probably a metre when it's carried on the Bora from the Balkans. But don't worry, we'll wrap his tummy up in a huge sock.
Tikka thinks he's wonderful.

Day after....the others, Tikka, Socks and Lila jostling in the snow; Tikka's first ever experience of it!

And our road this morning...

Caribinieri

2008-12-16T05:59:00.000-08:00

No not this photo! This is one of Bessie for all those of you who have been requesting a Christmas portrait of La Bessalina. She tells me that she's been asked to play the part of a sheep in the local Nativity play. Great for the part

Now the story!
Went to fetch my car yesterday evening in the Piazza and it wasn't there! Scanned my brain for the obvious possibilities; onset of Alzheimer's, parked it somewhere else, it's been stolen. Then I noticed the cheese and salami mobile shop was open (it's a long white caravan parked to the side of the Piazza) and I realised that's where I'd parked it an hour previous as it was closed at the time. So I march squeamishly up to said mobile salami and cheese shop and say to the lady owner 'Excuse me, but was there by any chance a Toyota parked here which now isn't?'
'Ah,' she says, 'so it was you, it's been towed away. I waited an hour but couldn't wait any longer'
'So where is it now?' I ask.
'Wherever they take them' she says
A customer tells me I have to go to the Caribinieri because they deal with such misdemeanors. Oh dear! Off I trundle up the hill to the Caribinieri HQ. (calling Lili on the way who says 'Cripes, that'll cost us a bomb') Now these are scary places behind 4 metre high metal barriers and I press the bell and wait breathlessly on account of steep climb and general fear.
Out comes the Marshall (the boss!) (oh My God!)
I say, it was me. I'm the one who had his car towed away.
'Hmmpf' he grunts,' better come inside, it's a grave offence you've committed, where do you live? show me your ID and driving licence. You'll be fined for this, have points taken off your licence and have to pay a whacking fee for the tow away'
'Yes, I say, 'and quite rightly too. It was a stupid thing I did and I'm happy to pay for such a mindless error'
He looks at me with surprise and smiles.
'You know', I say, 'I've been parking in the piazza for years and know jolly well I shouldn't have parked there. How could I have been so reckless!'
He softens even more.
'Oh, hang it all' he says,'We all make mistakes sometimes. Let's forget about it. I'll call the tow away guy and you'll have to pay him of course. He does and he says to the chap 'Look be easy on this chap, it was just a silly error'
'Do you know where the garage is?' he asks.
'Yes, more or less' I answer.
'Do you have some one to take you there, it's quite a way'
'No', I say 'I'll walk, don't worry'
'Oh, it's far too far ' he says,'Come on, grab your documents and I'll zoom you down there'
And he does.
We're there in three minutes flat and he shakes my hand as he says goodbye.
There's my car perched up on the tow away wagon and the driver comes over with a smile.
Oh, sorry I had to do that he says, guess you just forgot, he smiles, happens to us all.
So there I am, ready to drive off, go to pay him and he says,
Hey, don't worry, you don't owe me anything.
Sort of thing that makes you smile inside for days after.
Those little human sympathies which remind me of why I choose to live in Italy.

I quite forgot

2008-12-04T11:20:00.000-08:00

Some of you have been kindly asking about Tikka and the state of her paralyzed foot.
Well, sometimes we think she may be getting some feeling back into it, but it could just be wishful thinking. But she gets around just fine, runs like a rocket on three legs and can even climb trees. Can't get down again but we're working on it.
Here's her Christmas portrait for all her fans out there!

Pilates and snow

2008-12-04T09:12:00.000-08:00

Snow where it should be (and remain there)..on the mountains that is.

Oh! With the exception of Christmas where it's allowed to do so (snow) for a couple of days; big flakes drifting dreamingly down but not so heavy as to crush our flowering bushes or take whole branches off our trees like it did last year. Oh, and please can we have no ice, 'cos I went down like sack of Sicilian potatoes last winter on my way to my Pilates class. (This is beginning to sound like a Christmas prayer to Baby Jesus. It can be, it can be...being as it's nearly his birthday and all)
And, talking about my Pilates class, I must say that I was quite put out last evening.
Usually as you know it's just me and twenty ladies. Now after two years, some of them have begun to speak to me. You know, the odd word here and there. like 'Ciao' and 'Buonanotte' Sometimes I even get two or three words or even six put together, such as .'It's chilly tonight, or even 'Can you move your car please' So, in short you see I'm pretty well accepted into the group.
Imagine my horror then, when two minutes into the class, this big hairy brute of a guy barges in and takes a place next to me. Next to me? And really close too. This is a spot I've cultivated as my own for two whole years, just to the left of the orange pillar. OK, I know it's a quarter of the entire space but it's how women are with men. Well it is! Like when they always give up the front seat of a car to a man.
The last remaining vestige of past supremacies you might mumble (but not too loud, especially if Lili is in earshot because she has actually eliminated this last remaining vestige much to the physical and psychological discomfort of male friends who might be visiting).
Where was I ?
Ah yes, this bloke!
So, he comes in late, disrupts the class and then? He starts talking collectively to all the women!! And what's worse they all start giggling and answering back!
And it puts me right off my 'one-legged butterfly' position. In fact my legs have turned to jelly and I'm fiercly inwardly debating whether or not to just walk out of the gym.
And it gets worse! Within minutes he's huffing and puffing and gasping and sweating and clunking me every time we get the 'arms stretch' order Robbie the Pilates teacher turns the music up (I imagine to muffle the gasping next to me) and it's Tom Jones singing 'Sex Bomb' This is too much, I've really gotta talk to him about this, I mean not just the music but allowing other men into the class. By this time my mind and body have lost control completely and I'm competing with him to stretch further and touch my toes for longer, in fact my whole foot!
And he can't. He can't! He can't touch his toes!!
I mean what sort of man is this?
A wimp obviously.
I might have known.
When I get back home and walk into the kitchen, Lili asks 'Why the smug smile on your face?'
Nothing, I say, just a man thing. I was thinking about taking up a manly sport, like darts.
'Oh' she says ' Is it like archery? And can I do it too'
Bad day, bad day!

goodbye

2008-11-17T09:54:00.000-08:00

I want to say goodbye to two friends, both young and full of life and energy. Marina died yesterday after a long brave attempt to hang on and come back to us. her sister has written a lovely goodbye too http://be-reckless.blogs.com/be_reckless/2008/11/marina-finally-traveling-again.html.
Goodbye, too, to Gaby. You too were too young to go.
Lili and I wish you both buon viaggio

Truffles and fairies

2008-11-10T08:58:00.000-08:00

Do you know what a fairy looks like?
No no, I mean a real fairy!
...They're tiny with little wings and they whisper honeyed phrases like 'Would you like a warm marshmallow?'.
No, please! Quite wrong!
So here, to enlighten you is a picture of a whole bunch of them up in the Sibillini mountains, where, legend has it, they seduced poor young shepherds in fields as they lay.

How do I know this? Well, it's all described, along with other wondrous information, in our new Museum, at the top of the old town in Amandola.
But don't they look delicious? Most probably they all work in local bakeries in the daytime and go searching for poor young shepherds at night which would explain why the latter always look so knackered as I drive past in the mornings..and why shepherding seems to be so popular around here.
But before you rush to sign up for a career of shepherding hereabouts, I should add that these fairies had/ have goats legs and that the poor young shepherds were/are bewitched forever.
Hmmm! Now I think about it, it explains a lot, I mean about the strange nature of some folks about here. Haven't seen any nymphs with goats legs though. Our local bakery girl certainly hasn't got them because she goes to the same Pilates class as me. And I certainly would have noticed, believe me.
Hey! Look! There's a figure behind the Sibyline fairies. Cripes! It could be the devil. Now that is weird!
Oh and here's a picture of our museum. Most impressed I am, most impressed.

Anyway, I was in town to visit the 'Diamante a Tavola' fiera, our local yearly Truffle bash where I bought two jars of marmalade and one of Dog Rose jam. There who should I meet but the President of the local Truffle Society (one step down from God) who tells me that local truffle hero Bernie was up foraging last weekend (of course he got the wrong weekend), and only one small trufflette to boot(read his article on http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/10/white-truffles-amandola-italy) not that it made much difference because this year they are so scarce, that even his very miniscule find would have won a prize......the summer having been too hot and the Autumn rains arriving far too late. Yep, this year they are so scarce and this means they're gonna be costly.

Here are some photos of the fair with small truffles.

Nice weather, nice atmosphere, mediocre marmalade. Mountain living at its best, before the snows arrive.

24hour cops

2008-09-27T06:05:00.000-07:00

You've heard of a sleeping policeman?
Sure you have.
So what do you think this is?
A Darlek.
No, don't be daft..
It's a 24 hour cop. That's what it is...that's what they call them. No, That's not true, that's what they probably would call them if they thought about it, which I'm sure they don't. It's what I call them, maybe it'll stick.
But they are sprouting up everywhere. In towns, outa town, some blue, some orange, some red but all innocuous.
What they do is film you as you drive past (thinking they are just waste bins)... well, you might until you get a speed fine in the post. Yep, any speed over 50KPH and you're done for

And this little piece of living participatory street art below is entitled ' An assasinated 24 hour cop'
Wasn't me what dunnit, honest, but the artist, whoever she was, has the full support and gratitude of most of us locals ( except maybe the town policeman, the human one )
You'll find it on the road to Macerata just north of Sarnano.
Hoot as you pass.

Synchronised divinity

2008-09-02T02:43:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a blog about synchronised swimming (see sketch below with me on left teaching my 2012 Olympic hopefuls) at the lake at Fiastra..

......but a friend told me that he had a water diviner coming round to search for water on his land, and..well... I've always fancied myself as a bit of a hot shot water diviner, but I'm always willing to take a step back and learn from others...so I zoomed over to friend's restored mill near Mogliano and met Paulo, the water diviner. Oh, you know, we shot the breeze about our divine experiences, compared twigs, the sort of things we diviners do together when we meet, which is about every half century.
Just kidding really. But I did have crack at it when I lived in Tuscany and after hours wandering aimlessly over swampy fields, I did discover that my twig was twitching, called the digger and we dug two metres down and woosh, out it suddenly came and the well became the water supply for my wondrous veggie patch.
Paulo taught me more than these remembered basics however. You talk to your diving stick (in your mind he said) and it tells you where to go and shoots back when a source of water is found. That day he found two underground streams converging and chose to locate the future well at that point. He said the water is 50 metres down but I find that hard to believe because my inner voice said 10, but we'll see when they dig. (if they ever do, because the source is unfortunately in the neighbours field, bad luck that)
I asked him how he knew the depth to be 50 metres. Same process, he said, I just ask the stick at every stage, 10, 20, 30 metres and so on and it says yes when it's the correct depth.
Does it ever trick you I asked?
Only when it's in a bad mood, he said.

I'm thinking 'I believe the song and not the singer'
Hmm

Paolo at work.... great job, great job.

First we'll take Manhattan

2008-08-09T02:50:00.000-07:00

Having a bad technology day!
In fact I'm nervous about using the computer. Lili says I'd best go back to bed. It started with the washing machine which did strange and lurid things to my posh new beach shorts. Now what do I care about beach shorts? But these were extra swish and I don't mind telling you I cut quite a dash in them (not that I could ever see them, says Lili, over my beer belly) Hmm.
Then this morning I tried to download some images from my telefonino onto my computer.
Zilch! No connection. Try with battery recharger... Zero! Then it dawns on me I'd dug it out wet from the beach bag at Altidona yesterday (somebody had put a bottle of water next to it, the same somebody who made my beach shorts metamorphosize)
And it's hot and everything is wilting in the garden and the promised storm was just an electric one with ten drops of rain

The telefonino images were of the Leonard Cohen concert which we zoomed over to Lucca to see. It was great, and you felt like it was historic to be there. It was worth the ages it took to get there (a two hour pizza lunch en route for the ladies, you understand), then the hysteria and crushing at the entrance of the concert, then getting lost on the way back and ending up in Orvieto, so deep we were into singing Leonard's songs. So they were the photos...I guess now lost forever along with my telefonino. Oh No!

So here are some more images of the electric storm and the weird orange light that made us look like Martians.

Tonight there' a Tango festival in San Ginesio, but Lili says we best stay home until it passes.

Animals, babies and sunsets

2008-07-24T02:35:00.000-07:00

I've always considered photographing the above categories strictly taboo, especially babies, especially friend's babies; although I must confess to having broken the animal part of the taboo with Tikka and Marina. Went out with friends to dinner at Mogliano yesterday evening and didn't have my camera, although my feeling when leaving home was to take it with me...however there was this gorgeous African sunset the like of which I have never seen. Had my telefonino however and look!

I never go to Mogliano that often and have never been to this restaurant ever but who should come in but two old friends from Ascoli. We'd parted on bad terms some seven years ago but here we were hugging each other and thus obliterating the past.
So, life is full of surprises.
They had a new baby with them and I wish I'd taken its photo. Taboos and grudges are useless concepts, aren't they?
This week I've been invited out to lunch and to dinner in the evening just about every day. Word has got out that Lili is away on a workshop (what again you ask?) Yes and for Italians this means this poor man is going to starve. Who's gonna cook for him and shop for him? Fridge is empty and the house is a mess. Animals are dropping with hunger and the garden has become a jungle full of wild beasts such as snails and black squirrels. None of this is true (except the black squirrel part), but what is it about women that makes them want to believe we can't cope? As I write this my friend GG calls and says he's heard I'm on my own and his wife says we should meet for a pizza in town tonight.
I say great, 'cos I'm starving and I've run out of baked beans and chips and I don't think I can cope.

Two black mice and one white

2008-06-30T13:02:00.001-07:00

Two black mice, one white; a green crocodile, a pink elephant and a white ball. Her play times (of at least an hour) each day. And she checks that all her toys are there. These exercise sessions are essential for her paralysed arm according to our vet, who tells us this evening that she may put a metal plate in Tikka's paw to straighten it. We're not sure though, don't want to distress her. On the subject of distress, I was bringing my paintings back from the Perugia show yesterday evening when the car went dead on me. Sunday evening. 9pm in the middle of nowhere and the other side of the mountains. Went back today to retrieve it. Thankfully car intact and all paintings inside. 31C and frying in the heat I was and I was helped by angels to get the car to a place of safety. Real angels.

Witchcraft tips

In the evening of the full moon, wander down to the forest with Bessie for protection and collect handfalls of wild rose petals from the wood below the hunters lodge, yellow ginestra flowers from a little lower down (but don't wander too far, dear). Then, when you are safely home, soak them in cold spring water from the magic fountain at Rustici, over night under the light of the full moon. In the morning splash your body, in particular your hair and head with the cold flower infused water...and this will sharpen your mind and body and protect you from spells and periods of depression.

Witchcraft

2008-06-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

Witchcraft.
Funny, I've only just remembered that I did my thesis at Art College on Witchcraft. Don't ask me why, just something that fascinated me at the time. Not by chance then, you might say, that I find myself living in one of the witchiest places in Europe.
Here are some witchy things to contemplate.
Fred.
This is Fred

Fred emerges at this time every year and frolicks with the fireflies, eats then too I imagine. How old is Fred would you say? Twelve years old possibly, maybe ten?
Forget it, you'll never get near it. He's 164.
None of our seven animals take any notice of him because of his invisibilty. this BTW is Lili's notion, i.e that he only makes himself visible to us as a kind of thank you for bringing him back to the World after he'd made that dreadful mistake (being in the wrong place at the wrong time... in the cattle stalle when they were laying the floor in 1850)
I'd written about this rospo miracle some years back but seeing him on our doorstep last night makes it worth a retell,
I was digging out some crumbling brick tiles from the floor of the old stalle
(now my studio). Dave was giving me a hand and there were two or three bricks which were in pieces but difficult to dislodge. We tried bashing and levering not to no avail, so we had to prise every broken bit out with a screwdriver. I'd taken out the whole of one brick and was removing the mortar beneath when I saw an eye open within the mortar dust; then a slight movement and then 'Yipes!' And we watched, mesmerised, as a toad pulled himself out of the debris, shook himself, gave us both a cursory glance, and wandered out of the door into the garden and into the 21st Century.
That's Fred.

videos and assassins

2008-06-23T02:14:00.000-07:00

Today I've been out in the garden aligning my sacred stones. Now what else would you do on the solstice?

Up at dawn I was, at 5.30 to check my alignments and listen to the bird song (what bird song? Socksie has eaten most of them...we twigged this when we saw him with a different bird in his mouth at any one time. He is, in short, an assassin and we don't know what to do about it)
Well, eager ears, my dawn stone alignment proved to be a complete success, by which I mean that I can confirm that our planet still is tilted at the same angle and hasn't change its orbit around our sun.
Not so with my westerly alignment at sunset. It was out by 7 degrees. Now this means, either we are heading towards Mars at a rate of thousands of K per second, or that Lilla (Socksie's sister) had jumped on it (as was her habit during the winter for some unknown reason) and Lili had just just stood it up again not respecting my cosmic organisation. Anyway, both deny it.
So equipped with just a garden fork, and under my barked instructions, Lili hopped from left to right as I set my sights from my main mini Stonehenge stone against the westering one, dipping as it was at that moment under the Sibillas' torso.
A passing outsider might have mistaken her movements for a solsticial pagan dance ritual ( Aaah! ..so legends and myths are born I hear you whisper)
But success, westering stone re- aligned and cosmic order (at least in our garden) restored.
Apart, I should emphasise, from the murder of birds, mice , bees and butterflies which is going on faster than Americans eat hambugers. (I mean, are we not feeding them at home that they behave so?)

Summer's here at last. Arrived on same mid summer day after weeks of rain and low temperatures. Now we get 30C by day and it looks to stay that way for a while. And look at the lavender!

And the profusion of butterflies. The live ones that is , not the fallen one-winged victims of Tikka's right paw. Bees a-buzzin too and a heady mixture of a thousand scents fill the air.
Everything good in the garden.
And in the fields around us, Quinto, Graziella and Renzo are cutting and bailing hay.
I like the noise they make and to hear them shouting to each other.
You ask about Tikka.

Still no feeling in her left paw, so we will try another trip to the vets, just to see if anything can be done, although she is getting around just fine. We just worry about when the sheep dogs do their weekly raid and that she might be outside alone in the garden and not be able to escape fast enough. She can't climb trees you see. Built her a ladder though, although when they attack, they are fast and brutal. Bessie does her best as her guardian, but she's getting on in years. Our garden, our garden.

2008-06-19T09:49:00.000-07:00

Hey! Look at these
http://turismo.comune.perugia.it/canale.asp?id=465

http://sette-bello.blogspot.com/2008/06/portrait-of-artist-as-young-man.html

Now, if you're in Perugia Sat 21st or 28th, I'll be there at the show and I'll buy you a coffee and a cake

June deep green

2008-06-14T07:33:00.001-07:00

Just look at that green! It's supposed to be summer in Le Marche and I should be out there watering for an hour every evening, relaxing after dull day and lit up rouge by the glow of the westering sun, with a bottle of beer and a packet of crisps. But it has rained for almost two weeks now and the only life form getting any benefit on our property are the trees and plants, oh and a worm or two I would imagine and of course a fish would too(if we had one). Hmm, other pluses too now I think about it; reservoirs full, water bills bearable, no dust in the house from passing cars and a great year for trout (which you can fish for E10 a day up near Franco's place on the river Ambro just below the Abbey)
Tomorrow we have to drive across the mountains to Perugia to put up my show of paintings so I do hope it's not bucketing down like it is at this very moment.

You were asking about Tikka
We scoured all the websites for info about nerve damage and made endless trips to the vet but poor Tikka still has no feeling in her left paw. Seems it depends on what sort of damage there is to the nerve, poor mite. So if anybody out there has any info on this front?

Tikka

2008-05-26T01:31:00.000-07:00

OK, you guessed it!
Our home is rapidly becoming a hospital for pets.
But what other option did we have. We were driving to Ortezzano to dine with friends (at the Osteria 'La Rosa dei Venti' (highly recommended .. really excellent)... and as we passed Comunanza, I saw a little black shape moving in the road; it was getting dark and there were quite a few cars on the road and as we drew close I could see that it was a kitten so I instinctively swerved off the road and parked and managed to stop the cars as we rushed across the road to save the poor little thing.
So here she is. Vet says her sciatic nerve has been stretched and so she is paralysed in her left leg, poor mite, but the feeling could come back with massage, Reiki and vitamins.
So our animal farm now consists of Bessie, Forch, Eva, Marina, Lilla, Socksie and now Tikka (or could be Treacle)

Most of the cat tribe are ignoring her, except for Socks, who is always asleep anyway and wouldn't know if you'd put a tarantula next to him- See pic!

(Bessie likes her though and wags her tail enthusiastically and is thus adored which means she gets fed extra)

Best advice? Keep off the roads as much as possible around this time of the year. Fact is, people dump kittens. They do. Too mean to get females doctored and too lazy to find homes for the offspring. Makes me mad it does!

Pizzas and pilates

2008-05-10T05:36:00.000-07:00

Would you buy a pizza from this man?
I think not.

And was it Ralph Waldo Emerson who said 'There is truth, then there is journalism'?
Probably not, although it was the sort of thing he would say.
But, whoever said it, obviously had pizzas in mind.
Don't know what I'm talking about?...Read this
http://sette-bello.blogspot.com/
Yes, you've guessed it. it's the weekend of the world famous annual Sant'Ippolito pizza competition.
Now, if ever there were a travesty of the truth, it's this little tale above; a demonic manipulation of the true story, the actual chain of events on that sunny afternoon in Bernie's backyard.

I know what you're gonna say 'Sour grapes'....But I never use 'em, only stone ground olives (are there such things?), and a speck of spek, but I can understand the confusion.
But as my old dad used to say 'A pizza speaks a thousand words'

So, it's enough to look, indeed gaze (ten minutes minimum) in wonder at my masterpiece.

Here you see true art; not only culinary art, but contemporary visual art.
OK I'm too late to enter the Tate competition this year I know, but, come on, you've gotta wonder at its splendour.
Oh, not that I could've entered it anyway, I ate it! So very very delicious it was.
Edible art!
Yes!

...and the Pilates?
After six months of stretching, bending, twisting and contorting my poor body, it's screaming 'enough, no more!'
And me, being the only man in a class of twenty women, I suffered the most. Because the teacher, Roberto, couldn't touch twist and bend the bodies of the ladies as he could mine (being male and all). So I'm more flexible but ache in the places that I used to play and have given myself a summer break. Gardening's gonna be my main exercise until Autumn and swimming and walking and Qi Kong and table tennis (for which, sadly, you don't need twenty women), oh and proper tennis if I can find an opponent, which is doubtful because I'm crap at it.
Massimo might give me a game though, if his toenail is better.

The cuckoos are back

2008-04-18T07:12:00.000-07:00

And not only the winged variety.
You think I'm writing about the latest Italian election, don't you? Now look! I don't ever write about politics, do I? Well, I do sometimes when things political nauseate me, so get this, dear reader, just get this.......
What's Berlusconi's first act as Prime Minister, on his first day in office? He invites his mate Putin down to his weekend millionaire's playground in Sardinia to watch a troup of young dancing girls. And what's more, he's trying to flog Alitalia to him. You've gotta laugh at the man, especially when you think of poor old Prodi who used to spend his evenings swotting over Italy's accounts, trying to find ways of getting the country out of debt.
Bring on the dancing girls, that's Berlusconi's solution.
Let's just dance all those silly problems away!

So this is a photo of my new orchard by way of diversion, just so's you don't get bored.
(And you can guess from the long shadow that I'm either a giant or it's 5 mins before sunset).
Trivial?
You bet! but it's because of this fear I have of Italy drifting into mindless triviality.
You see, I have to be it to understand it, because from the outside looking in, it makes no sense to me. Or maybe you can make it easier for me by explaining to me (someone?).... why Italians have put Berlusconi back in power with a solid majority. I just don't get it.
Depressing.
And here's a footnote, just in case you wonder in which direction we might expect our Govt to take.........http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/30/italy

Blackout/Whiteout

2008-03-07T02:25:00.000-08:00

Get ready to faint!
Can you imagine a world where you switch your computer on to write another nonsense blog and nothing happens, just a blank screen? (Oh but I bet you can though, eh?, hmmm)
Alright then, a world where you switch on the TV to watch the Texas Primaries and nothing happens (Yes you can imagine that too! Oh!).
Well then...coupled that with no central heating, no chess games with your vista chess programme (it's a genius)..And, to make matters worse, the bread machine hasn't finished its cycle and produced a sort of concrete bun.

You make bread?

Yes I do, look....They say it's the best bread you can find in Sant Ippolito

If I may allow myself a wee boast.

Sadder still, missing your morning tea and only two biscuits Michael you're on a diet.
Yes of course we have a blackout but still I went through all the actions all the same., switching things on and off unconsciously.
So, The electricity lines were down and the snow fell for one whole day up to 40cm.
Trees where down everywhere too and the shrubs in our garden crushed.
It was the Bora, that freezing blast from the dreaded Balkans which picks up moisture from the warmer Adriatic and dumps it on us in the form of snow.

Poor Marche.

ski day

2008-02-21T12:25:00.000-08:00

Beautiful Springlike day, clear open skies without the slightest wind. Nipped up to the mountain above Sarnano and treated myself to a morning's skiing. Just me on the slope, just me! What a privilege. Ok I know it was just the kid's slope and I know I must have looked like a drunken caterpillar skewering my way down but hey! who was there to watch? Just the ski instructor who had only me as a customer. He let me eat my cheese and prosciuto panino and drink my coke on his terrace.
And I read my book 'Winter in Madrid' and soaked up the sun.

Here are some pictures..

By the way, did I ever tell you how I learned to ski? No? It was in the Rockies with a Zen ski master.
I learned a lot about Zen. Not too much about skiing though (still have the head scars)

Super Tuesday

2008-02-06T01:38:00.002-08:00

This morning. Bessie barking like mad and confronting a sheep dog as a local shepherd artfully guides his sheep past our early flowering marigolds. A medieval scene.
It's Super Tuesday in the US and Carnival time here. I'm checking the primaries results on the internet and all I can here is sheep bells. And the news comes up that Italy is to go to the polls again. What? This is a disastrous decision meaning another weak government blackmailed by minority parties.
Who bribed who?. I'm asking myself.
Get the picture?
Understand why I feel confused and perplexed?

And this is yesterday evening in Sarnano. the whole town gets blocked while the carnival passes through. I suppose the western theme had something to do with Super Tuesday. Do you think so? Or the state of the Italian Govt? Or the speed of Italian trains?

On Sunday I went up to Padova where Lorenzo and I had an opening for one of our Red&Blue Art Factory shows..back on Monday after staying overnight. Couldn't face the drive so took a train. Have you ever traveled by train in Italy? Hmmm! Wanna talk medieval again? (See how the themes are overlapping in my mind?)
It's the same day that Spain announces its spectacular new rail system. Two hours from Barcelona to Madrid. And if the train is more than two minutes late you get a full refund!! Can you imagine Trenitalia ever offering that.... the economy would collapse overnight (if it hasn't already)
There's me trying to get to Padova from Porto San Giorgio on the coast. It's Sunday morning and I arrive 15 mins beforehand having wasted half an hour trying to get some cash from a hole in the wall.... Tried three, none working.
There's a herd of customers by the ticket office which is closed with a hand written message on window which says we open at 11 o'clock with an arrow pointing left and the words 'use the machine'
But nobody knows how to. One after the other we try, dialing up destination, class of ticket etc to be instructed to then dial 'OK'. But there isn't an OK button and the train is about to arrive---- Look I say, let's all just get on and explain the situation to the inspector and pay at the other end. They all turn to me as one and say 'What are you crazy and be fined 50 euros?' Oh he'll understand I say. 'No he won't..we've been fined before in the same situation'
Then suddenly pops up a young lady from the town who says 'Hey that's the OK button bottom left, the one with nothing on it...the letters have worn away' So hurriedly we get out tickets, me last of all as the train pulls in and I get one only to Ancona because one of the ladies in the queue advised me not to try and get a ticket all the way as she lost E50 on one of these machines a week before. Oh my!
So on the train I am and it's ten minutes late already and I'm doubting if I'll have time to get a ticket for Padova at Ancona.
Then (of course) arrives a ticket inspector who sneers at my ticket and says I have to pay a E50 fine because it isn't stamped.
I explode!
I say, you should be ashamed!
'Trenitalia is a disaster. It symbolises everything that's wrong with this country and you should be ashamed working for such a crank organisation. there were twenty people
trying to get a ticket this morning, the ticket office was closed, the machine didn't work, the train is late and I probably won't have time to get a ticket to Padova and now you're saying I have to pay a E50 fine?
'It says so on the rules he says'
And service , I say, do you know what service is? All these people paying money and treated like this?
I'm only doing my job he says, and you're foreign aren't you (as if this is an explanation for the difficulty he is experiencing)
What's that got to do with it I shout?
OK, OK, he says and signs my ticket and lets me off the fine.
On the station at Ancona (I just managed to get my ticket in time) I see an poster saying 'Travel by train and make a smaller carbon footprint' and feel an urge to scribble something apt and rude over it...but have no time.
A great time in Padova..nice opening with lots of people.
And when I get back (to cut a longer story short), I stop at the ticket office at Porto San Giorgio on the way out and say to the guy behind the triple strength attack- proof glass 'Look the ticket office was close yesterday morning and there were lots of people trying to get a ticket from this machine here and the OK button is obliterated and it caused a lot of difficulty for people'
'It wasn't closed' he says.'This ticket office wasn't closed'
I lose it again until he finally confesses that true it was closed and what's more the OK button is obliterated, did you know that?
I'll fix it he says.
I wonder, I'll check next time I pass.
Obama's ahead in the first counts and Italy is without a government.
The sheep are settled happily in a nearby field and Graciella and Quinto are up a tree cutting there vines.
I say I think it'll snow next week.
(it's wish talk because my daughter and grandson are here and I want to take him skiing)

Post script

And guess what happened when the sheep came back later in the afternoon?
Socksie (that's him on right) nearly got murdered by three sheep dogs. He was cornered and made a break for it but ran into the herd of sheep: made a swift turn about but straight into the dogs who were so suprised they hesitated and he luckily made a leap for Bernie's tree and just escaped a snapping mouth. So Lili gave him Reichi and he's calmed down but we have had to lecture him on the evils of the outside world (Marimmana dogs in particular)

Christmas Carols

2007-12-19T06:37:00.000-08:00

Just look at this stuff!
Dreaming of a white Christmas were you?

We get back from a weekend in UK and whammo! Straight into half a metre of the white stuff (Oh, it's snow I'm talking about here)
Yes, Christmas shopping in London where we saw marvellous things. We saw The Queens' collection of Italian art at Buckingham Palace (well, not actually IN the Palace but in The Queen's Gallery on the side), an exhibition of Futurist Art in Islington, then to Camden market, where we got a Chinese meal for two quid, and finally the new St Pancras station where we had champagne in their new bar there in sub zero temperatures (only the English, I said to Lili.... only the English would conceive of ,and enjoy, anything quite as daft) we stayed with our friends Sheila and Tony who fed us quails eggs and huge breakfasts. Then we zoomed up to other friends, Franca and John, near Cambridge, and arrived in their quaint little village of Brinkley just in time for the Carol Service in the church opposite.
Lili was quite intrigued at the thought of attending an activity in an Anglican church (being of the Papal ilk herself) but I don't think any of us were prepared for what we experienced.
It was odd, very odd indeed.
And this is what happened...
There we were, the congregation, adults, families with kids of all ages, packed within ancient oak pews, all of us clutching our carol song sheets, ready to sing our hearts out, as we English love to do and suddenly, from the back of the church and obviously in a rush arrives the vicar, a lady vicar, a vicarette, carrying a tatty cardboard box which she plonks on the floor beside the alter.
'I suppose you're all wondering why I'm not dressed in my usual vicar's attire' she asks 'and dressed in this coat? Well, maybe you think I'm bonkers, or absent minded, but it's not either of these. I'm dressed to go out because tonight we are going on a journey'
The congregation exchange nervous glances (no mince pies?, out in the freezing cold?). 'We are going on a journey to Bethlehem, to be at the birth of baby Jesus'.
(phew, a metaphorical trip, ok, ok, ok.)
'Let's think first about Mary', she says, 'Now she was only twelve years old when an angel came to her alone in her room one evening and asked her if she'd mind giving birth to the Son of God. "That would be just fine" Mary said, "Oh thanks, but don't tell your mum just yet" said the angel, and then disappeared.'
'Now', says our vicarette, directing her questions at a couple of young girls in the front row, 'What would you feel if your mum and dad had gone off to Tesco's to do the shopping and an angel turned up in your room and asked if you wouldn't mind giving birth to a divine babe? And you were just twelve years old?'
Nervous giggles from the girls and a few muffled grunts.
'You'd be really scared wouldn't you?'(more giggles and shuffles)
'And would you tell your mum and dad? No, because the angel tells you to keep it a secret between you and God?'
'Let's here say a prayer to Jesus for all the young people who have to make hard decisions in their lives'
We pray,
And then sing a carol 'Away in a manger'
'And poor Mary, can you imagine going all the way to Bethlehem on a donkey in her condition? Not a lovely warm BMW! And being only twelve years old, and arriving there and finding all the hotels full?'
'And what about the shepherds?' she asks 'The angel flies up to them on the hillside and declares the imminent arrival of Jesus to them and asks them to go down to Bethlehem at his birth. What must they have thought?' (adults beginning to exchange increasingly nervous glances)
She then drags out the Tesco's cardboard box she'd hidden under the altar and asks the children to come out and put the little shepherd figures into the box along with the manger.
'And then poor Joseph, what must he have thought when the angel told him his 12 year old betrothed was pregnant not with his baby, but with God's? Would one of the children like to come out and put Joseph in the box, uhm.. manger?'
Little boy hops out and bungs Joseph in Tesco's box.
'Now I would like all the children to come up and meet Joseph' (increasingly reluctant children forced by parents to go to front of church)
'Now what sort of job did Joseph have, children?'
'Fireman', one says, 'TV producer' says another.
'Well, he worked with wood, what would that make him?' 'A lumberjack' says a little boy.
Vicarette somewhat impatiently tells them no he was a carpenter.
And so on with more carols and prayers to baby Jesus for all shepherds, carpenters and lumberjacks who have difficult decisions to make in their lives.
Finally (and by this time the congregation are in a state of suppressed mass panic),
She says 'And guess who I've got in my pocket? Yes baby Jesus, I've been keeping him safe and sound and warm all day' And she lugs him out (in the shape of a little cloth mummy) and drops him on the church floor (oh crikey!)
Then she asks a little boy to take BJ and put him gently in the manger (Tesco's cardboard box) 'But don't drop him', she says.
A finally a prayer for the animals in the manger who must have wondered what an earth was going on (what about us in the congregation, I'm thinking, we'd like to know what's going on)
And then we sing 'Oh little star of Bethlehem', a quick prayer to BJ and then outa there, most of the parents rushing home for a quick brandy and on to Google to ask how old Mary was when she had BJ.

Wanna know? try this link, (but not if you're Catholic)

http://www.able2know.org/forums/about1970-0-asc-0.html

Phew, glad to be back safe and sound in the land of a million nativity scenes (presepe where Joseph and Mary are both thirty years old at least, the animals and shepherds are all happy in their respective positions and the three wise men haven't been forgotten and are also inside the Tesco's box, ......I mean manger).

Look!

I'll leave you with a picture of a snowman I made yesterday in the garden.
I've made him look about twenty one years of age, although he's probably only eleven.

snow on 16th Nov

2007-11-19T08:18:00.000-08:00

Yep! Lots of it

And here's one next morning! OK, you've got it... this is the other side of the two halves of Italy. Green lizards versus fine wines (and chocolates).

Bad Italy day

2007-11-17T00:54:00.000-08:00

Bad Italy days happen periodically and nowadays more frequently.
Is it because I'm getting older and grumpier, or because they are getting worse? (they being them). Both, Lili tells me, with always the aside 'This is Italy, for goodness sake, you know it's like this, get a grip'
Ok, what am I talking about specifically?
Uhmm, how about yesterday for example?
Weather forecast is for snow arriving later and Lili has to get to Rome for her Tantric workshop.
I've already made an appointment to get snow tyres put on, so I drive into town, at the appointed time of 9.30, only to find the Gommista, the tyre depot, completely chockablock with locals. and then the usual routine......(Oh my goodness).... there's this unspoken communication going on. Twenty men, twenty cars and nobody saying anything to anybody. Look, everybody knows Italians don't like to queue but when they do it with cars, it's just, it's just.... deadly. And it's not just men driving/darting into the workshop as soon as one car departs from a ramp but some are driving in and doing a self service routine, jacking up own their cars, even using the workshops bolt guns (and thus holding up any semblance of progress). Then I see Massimiliano, our earth moving man, and say for heavens sake what's going on here, who goes when and how? Michael, he says, you just have to push and not be English, otherwise you'll still be here this evening. So I try assertiveness, go up to the boss and say I'm driving onto the ramp next.
OK?
Sure he says.
Oh!
So there I am (car that is) up on ramp and he duly sets about seeing to all the other punters.
I get away an hour and a half later, and it's beginning to snow.

Next stop the Anagrafo.
I shouldn't have done this, I should have gone home. Why would I want to punish myself so!
The background story....
Up until this year, non- Italian EU citizens wanting to live in Italy have had to apply for a Carta di Soggiorno. With new more universal EU laws coming into effect, this excruciatingly soul destroying process has been replaced by one of simple registration at the Anagrafo of one's local comune.
Simple?
Oh yeah?

Lizards at work (in confused state)

There is no doubt in my mind that the creature who runs the Anagrafo office is a six foot lizard, an alien being. Sure he has (almost) the appearance of being a human being, but don't be fooled.
His sole purpose on this planet at this time is to make miserable the lives of non-Italian residents, me being one of them.
So, my Carta di Soggiorno has just expired and, as these documents legally no longer exist, I naturally assume that, as I am already a resident here from nine years back, that all is in order and I just have to do nothing.
Naive, or what?
This week I get a letter from the six foot lizard telling that as my Carta di soggiorno has expired that I must report to his office within 20 days and with every possible document proving my identity (which they already have remember), otherwise my name will be expunged from the Comune records.
What? Hmm. Hence my visit.
There' a young guy working for lizard who does all his counter confrontations for him. Lizard controls him of course, because everything you say (or plead) has to be reported to lizard who is constantly sending telepathic messages to young man (who could in fact be a baby lizard I'm beginning to think).

It goes like this..
Why have you sent me this rude letter?
Because your Carta di Soggiorno has expired.
But the Carta di Soggiorno no longer exists, how could I renew it?
It's the new law and you have to apply all over again.
For what?
For legal residence.
But I've been legally resident here for nine years, had a legal business, paid tax, paid into Italian pension fund, you name it. Also I'm married to an Italian and can claim Italian citizenship.
I don't know about that, but you still have to bring in all the forms we ask plus proof of private health insurance.
What? (at this point my heart beat is making the double thickness glass partition between us begin to rattle) I already have Italian State health insurance (which I'm imminently going to be in need of)
No you don't.
I whip out my insurance card and he looks at it dumbfounded, then takes it over to six foot lizard. Lizard gets his own out of his wallet and scrutinises both together, turning them over round and round. He sends a telepathic command to young lizard who picks up phone and calls Lizard HQ. I leave him talking and go and have a coffee with Graciella and Quinto who I spot outside; comeback and young lizard is still on phone and now I see boss lizard is giving me deadly looks, trying to hypnotise me I guess or damage my brain cells.
Yes you do have this card it's true but you must get an E121 card from your country of origin and take it to the hospital to make it valid.
You mean it isn't any longer valid? If I have an accident , or maybe a heart attack, I'm not covered?
Yes you are but you still have to get this card and I would advise as soon as possible.
For God's sake, I've been resident here for years, etc etc etc.
OK, I'm getting out of here, you lizards don't know what you are talking about.
They flash each other looks and I see the green sparks for a split second, so now I know for sure.

Get back home and Pino turns up because I'd said we'd go to Denis' house to check out a massive leak he'd been told had swamped his downstairs lounge. We drop Lili off in Amandola to catch the bus for Rome and we head off to Illice to check house. Pino hands me his new Tom Tom satellite navigator because he says he's tried for days to get it to work and can't, it keeps on trying to make him go to Ancona airport when wants to go to The Oasis shopping centre in Fermo. I switch it on and it says 'Turn around now. Would you like to take the autostrada.... your journey is 316 Kilometres and will take two and three quarter hours.'
Illice is only 8K away and ten mins I should add.
Try it tomorrow I tell him, it's a bad Italy day. He puts it away. I don't have to explain.
Denis' flood turns out to be a tiny puddle and as we leave the house the snow has really set in and we sooth our irritation by picking as many of Denis' persimans as we can carry. Enough to last until Christmas, you bet.
Back into Amandola for a beer and it's getting darker and colder and I have to remind myself that this weather is not normal. Why this time last year we were still at the beach sunbathing, although I guess that wasn't normal either.
Back home I decide to go to Pilates class even though Lili is in Rome (just me and twenty women, what am I doing?) I kit up, go out wearing my Crocs walk onto snow and WHACK!, down I go. So there I was, in the dark, lying on my back, soaked in wet snow and my back hurting like hell and with Bessie looking over me wagging her tail.
I give up, go back inside house and run a hot aromatic bath.
It's a bad Italy day.
It's the best you can do.

It's Autumn

2007-11-03T06:07:00.000-07:00

A short animal quiz

OK what's this?

'A dog.'

Well done!

What about this?

'Another dog.'

Errr..... yes.

'And this is a photo of a man with the same dog (and Eric the Black peeping into frame)'

Well yes.

'And his friend with the other dog.'

Righteeho!

Not really getting anywhere are we?

'No.'

What I was trying to steer you towards was some sort of exclamation of recognition.

'Oh!'

Yes, like 'Hey, that's a hunting dog'. Or, 'That's a bird dog, duck dog, hare dog, any anything dog, apart from being just a dog!'

'Oh!'

So what sort of dogs do you think these might be?

'Duck dogs'

Oh. good grief! How on earth could they be duck dogs in the middle of a truffle wood in Le Marche?
There, now I've said it.

'Oh, they're truffle dogs'

Why yes, you've got it, well done.

The story, however.....

Bernie has been invited to write an article about truffle hunting for a very famous magazine which could even possibly be the New York Times (gosh, if only this were true). Although one can never be sure about such things with American journalists (which is what he is) because they all say they are writing for the New York Times and I never know why except maybe it's magic mantra which claims truth by it's very utterance. (Shakespeare, hmm)
So in town we meet Alberto Mandozzi, the President of the local Truffle Society along with his assistant
Marcello. We've already been briefed at some considerable length by Antonio's son about the holy nature of our task and I'm getting to feel that we are going on a secret mission into some ultra-sensitive war zone. We're certainly dressed for the part, wearing what can only be described as combat gear. Truffles after all, can be dangerous critturs warns Bernie.. shouldering his shotgun. The truffle President eyes him suspiciously, dark imaginings flitting across his knitted brow, visions of skies full of helicopters and marines parachuting into his scared groves.

Bernie entering sacred grove

The war zone happens to be in the woods below our house. What? Beneath our house? So that explains the cars we see scattered around our drive all these past Autumns...truffle hunters. Already this eiry feeling that we are entering some magic secret, some other divine dimension.
The dogs, Lampo and Dora spill out of their respective Fiat Pandas and go racing down the hill, our hill, noses already vacuuming the ground beneath them as they zoom down towards the woods.
And so it began, our initiation into the sublime art of truffle hunting.

(Alberto has written a wondrous book on the subject...'i Tartuffi del Piceno' but here's a brief synopsis).
There are, he explains, two types of truffle, white and black.
There are four types of black but only one of white. The white you only find in Italy, it can only exist in the wild where it lives a symbiotic existence with the oak tree, attaching itself to the roots of same. The black, which can be grown domestically also depends initially on this symbiotic existence with the oak and a couple of other trees but it then spreads across the woodland floor. The white is four times more valuable than the black (this year fetching E10,000 a kilo) has a richer aroma but a more subtle taste.
And then, most important of all (and this had both Antonio and Marcello roaring with laughter),
there are no white truffles in France, only black. The poor French...... but nothing less, of course, than they deserve.

Bernie, Eric the Black, Marcello and Alberto, Lampo and Dora

And this was the most amazing part for me.
That the truffles want to be found and eaten.
This is why they give off such a heady seductive aroma which attracts dogs, deer, cinghiale and snails (yes, snails!) If they could talk they be saying, shouting, 'Find me, here I am, dig me up and eat me', although in Italian and not of course in French.
Because this is how they are spread: the spores pass through the alimentary canal of animals and are deposited across wide areas (in the case of the cinghiale) and considerably shorter distances (probably two metres) in the case of the snail. But it's the snails' excrement that contains the best nutriments for the germination of the truffle spore. Now what do you make of that?
And our hunt? Zero! Didn't find a thing. Worst season for years with no rain in the summer they tell us, but I wonder. I wonder if this is all part of the ritual of initiation. That there is a level two, and we've only passed part one. That, metaphorically, Bernie has to change his shotgun for a truffle spear. You know what I mean, don't you. You do.
Truffles next time. They promised.

The language lesson.
Two weekends back I got stuck in London because of a strike at Falconara airport. Anyone who has ever suffered the trials and arrows of outrageous Ryan Air will know that they don't have an office anywhere, a number to call, nor an email address which replies to you desperate pleas for help or even information. Instead they have countless blue clad colleens who are trained to say to each and every demand 'We can only ask you to go on line and refer to information on the Ryan Air web site sir'
I won't go into the dreadful events of that morning only to say that there were other's in a more desperate situation than myself, those with small kids and old parents who were literally left high and dry. I'm sure these people just gave up and went home.
I'll mention one thing though. When we eventually got to the ticket desk to rebook, this one young colleen suggested to us that we fly to Marseilles. 'Marseilles my dear' I said , 'Is in France.' Well I never she said. Then there this nothing going out for days.
What about from Forli. I asked?
pWhere's that' she said.
Well, turn around and look at the Ryan air map behind you and I'll point you to it.
Oooh, she says, l can try that, can't I?
'Oh why not'
We got a flight to Forli next day. I shall spare you the grizzly details.
Oh, but this is the funny bit.
Having missed the flight, I missed out on a meeting with clients that day and when they turned up at the office that afternoon, Lili told them that she was sorry that I couldn't be there because I'd had a stroke in London, but that I should be back the next day.
She said afterwards that she couldn't understand why they sat down so suddenly and kept saying I'm so sorry, I'm so very sorry.

OK, where's this?

2007-10-08T05:30:00.000-07:00

Go on guess.

St. James's Park?

Are you crazy? Ok I know there is, or used to be, one flamingo there which I think was actually a pelican....so scrub that one.

The Nile?

Oh dear me no! Can you see any crocodiles? Come on!

Lake Victoria?

Oh well, could be, but look, you're never gonna guess, so I'll tell you, but only if you keep it a secret.
Alright yes we promise!
Ok then... It's Sicily.
Oh you're kidding!
No no, honest it is. It's a national park, a wild life reserve in the far SE corner of Sicily. It's called Vendicari Oasis.
Of all the years I've lived in Italy, this is the first time I've ever got around to going down there. You know there are some many new airlines now in Italy doing the Ryan Air thing that you can get cheap flights most anywhere. I always had in my mind a criminal, savage and messy sort of image of Sicily, but in fact it's gorgeous, peaceful and clean and exquisitely beautiful, especially in the SE part that we went to.
Here's a picture of a beach on the bird sanctuary.

And one of the tombs at the iron age Necropolis further inland. Incredible place. What on earth were their religious beliefs? Of some sort of afterlife no doubt. Must look this up,

Fruit

And what do you see here?
Two red apples.... hmmm!
Yes, true, that's what they are but they are more than that.
They are two fresh apples sent two days ago from Jack's garden in San Rafael, CA.
He'd sent Lili a present from his tour of Ladakh, a cushion cover with two cats on to replace (he said) the ones she'd adopted out and he slipped three apples into the courier box just for good measure. Jack, I said, you can't do that, it's a contravention of all known international import/export laws and the apples will be arrested by a sniffer dog immediately on arrival. Oh well, he said, I only did it as a mark of affection.
But, as you can see, they arrived, as fresh as fresh. In fact, I could smell them ten yards away as the courier driver unloaded the box from his van.
But delicious! We've eaten one already, and here is a photo of the one that's left, just by way of deliciousness.

You'd like to take a bite of it wouldn't you?
Yes you would.

Oh, a footnote!
Jack tells me he'd put 3 apples, into the package, not two.
My imagination is racing on this one.

Eva forever.

Eva wasn't at home when we'd got back from Sicilia. Pino, our friend who animal sits
for us said that she'd been around but had eaten little and had become moody (you know how she is sometimes). After four days Lili had given up on ever seeing her again but I had a feeling she was still alive. I had to go up for a Qi Gong weekend in Reggia Emelia and on that Saturday morning she suddenly turned up, depressed (Lili said) and a bit the worse for wear.
Anyway, now, after four days at home, she is back to her normal principessa self.
i.e. fed the best gourmet food and given 90% of our attention, prodigal returned status A1.

That bright tight forever drum

2007-08-29T15:06:00.000-07:00

This week I lost a friend. Gabriele died and I shall miss his honesty, his kindliness and his infectious smile and twinkling eyes. Gabriele was a builder in the daytime and a restauranteur in the evening. He was always working and I see now he worked too damn hard. I wish I'd told him this. I wish he'd taken a holiday sometimes. I wish he was still here. I shall miss him very very much.
Ciao Gabriele!

With a Scirocco searing up from Africa and temperatures hitting 40C, the sun a bleak
and creamy burning eye in the sky, gardens burned dry and houses and swimming poolscracking, fires in the hills around Ascoli and conflicting weather forecasts. (some say it will, some say it won't ...uhm...rain? ...yes that delicious word)....
Well, we are all nervous, the skies are full of smoke and the trees are shedding their leaves to survive. Nobody can remember a year like this one.
Vulcan Gas Company

Bernie calls (and here's an example of the way we are all , like the earth, cracking up) to say he is emotionally overwhelmed by the fact that The Vulcana Gas Company have finally agreed after three and a half years, to take away the gas tank from his garden. Close to tears he says and I say save them until the job is done.
Luckily I am home when the truck arrives and able just in time to stop it backing into his apple tree. The driver hooks the tank onto his crane and shouts to me to come look at something he has found inside the top rim of the tank. It's a nest full of tiny eggs, I think wren's eggs.

This is terrible he says, what shall I do, come back in a few weeks after they have hatched? This, I know, will cause Bernie a major breakdown as it would be another three and a half years for sure.
A dilemma for me too, it's either the wrens or Bernie. I choose, of course, the wrens. But he says, look let's take the whole nest out and construct a platform about the same height and maybe the mother won't notice. This we do and the driver zooms away with the maladetto bombola.
I place heavy rocks on the construction to hold it down for the scirocco which is building up apace and wish wren family good luck. What else could I do?
The Boyscout
On Sunday evening I get back home after a swim in lake Fiastra and find Renzo and a Boyscout at the front door. The scout says he is with a troop camping nearby and they have all been given a task to go out and find a family to stay overnight with. Of course we take him in and he begins to tell us that this is the centenary of the Scout movement and about Baden Powell and Brownsea Island. My favourite island I say. 'You've been there?' Used to live right by it I say. 'So you know about how the Scout Movement started there?' I was a scout too, I say. So you know about the Jamboree that's going on now?' Yes, I was at the last one in '57, I say.
By this time, the poor boy (he's sixteen), is overwhelmed with awe and he almost faints when I dig out my Jamboree catalogue and show him pictures of me in it.
'Did you see the Queen?' Yes, I was chosen to be her bodyguard and march next to her Land rover.
By this time I feel like a visitor from another universe.
And it warms me to talk with this young man who is so caring and respectful of nature, to animals and, well, he reminds me of me when I was his age.
I dropped him off at his camp the next morning and when I got back home the house was still full of his gentle presence.
50 years! How can I measure these 50 years?
With stories? Yes with stories.
Thank you Giovani, Boy Scout Giovani.

Footnote 1.
We are at last connected to the wireless antenna at Gualdo and we can disconnect Telecom. Haha! Italia

Footnote 2.
Now you won't believe this!
Last Friday 40C, then five days later it crashes to 10C!
A drop of 30C!
With snow on the mountains!...unheard of.

the day of nature

2007-07-14T08:01:00.000-07:00

I've just been attacked by a wild carrot (or maybe it was the other way round, or a bit of both). Let me explain. Last week I was on a friend's garden and as I stooped down to pull up a weed (don't ask me why), the friend shouted 'Don't touch that' I froze in horror expecting... what? ..a baby viper maybe? (very dangerous this time of year).. but no, it's wild carrot friend said, can do untold damage to your entire nervous system.

'Come on', I say (in Italian) 'Pull the other one'. 'there isn't another one' friend says 'At least I hope not'
I sigh deeply at this linguistic chasm and listen to his boring explanation.

Wild carrots indeed. Next it'll be wild crisps, or wild hosepipes (talking of which, see below).
Anyway...I decide to cut what's left of the lawn during this torrid Saharan
drought; not really to cut the grass but a cunning way of dessicating the leaves which have been shed by our trees in their frantic attempt to survive. Then out with the strimmer to cut my ruined lettuce patch and then I attack the area around the organic bin and by this time I'm not seeing too well on account of sweat in eyes and clogged up face masked. Clogged up? with what? You guessed it... wild carrot! dessicated wild carrot, dessicated all over me, i.e. I'm green all over and my legs and arms are beginning to sting like hell.
So what do I do? Do I panic? Yes! You bet!
I rush to the house, shedding shorts and T shirt en route and dive into shower and start washing down as I await the closing down of my complete nervous system 'If I should die, think only this of me, that, slain by a wild carrot in this distant land...etc', I'm thinking poetry for God's sake when my body's closing down forever!
OK to cut a short drama even shorter...I didn't die (at least I don't think so), so let's move on to finer things.
Like Liliana's Hydrangeas. Just look at them , drought victims too they are

Or maybe let's talk about a bee!
Seriously..a bee.
In fact a bumble bee. Now I've never heard of any of these sweet chaps ever stinging anyone but maybe because this is the day of nature, maybe this one had to make a point...and he did..at the top of Christina's thigh and what's more she ended up in hospital. I had my hand out of the window of the car, she says, to keep cool, and this bumble bee whams into it and then bounces into my lap and, yipes, stings me right through my jeans. Good job I wasn't driving. Phew!
So, if you following the drift here; heat, stroppy bees, wild carrots, baby vipers, gasping hydrangeas. What does this all mean? It means, dear reader, that the world of nature is upset. And it's withholding rain from us as a punshment. Instead we have torrid heat, no rain for weeks and guess what? The water in our reservoirs isn't for drinking. Oh no! What it is for is to drive our hydro electric system. Our drinking water comes from underground caverns which are fed by melting snows in Springtime, and this year we had hardly any snow at all.
On Tuesday we all received a letter from the Comune. It says there is an energy pack available to every family in Amandola; wondrous goodies like energy efficient bulbs and water saving gidgets, a pack of delights. Bernie is down there like a shot of course and he calls and says ya gotta get down here dude, this pack is worth a ton of bucks. Actually he didn't say that, it just sounded that way. So down I go, queue up, sign up and get presented with my pack by our tasty Vigilezza urbane with that certain smile she has.

Just sign here and take your pack, she says and I act as droolingly overwhelmed as a child picking up his present from Santa Claus.

This is what's in it.

Energy saving bulbs which consume 20W but give out 100W of brightness (use less electricity and save the water in the reservoir,neat!) and six fittings to go onto taps to aerate your water (and thus consume half amount of drinking water, cool!)
But don't you think this is just great? Actually giving you the wherewithal to save instead of telling you to shower with a friend or to clean your teeth with washing up water? I feel quite proud of our little town for this and you know they have calculated that they will save 13 million euros worth of energy if we all fit these devices. We will, we will!
In the meantime on this day of nature, Bernie's sewage removal truck turns up to clean out his septic tank. It's a very special truck because it has a video eye which travels done tubes to spy out blockages. What a wonder! And off it zooms to deposit Bernie'e sewage into a methane gas producing factory.

And to cap it all on this respect for Gaia day, two Oz friends tell me of a way of saving even more water. You take a bucket into the shower with you and save all the cold water that comes out before it gets hot.
(It's best to keep the bucket inside the shower and leave friend outside, they say)

So, that's my 'Give to Gaia' day!
The day of nature.
Oh, and it ended with a 'thank you' sunset.

The Janissaries

2007-06-24T05:36:00.000-07:00

Two of the Janissaries in their tree

Janissaries....This is their collective name now; Socksie, Lila, Lilo and Pix.
(Suddenly I have the TeleTubbies tune playing in my head and their adventures match those of those colourful inarticulate creatures).
I'm talking of course about our kittens and the adventure of the other evening; an adventure which almost turned out to be a tragic disaster, and one with unthinkable circumstances in its wake.
Read on....
Lili had gone into town for a few hours and for the first time ever had left the kittens outside in the garden to play. I'd returned home to find them gone and nowhere to be seen. I'd scoured the dense little wood beneath the house, scratching myself on bramble and getting completely filthy, but with no sign of them anywhere. Even went down to the hunter's lodge in the lower field and then a complete circle across to Vittorio's field to look back at the house, hoping to see them from there. But nothing.
By the time Lili got back, our worry was fast moving to panic as friends turned up to join in the search.
At this time of year, especially because it's been dry and perhaps because of their need for food, wolves are seen outside of the National Park, in fact just last week in a little village just below us.
Also it is a time when young foxes are kicked out of home to fend for themselves and being inexperienced they takes risks and come too close to human habitation. Vixen mothers are hungry too and they are known to take kittens, something which they wouldn't usually do.
All this we knew and it was on all our minds, only nobody wanted to voice these fears.
I walked twice along to Vittorio's house with Marina (the Janessaries' mother as you know), and twice she veered off into V's field of corn but I took no notice of this, thinking she was just searching too.
I was beginning to feel sick with worry after what was now almost ten hours since their disappearance and Lili was sitting crying at the top of the Pastore's field.
We had a gloomy dinner outside on the patio and and at about 9.15 I said I thought we should try one more time. I'd thought about Marina's sidestep into the corn field (it's American corn, maize) and I said I thought we should search there. I looped around the back of the field and Lili, Richard, Nick and Cider plunged into its dark green jungle.
And there they found them!
Playing amongst the plants they were with not a care in the world.
I took us a while to catch them all but we were all so triumphantly happy that we opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
Nick told us later that he'd said a special prayer given to him by his Tai Chi master, one that he'd only used twice in his life, it is so powerful. Lili said she'd recited a Tantric prayer and I confessed I'd logged in to my star cluster for a bit of help. Richard said he'd known all along that they were safe and well, said he'd read the signs reflected in his bottle of Hieneken. Cider just said 'Cool' (he's fifteen).
What an adventure eh?
It has a nice ending too in that Lili was so overjoyed to see Socksie and Lila alive that she has decided we should keep them ( do you know how much cat food costs here?)
But I'm glad too.
Bessie the dog?
Hmm...she's giving out these long sighs and those ' what next?' looks in which she specialises.

Are you scared of ghosts?

2007-06-20T02:21:00.000-07:00

I suppose everyone is really, although a lot depends on the time of day, or night and whether you are alone or with a friend or a pet, but not a rabbit (the old man keeps rabbits)
On Sunday evening our door bell rang and it was our neighbours (no, not the enemy) but Graciella, Simona, Renzo and Angela from down the road.
We've come to take you for a walk they say.
OK, sounds good, the evening is warm and almost balmy with a slight breeze as we wend our way on the four kilometre walk towards the upper bins i.e. the junction of the Sant'Ippolito and Monte San Martino roads. It's the night of the new moon (auspicious!) and there is just enough light left in the sky ( it's after 10pm) to see the road. And on either side of us the fireflies are weaving their symphony of light and Renzo does his usual trick of catching one and using it as a torch. Completely ineffective of course.
It's pleasant to stroll and chat at night and the conversation rolls around between us and life is easy at such times and this sauntering gradually smooths away the cares of life.
Bessie is puffing away at my side because she still hasn't shed her winter coat and is over heating (and over eating I might add) but she is managing to keep up. She's ten years old now and not quite as agile as she used to be of course and at such times I wonder what life would be without her. And I feel sad.
By the time we get to the junction it's completely dark and we are passing by the house of the old couple and Renzo mentions the son who comes to the house a lot nowadays to work in the garden. I say I've never ever stopped to talk to the old father but I always wave as I drive past although he never waves back just sort of stands there with his bent back and ancient hat, always the hat.
But he never acknowledges me I say.
Who? Renzo says.
The old man I say.
But when he asks.
When I wave to him I say, why, just this week when I saw him over there bent over the vegetable patch...
Michael, he says, what are you talking about? he's been dead for three years.

24hrs in the life of Micer Red

2007-06-05T03:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's important just to write about a day, the simple little things you do to get by. Technically, I suppose, such a day as this could be considered crushingly boring. But it all depends on how you feel inside, don't you think?
9.30 a.m. Monday morning. I drive into Amandola to renew my tax for the Kangoo (my strange French car).
Nice chap there; forget his name but he is always courteous to me once a year when I do all this car stuff. No problem he says as I hand him my log book. He types my data into his computer and, bingo, all my driving misdameanors pop up and before you know it, all the backdated car tax I owe too. You know, even if you don't pay road tax for a few years, nothing seems to happen, until one day you get a massive bill, ten times what you originally owed, plus a threat to possess your car..... then you move real fast. (and that's how I met this nice chap at ACI, the road tax office who is always helpful, especially at the time I owed three years worth). And then, and then, I see my MOT has run out (every two years here) and he says come back at 3pm and we'll fix it
10.15 Still in Amandola, I stop at the chemist to buy some hand cream. Now this is the chemist's home made stuff and it'll cure my rough gardener's hands he says with a wink. Why the wink? No Idea.
10.30 a.m I'm in Sarnano and I go to the comune to pay my parking fine which I picked up last Thursday at the market. But the vigilezza (the local police lady) isn't there, just her son, playing on her computer. He gives me that shruggy brain dead adolescent look to every question I ask, like where is she? when is she back, where could I find her now? ...so I give up and wander over to the office to download mail. BTW, town halls and offices generally are always full of sons and daughters just doing...what?... just hanging around, lost.
11 a.m. Lili turns up and we go for coffee and read the newspaper which is full of vitriol against the current Prime Minister, Prodi, who is generally hated to about the same measure as wicked King John in the time of Robin Hood. Of course Berlusconi is currently playing the role of the latter, accusing Prodi of robbing the Italians with his new taxes (you may laugh here, please do, I mean given his track record), Absentmindedly, I walk off with the newspaper and have to go back to return it. The barman just laughs and shrugs, I do the same.
Enzo, the chap who is our shiatsu masseur in Gualdo calls to remind Lili of her appointment but she doesn't feel too well, so she asks me if I'd like to go instead.
Ok, love to, at 6pm, fine.
12.30. We drive home for lunch. I pluck a lettuce from the orto and we have salad and pasta. Plus a handful of cherries each, those dark red ones you love.
13.30 It's sunny in the garden and we spend a while there just simple stuff like pruning and watching the grass, reading a bit too (Orhan Pamuk, 'The Black Book')
1400 Back to the office for a spell to clear up some mail and then..
1500 I whizz back inti Amandola for MOT. Now the MOT (the call it revisione) is run by the ACI chap's daughter, a slight 25 year old who darts about like a squirrel, plugging in tubes and leads to my car and winching it up in the air on rollers where the car travels 60mph at standstill and she brakes. Zack!
Finally she zips to the computer screen, prints out the reading and zooms past me to the office. Despite myself, I find my heart beating fast because this is how I always was when I had to get MOTs in UK. I ask, in a dry whisper 'Everything OK?'
'Of course' she says.
So I pay up and drive to the car wash and give my Kangoo a thank you shampoo and then to the car tyre workshop just down the road from the Car wash to get a wobbly tyre looked at. The boss takes it for a spin down the road while I wait and half way down he meets his wife and kid driving up from the other direction. They both stop their cars in the middle of the road and get out to talk to each other, of course blocking the traffic in both directions. But nobody cares. This can only happen in Italy I think, only Italy. Sure enough, one tyre is slightly out of kilter, come back Friday he says and I'll put two new ones on the front, I'm out of stock right now. Maybe Monday I say.
I drive home and my nephew calls from UK telling me of his arrival on June 18th. Here to do work on my sister's house. Work? what sort of work. Chipping off plaster and making windows he says. Now the house is currently being worked on by two Italian builders and look, I say, you can't just move in there without coordinating with these chaps first. It'll be fine he says. Hmmm.
Jack calls from San Francisco and says he's going to India via Germany and Italy and we work out a timetable so we can all meet in Venice on The 30th of June..it's his birthday and my friend Lorenzo has some work in the Biennale so we can double up and see that too.
1715 I drive back to the office and answer some mail and then to Enzo for that massage. Enzo's really good, he does bones as well as muscles, and is an expert on heads. Just as I am leaving his wife arrives and asks if she can practice her English on me. She's pretty good but a bit rusty and she says we can do a swap. Massages for English lessons. Poor Enzo (who doesn't speak a word of English) just looks baffled and has no idea of the deal we have just struck (he, after all, being the one who has to do the massage whilst she gets the free lesson)
1930 Back home in a storm and as we've decided to not watch world news anymore (a deadly drug) and there are no films worth watching, I read to the end of Pamuk's book, still struggling to understand his parallel world idea.
I write a bit, fiddle with a painting that's blocking me and at midnight take Bess for a walk and then to bed, whilst the kittens are still racing around the house.
That's it, that's a day.
What I want to know is, was that boring?
Is was a bit, wasn't it?

The trials and arrows

2007-05-29T08:03:00.000-07:00

......................and by thus defeating end them.
Schoolboy memories.
We were in a restaurant just around the corner from our art show in Padova and Lorenzo's dad asked me to write something on my serviette. Like what? anything he said, so I did the schoolboy rote memory bit.
Hey, he says, this indicates to me that you have a great clarity inside you but you show chaos without... but that's OK because you use this in a creative way.
Ooh, I like that I say, but get uncomfortable, doubting looks from the other dinner guests.

Currently Bernie and I are continue to suffer the trials an arrows of new technology.
Yes, you guessed it, Fidoka, the wireless wizards..... More later.

You see, we have on loan from them a whole boxes full of wonders...wonders to charm the most illustrious of sheiks and international arms dealers. And with what we have in these boxes, Bernie (according to Fidoka) can wander great distances from this flashing blue beastie on my desk, the router.......

...and still pick up a signal and write an article for the Buenos Aires Herald (were there such a thing, could be, could be). It would be like throwing a paper dart into the sky, he says,.. as easy as that.

No such luck., not today, not today. Today which has the mountains covered with fresh snow just as they were at the beginning of June last year

.....and here we are wearing winter woollies, winter wellies, again. Today is a bad Fidoka day. You see how that word has already entered the main stream of ex-pat English here?...'Hey, come on, you're fidoking with me' and similar configurations of la lingua inglesi.
But, you know, I shouldn't be so hard on this little pioneering company.
Truth is, we got the wires mixed up in this wireless escapade,

I mean, just look!

Yep, all it needed was a bit of fiddling around and Bingo! we got the router to work. And yes , Bernie walks in a straight line up the road from the house, slowly disappearing into the distance cuddling his apple laptop , shouting 'I'm still on, I'm still on!'
And now there's only one problem...when he's on, I'm off!
We can't get both on line at the same time. It's like he's sucking the lifeblood from my PC with his fidoking Apple.
So off he will go to Fidoka this afternoon to sort out those techies once and for all.
If only, if only he understood Nerdish.
And he comes back and says I've got it sussed, I've got a diagram. OK let's see it I say, where is it? It's in my head he says. I groan and head for fridge. Mind you, to be fair, I must admit that things (instructions) do get lost in our heads sometimes (I'm talking about men here) Just this week I was sent to the supermarket with a shopping list for a dinner party that evening. Now, I always go into a state of panic and become word blind when I enter supermarkets and somehow just buy stuff which is immediately in front of me; shampoo, biscuits, baked beans. So instead of steak of vitello to make pancietta rolls, I come back with stewing beef! Can't tell you how it happened. I said I'm sorry but...
Hey, you know, the dog box ain't so bad a place to hang out of an evening.
With Bessie and her sasso museum.

We visited some friends up in Treviso on the weekend who live up in the sky in the middle of the historical centre. If you look up at their apartment from the piazza below, you see only what looks like a terraced garden. But up you go in a lift and low and behold they live in a wondrous rooftop palace with five children and this is what Francesco tells me about life up there.
We only watch SKY between channels 400 and 500, he says, and have our ADSL on all the time
to be in contact with the world outside, Why? To get reality, not the Italian version but info from the world outside (what does he mean, I'm thinking)...because nobody understands them in town and their need to think outside of the mainstream and they very seldom venture down, except to work (they are both dentists). Up in the sky they have everything, even a bonzi garden to care for at weekends. You must, he says, read up the Red Ocean, Blue Ocean Strategy. There are parallel possibilities in the main stream of life. So, I've ordered the book from Amazon. You know, we've gone wireless, I tell him. He gives me an empty look. Couldn't take the risk, he says. I let it go.

The kittens?

We've found a home for all of them, they are going in pairs, Socksie with Pix, and Pipo with Panda, his sister, who is somewhat strange with a long nose (picture)

Our battle with the neighbours?

They are such intimidating morons that they are not worth even the tiniest space in our minds, so I'll be brief. Suffice it to say that our lawyer says it could take 30 years for the case to be settled. Should turn out to be an interesting outcome for the 83 year old instigator of the whole mess. Climate predictions are that by that time this area of Italy would have become an extension of the Sahara desert, so their jealous eyes on my plum and apricot trees stare enviously and in vain.
And only the photographs will remain, only the photographs with submitted to our lawyer of their misdeamenours, like the photos I saw in the comune this morning as I was waiting to pay my parking fine. Pictures from the thirties: beautiful people on the Sarnano ski slopes, so elegant and cool and fashionable. And not even one of them could still be alive. Such stories there, such stories,

Mainly cats

2007-04-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

This blog is mainly about cats.
Well, actually, not just cats but also insane neighbours, motorbikes and space and foxes.
Let's start with cats.

We now have seven. How come?
Well. you remember the story about Marina aka Diabolika?
Hmm, well we didn't think fast enough to act on our decision to have her doctored.
You guessed it...four kittens.
And here they are......

This photo was taken a couple of days after they were born..

And here's one from yesterday..His names's Rocco (the rest are girls I think)

Space

Saw these wondrous sculptures (by Antony Gormley) last week on a beach near Southport (Liverpool). A hundred bronze men scattered across 2k on beach looking towards the ocean, towards Ireland, America.

They looked so wise and expectant and hopeful. Also expansive and downright good natured. I hear they're scattered around London rooftops too.
Just couldn't help comparing them with our neighbours (of whom you always ask, don't you?) who are currently turning our once peaceful domain into a war zone. They got Vittorio (who'd bungy jump into a barrel of battery acid if asked) to move a huge cement trough/animal feeder up to the edge of our garden.

They've planted a sprig of Ginester in it, according to Graciella, which they'd illegally (it's protected) plucked from the woods nearby. This adds to the line of plants and flowers which follow the same route along this border. This is their way of saying, to themselves I can only imagine, that this little stretch of land is their's. Then I imagine they photograph it and send the pics to their lawyer as evidence to sue us with when the court case comes up (in ten years time).
Mean-minded medieval mentality. And a medieval law to boot.
A characteristic, they say, of Marchigiane Romans.

Summer
Although it's cool and raining as I write............. (ooh it's now sunny...here's a garden pic fresh from the lens).......

................we have in fact heard the first cuckoo (hooray) and the swallows have arrived and the house martins have returned to their nest on the sill above the back door.
The young foxes are venturing away from their mums and know no fear, so we have be careful to keep the kittens inside. The older foxes are hungry and they take risks too, coming close to the house to look for anything they can scrounge.
Lili was in the garden for a final look at the stars through the cigarette smoke and she yelled up to me that there was some strange animal in front of her. I rushed down but it had zoomed off.
She didn't know what it was so I quizzed her; you know, its size, how big were its ears, nose, head, its colour, length of its legs etc. Then we went upstairs to look through our animal book and the nearest creature we could match to her description was a leopard.
But I don't think so.
Think it was an old fox with hypnotic skills (they hypnotise rabbits don't they?) Squirrels too probably....and Lili.

And motorbikes?

Cats

This is a picture of a couple of bikers. Actually, they are Lili's cousin Paolo and his wife Donatella. I didn't get a pic of their massive Honda bike because I was feeling ill on account of having ridden on the back of said bike through the winding lanes of Caldarola. It was sea sickness made worse by vivid dark memories of two accidents as a youth on motorcycles. I'm strictly a car man. This part of Le Marche is a biker's heaven in the sense that it has countless empty roads with just manageable curves until, whammo! We see accidents almost weekly at this time of year.
Heaven indeed.

Wireless?

I was hoping you wouldn't ask. I can't get hold of Telecom to cancel the broadband order I made.
And Fidoka, the wireless provider still haven't climbed to the top of Gualdo tower to fix the aerial which still isn't sending me signals. Look, I'll do it I say, let me do it, I'll climb up there with a spanner and whack it one.
I still have to pay them but for what?
I'm in a dilemna.

The big day

2007-03-16T02:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, today's the big day!
Bernie's on his way over from Rome and I've got it! It's true, I have...the aerial.
The aerial for our fantastic new 'wireless' adventure. Do you know what this means to us? No? Shall I tell you?
Well, for Bernie it means that he can come over and work in his country house away from Rome, send articles zooming out at 2000kps and Skype to his heart's content, even from the garden, (if we can manage to wireless the wireless as the lady at Fidoka tried to explain to me, unsuccessfully)
For us at Sambuco, it means Skype and being able to work from home and check our mail and then also to go out into the garden, or even snooze occasionaly. Oh, you know, all that stuff which will give us everlasting freedom and happiness. Yes, surely it will.
But, oh, if wishes were fishes!
Did it work?
Did it happen?
Hmm! sort of!
It became, in fact, an adventure.
Two days later
I came away from Fidoka with a box full of tricks and promises. This is what you have to do they said. You must plug all the wires and bits in and then wave the dish in the direction of Gualdo (4.7K away, it says on my form) and when the green light stops flashing, bring up the signal strength box and jiggle the dish until you get the lowest number between 50 and 90, (Whhhat?)
Have you ever tried adjusting a satellite dish after a scirocco? when the dish is one side of the house and the TV the other?
Easy, it's a breeze compared to wireless signal finding.... .
So there they were, my stalwart friends, standing on step ladders, hanging out windows in a howling gale, rain and sleet with me shouting no up,no down,no... where you were, hold it there, hold it there!
Until, bingo, we get green light to stop flashing and I call Fidoka and they say Nope, we can't pick you up this end.
(what?, we've been out here for two hours)
So we have to wait until Monday because they close on a weekend. They close?
But this is the only time when most folks have time to jump up and down in the garden with their wireless dish. Hey! But this is Italy, remember, they don't do service. OK Ok.

On Monday Pino arrives with a ladder and he fixes a metal pole onto the wall of our house and attaches the dish to it and points it at Gualdo and ...zilch, nothing...green LED flashing like crazy.
Winds begins to pick up again and Pino's grip on the ladder is looking decidedly
precarious then suddenly he shouts we've got it, the green light has stopped flashing! Again I call the company and no, they can't locate us.
So I look out of the window and see that Pino has the dish pointed at San Ginesio (9K away) and not Gualdo. Call Fidoka again and yes, they've found us beamed on to San Ginesio, but it's impossible, San Ginesio is too far!
So here I am, typing this via an ADSL broadband connection which can't possibly work but does.
Today I bought a compass in town to try to get at Gualdo the Boy Scout way.
I get home too late to try, It's getting dark, Gualdo has been consumed by a black cloud and it's beginning to snow.
And why was I late back?
I confess, I dropped Lili's precious Nikon wide angle lens this afternoon and took it in for dispatch and repair, swiftly and immediately to avoid death sentence ( which I'll get anyway)

The ski season, up until now) has been non existent. In fact wiped out, so no work for those poor chaps in the snow industry. For weeks it's been hovering above 20C, but guess what? Angelo shouted to me from his Kangoo yesterday afternoon that on Monday it's gonna drop by 15 degrees and we are all gonna be covered with the white stuff (snow, that is). Your dreaming I say to him (Angelo BTW is a ski instructor up in the mountains above us here) but no no he says, it's coming, it is, it is. But how can this be? All the trees are blossoming and the lizards and butterflies are out and I can't my grass yesterday evening. Hell' it just can't snow. What's worse, the geraniums are all outside and the lemon tree too. Oh dear, oh dear, I'll keep you posted.

Postscript
See above, It's March 21st and it's snowing like hell outside.

Just look at my blossoms, for goodness sake!

Do wireless waves travel through snow?
I mean, snow like this??

Bess and Rocco love it of course.

It's the end of the World as we know it

2007-01-20T03:10:00.000-08:00

Or maybe it's just a very warm winter.
So this blog/newsletter is mainly about weather
Giovanni the builder told me this morning that his Grandmother is 85 and she's never experienced a winter like it.. Today is the 20th of January and it's 22 degrees C outside and the earth is bleached dry by the Scirrocco we had for the last two days which blew away untold treasures (like the ash from our fires which I'd sprinkled lovingly on the orto and one of Lili's paintings which was covering the strawberry patch). The snow slopes haven't even opened this year and their are some pretty glum faces around town.. no snow, no work.
But still most folk are walking around in winter clothing and mumbling about the snow that must come in February. It must, mustn't it?
Not so sure myself. We were in Istanbul last week and it was absolutely freezing and sleeting and I know the type of weather I prefer.
Warm and sunny.
So.
I think I'm gonna enjoy global warming
The animals are all quite happy and not at all phased by the upside-downness of it all. And bees, wasps, butterflies love it too...even flies (depending if educated or not, see below)
And yesterday it hit 25C..and then...and then..
That Scirocco. a blast up from the Sahara which tore my Buddhist prayer wheel to shreds and tore any remaining leaves off the trees too and took Lili's painting a kilometre away to Graciella's backyard.
Pictures show Renzo drinking my beer on the Saturday (or maybe he's just reading my beer) and then the day after,the Scirocco (see shredded prayer wheel)

Then as we drive off to Reggis Emelia for the weekend it's stars to snow and the temp drops a full 25 degrees.

So that's my global warming bit.
Today, as I write this before zooming it off to the ether, the temparature is back up to 16C again and as sunny as sunny. And Pino said to me, 'my potatoes are confused' (I think he means the ones he has sown is his orto (veggie patch))
Which? the red or the whites I quipped.
The reds he said.
I let it go.

58
Now what does this mumber mean to you?
I walk into Massimo's studio yesterday and there on his door is the number 58, large it is.. a big number 58.
Hey! Happy birthday I say
He throws me a quick frown (meaning how can you think I'm that age?)
It keeps flies away he says.
It's scientifically proven that if flies come into a room and see that number they fly right out again.
But there are two flies in here I say.
They're obviously uneducated ones he says.

I think this is called the Fohn effect.
Too many ions floating about addling people's brains.
And to top it all, I find that Lili's has thrown away my Doc Martens.

These are the first effects of global warming.
Folks are going nuts.

2006-12-06T01:41:00.000-08:00

Zip Mouse crashed through the front door.
It was dinner time at La Villatoppo and if there are certain things you just don’t do at dinner time, well, Zip did them all at once. i.e. he crashed through the door without politely knocking first, he was late, he was badly dressed (torn shirt, trousers and shoeless) and worst of all, he was not only bleeding from his left ear, nose and tail, but he was screaming too.
‘I’ve just….I’ve just seen, been…I’ve’
And then he collapsed.
And then? Well, talk about a mixed reception..
The mousechildren dropped whatever they were eating (probably corncob sandwiches) and rushed over to Zip’s huddled form shouting what happened? who did it? where have you been? All at once of course.
The young mouseladies (being more refined and delicate), got to him just as quickly (if not faster) with their ooh aahs and their what’s happened to our poor brave handsome hero? sort of stuff.
And the menmice? They just carried on eating and giving each other that what’s he gonna tell us this time look.
Well, you might guess from all this that Zip is not just an ordinary mouse, but that he also a mouse for all persons, in all weathers, a mouse for all seasons (except winter). In other words he….
Ok lets’ hear the story from him (he is coming around slowly and his eyes are flickering open)
'Don't bite me, don't bite me!'
Oh we won't bite you dear famous adventurous Zip, they all cry (in one way or another)...they being the little ones. eyes wide open, mouths agape, and the young ladies assuming pert expressions; all huddled around Zip who now has been cleaned up somewhat and is about to be fed a delicious bowl of cereal soup by one of the young ladies (who by the way fought for this honour in a dastardly fashion, biting, scratching and elbowing the others in the kitchen)
Zip makes short work of the soup and gazes at his audience.
Oh, he says, I imagine you are eagerly awaiting my story (yes,yes) Well, I feel much better after that soup, I must say, so where shall I begin? (start by telling us how brave you are).
OK, yes, well as you all know, I'm probably the bravest country mouse who ever lived and have spend my life having adventures in order that I can come back and tell stories and eat delicious cereal soup (blushes from pretty young lady mouse). And this time I ventured into the land of the two legged giants (oh my!), made friends with a C.A.T. (shrieks) and flew through the air! (Ooooh!)
It happened like this.
I was trying to set up a deal with some housemice (Yuk!), to supply us bits of bread and tasty cereal snacks in return for poppy seeds and tobacco and I waited in the garden of the giants house for ages and ages for my contact to turn up but no show. So then I made a very brave decision (oooh!) to go by myself into the house of the giants and into the dark criminal world of the housemice (we hate them, we hate them!)

Thus did our hero begin to tell his tale about descending deep into the criminal world of the housemice mafia but how he instead walked straight into the paws and jaws of Eva the giant's C.A.T. who promises not to eat him, at least for a week, if in turn he taught her how to charm goldfish up to the top of ponds (oh, you know everything Zip!)
At the end of his story, Zip gazed absentmindedly at his empty cereal soup bowl and began to whisper, as if to himself. And the children and pert young ladies had to draw closer and strain to hear his softly spoken words.
It was time to say goodbye to my new friend Eva, principally because there was only five minutes left of our seven day pact and Eva was beginning to lick her lips. But she didn't bite me. She kissed me on the nose...and this is the weirdest part. All of a sudden the world went red and I was in the grip of one of the giants who was just about to bite my head off. So I bit him I did ( Oh ZIP!) and then I was whizzing around and suddenly flying through the air up up into the sky and then landing here just in front of Villatoppo.
( What a marvellous story Zip, our astronaut Zip!)
And they cheered and hugged him and the pretty young mouse went off to fetch him another bowl of cereal soup.

In the meantime, back on Earth
We have earthquakes
We get a shudder every other week or so......here it feels as if it's some 50 metres down, a wide rumble that moves at 50K per hour.
I know within seconds that we are experiencing one.
How?
The birds stop singing? Nope!
The dogs start howling? Nope!
This is how I know.
Lili gets up smartly from the table, or chair, or bed, and heads straight for the door. Not a word said, or an animal grabbed (let alone a husband)...just straight out into the road.
When it's over, she comes back in looking sheepish and pale.
It happened last week when we had dinner guests. I told them not to panic and we just rumbled through it and when Lili came back of course they all questioned her as to why she hadn't at least grabbed Marina ( kitten, as you know) She said 'sorry but it's bigger than me'.
Yes I said and an earthquake is bigger than us too.
She said she'd try harder next time.
Not quite sure what she means.
Running for the door perhaps.

Animals
This is the season of mice. Heaven knows what they are up to. Maybe getting as much food in before winter truly arrives. Eva is getting into the habit of bringing them in for Marina. She just plonks them at her paws, meeows and goes back for more. Marina plays basketball with them for half and hour or so and them eats them.
Last week though I walked into the kitchen and found Eva face to face with a pretty little field mouse. Lili came in and said Oh he looks sweet, catch him and throw him out, Eva's about to munch him up. So I grabbed a towel from the washing on the table and threw it over the little chap as he tried to dash away. Got him I did, then extricated him from the towel and took him down to the garden. I had him cupped in my hand with his little face peeping at me. Keep away
dear little chap I said... next time you'll get eaten. Then he bit me! He did, he bit me!
I let out a yell and threw him up in the air! the little beast, and went back inside to inspect and clean my wound.
There, you see, you try to do a mouse a kindness and what do you get?
Bitten that's what.

Other animal news?
Bessie dog got bashed up by Lucy, neighbour's dog and has spent nearly a week unable to walk.
She's almost over it though and I left her two bones at lunchtime by way of an incentive to recover.

The autumn has been more like summer with endless days of sunshine. As a kid I used to love snow. Now I'm happy if it stays on the mountains. Oh well, OK, maybe a romantic snowfall between Christmas and the New Year. Yes that would be nice

November 2006

2006-11-08T01:20:00.000-08:00

Sambuco newsblog November 2006

If she finds out I’m dead in the water. Or maybe I should say when she find out, and not if.
It was a hijacking, a highway robbery.
And I was the victim.

What would she say?
She would say, Michael, how could you?
You, who have traveled the world and been swindled and cheated from New Dehli to Mexico City…how could you be so dumb?
And I would reply (you can bet I’m getting my replies practiced and ready)…. I would say something like…
Hey, come on! The road between Amandola and Sarnano? It didn’t enter my head!
You’re gullible that’s what she’ll say, gullible gullible gullible. Un ingenu, una pecora persa

You want to hear the story, don’t you?
I’ve got to start it by explaining that I’m the most non-racial person on this planet.
Why, when I first went to South Africa in the time of apartheid, and when I went through customs at Durban, I handed out sweets to to the African workers cleaning the floor with toothbrushes. Consequence?
Two hours in luggage inspection but spared from execution.

So here we are, the story.
I was driving back from Sarnano and to the side of the main road was a car with its bonnet up and what I took for an Indian family outside around it and the father trying to flag down passing cars...and nobody was stopping. Oh, poor souls I think and turn my car around and go back.
First mistake!
As I get out of car, the man grabs my hand and thrusts it to his heart and says Oh kind kind sir, today you have truly saved out souls and found a place for yourself in paradise (Help!). I am an Arab sir (Oh no!) and I live in France and am a respectable business man (Hmm!).
I say OK calm down. Are you out of petrol and can I drive you to the garage? Oh no gentle sir, he says, its that nobody will take my credit card and I need petrol money for the big drive to France.
He takes me to his car and says look look kindest man ever, there's the baby of my daughter in the back and you are saving her too by giving me E150.
Me, giving you a hundred and fifity Euros? Yes yes he says and yes yes says his wife who comes running over and starts wailing.
Look I say there's no way I can give you E150.
Yes you can he says and starts taking off bracelets, a ring a necklace. All gold he says. (Oh yeah?) A thousand Euros worth as a securuty.
Look, I don't want your gold I say and he starts throwing it on my dashbord.

OK.. to cut a long story short, I drive off a hundred Euros lighter and just know I've been done.
I hide the gold in my camera bag.
Then a few days back I check with our jeweller friend in town.
He takes one quick look through his eyeglass and chuckles.
Michael, all that glisters is not gold, he says.
Bottle it, I say.

It's wearing off now but I've felt bad about it for a week.
Robbed I was.

The weather.
On the third of November , in the evening, we had our first snow of the winter.
A shock, because there has been no build up. We’ve had an extended summer with temps last week hitting 28C. Sore throats, coughs ands sneezes, and that’s the cats. But now, a few days later the sunshine is back and we have temps up to 20C again.
Dry it is and the grass sown by Pino shows no sign of taking.
And when the cars drive past it's as dusty as summer.

Stamps
Feeling pretty aggresive after the highway robbery, I find myself in the post Office with 250 invitaions to post for an exhibtion Lorenzo and I have in Ancona. I have a hundred things to do and am late for an appointement.
Do they have a franking machine for a bulk stamping?
No!
But Michael the Post lady says, just leave them with me and i'll put the stamps on for you!
I stare intently at her. You will? You'd do that?
Yes, sure she says, pop back later, no prob.
And I walk out feeling better about the world.
I've been given something.. simple kindness.

Skype
Everyone's getting it. It's great. I can talk with my grandchildren in South Africa via video in real time. Who's that mummy?, my grandaughter says, as my face pops up on her screen.
Time to visit them.. I can't have them not recognining their own grandad. Shameful

Tai chi
Lili and I went on a Tai Chi weekend in Reggia Emilia. Taiost it was, full immersion for twelve hours. Got the shoes but need to buy the outfit for the next session in November.
Another trip to Decathlon.

2006-08-28T01:31:00.000-07:00

The sky at night in August
The Milky Way
La Via Lattea
La Rue St Jacques (trust the French to be different)
Here it shrieks across the sky and on dark moonless nights such as we are having right now it takes you breath away it does. Bessie and I walk out at midnight along the top road towards Vittorio’s house and there it is, this chunk of white up there.
And they’re all stars for heavens sake I tell Bessie.
Who is as black as the night herself,but I hear her pattering along beside me and imagine her nodding yes.
Bessie, I ask, do you know why The French call it La Rue St Jacques ?
She mumbles something like 'Has it got something to do with the extortionate price of dogfood?'
I let this one go. What do dogs know about stars anyway?
It almost makes up for the disappointment of the La Notte da San Lorenzo, le stelle cadente, the night(s) of the falling stars, which were mainly cloudy.
Saw one tear from East to West above the roof of the house though. Huge it was.
Well, biggish.

During Ferragosto week, Bernie and Cristina visit us to calm their pre-nuptial nerves and we drive up to Lake Fiastra where it's cooler and the water is sweet and fresh. We take the mountain route back and being up there so high is a wonder indeed, another world, of strange blue flowers and diving hawks.

The language lesson
Andrea, the woodman calls me and says Michael I’m delivering your winter logs right now. Yes I say but you said you’d give me a call a couple of days beforehand. Hmm he says anyway I’m on my way now and can you be here to supervise the offloading so that I don’t crush Lili’s favourite rose like last year. No way. I’m busy, I can't get home, but look I say, I trust you, just put them over the wall (as in over the other side of), sopra il muro, avoiding sacred rose bush.
OK he says I’ll put them over the wall avoiding sacred rose bush.
Good idea, I say.
I get back late to find he’s dumped a trailer load over the wall, (as in completely covering).

Andrea, I say when I meet him in town the next day, I meant over the wall, not over the wall.
You should have said, he said.
Great eh? Isn’t that just great?
Your fault, Lili says later when she’s back from her hairdressing trip to Treviso, you should have used your hands, what do you think hands are for in Italy?
How can you talk if your hands are always stuck in your pockets, you English?

Tennis and the death watch beetle
You’ve heard of tennis elbow, but do you know what I’ve got? Tennis shoulder. Yes, that’s what I’ve got, tennis shoulder.
I had a game with my geometra friend Massimo…first game for eight years and I was bit uhm…creaky. The brain stays young, they say, but the body doesn’t always quite agree.
Hell, I remember, I do, I could slam a backhander and get to the net in a wink.
OK, this physical impediment I can handle, but psychological warfare?
Now where did that French soccer captain get his bad football pitch manners from?
I’ll tell you, Italy. He played here for some eight years for Lazio.
And this is the first time I’d played tennis with an Italian, and I’m getting rattled because every time I get a good shot in (which wasn’t that often on account of rapidly deteriorating shoulder condition brought on by whiz bang serves), Massimo lets out the most indelicate and vulgar curses. Monster, idiot, elephant, you are a stupid, fat, slow and ugly elephant he shouts, (these are the cleaner selection of epithets he was hurling my way).
After a while I have to say look Massimo, I find your curses a bit upsetting and I don’t think I really deserve them.
Oh, cripes, Michael, he says, it’s not you I’m cursing, it’s myself.
Oh!
So we settle back into the game and I’m thinking maybe our Italian player was cursing his own mother and sister and La Captaine Francais didn’t quite understand the context.
Soothing thought.
Doubtful though.
I should mention here that everywhere the Italian flags are still flying even after almost two months since the world cup. It’s as if that’s all there is to hang on to. Two months of Prodi’s government where daily everybody is receiving fresh tax bills, oh not just for tax but everything we are just not used to paying, this is Italy for heaven’s sake, rates, water bills, refuse bills, etc.
Are they crazy? This is Italy for God's sake! (Here BTW you get the added delight of a sweet attachment which says if you don’t pay within ten days they will repossess your car) And what exactly would they do with the ten million cars they repossess? Where would they park them?
Napoli I imagine, or maybe Albania.
Talking about Albania, when we were in Croatia the other week on a short holiday, we were told that Albania is the new Croatia, implying that it’s half the price to go and stay there, rip off the locals and cash in before the Sunday papers start writing about it and the globalisation gets a grip.
Somehow I can’t imagine any journalist coining the term ‘The new Albania’, but journalist would and could, you bet! Last week I read in the Guardian an article entitled
‘Tuscany, the new Tuscany’
Oh, good grief!
Ah yes, the deathwatch beetle.
Tick tick tick. All night it ticks Lili says and you can’t hear it because you’re stone deaf.
Only in Italian restaurants I say and it’s selective.
What’s selective?
My hearing problem, I say. I can only not hear certain things. She says it might have something to do with my excessive use of a mouse.
I haven’t got a mouse I say.
No no, she says, my Rolfing therapist (rolfing?) tells me that using a PC mouse does damage to your back, eyesight, and gives you headaches, so maybe that’s why your losing your hearing too and why your tennis shoulder won’t heal.
And the tick is driving her mad because the beetle is obviously getting bigger and bigger and soon it will have babies which will eat all the roof beams and the house will fall down. Whoa! I say, hold on hold on, we’ll trap and destroy this beast, but do you know why it is called a deathwatch beetle?
Because it watches death, she says.
Oh dear, no wonder you can’t sleep at night, I say.
I call our friend John who used to be a pest control expert in London and he comes over with a bunch of books on wood blights.
And this is what we discover,
a) That the death watch beetle is only tiny, maybe a centimeter long
b) That the ticking sound is not her eating but tapping on the wood with her nose (please don’t ask)
c) That there is a paste which applied to said beams is a sure knock out killer.

So John has ordered magic paste from friend in London and soon we will be saved, forever. And the magic paste will fix everything, my shoulder, my hearing… and soften the deathwatch beetle’s nose.

Our war with our neighbours?
They are suing us to try and take away a piece of our garden so it can be theirs, citing a medieval law which is called ‘Usocapione’ They have witnesses to swear on their behalf that they cultivated this piece of land whilst simultaneously living and running a bar in Rome for twenty years. A difficult task. Must have exhausted them.
And you know what surprises me the most?
That I have murderous thought running through my mind.
Blood and earth.
Must be the Saxon- German blood in me.

The animals
You ask about Diabolika?
She has now accepted her new name of Marina.

She has won the hearts of us all and even snoozes cuddle up to Bessie.
Eva has returned home after her few weeks of jealousy and is beginning to play with her, and Forch is basically knackered because being her adopted father is one thing…. but playing with her all day? Come on. Some respect for my age, please, says he.

You can read my other stories in the Physik Garden, http://www.physikgarden.com/chronicles.html
And see some of my paintings on...
http://www.physikgarden.com/glasshouse/glasshouse.html

Margherita

2006-08-26T01:39:00.000-07:00

This is a photo of our little niece Margherita.
If you live in Italy, you might have seen her face on TV and in the newspapers over the last two days.
She was born with a very rare physical deformity which has meant for her that virtually her first two years of life have been in hospitals, with feeding tubes in her nose and down her throat (because she didn’t have full control of her swallowing mechanisms) and only a small body frame to get around on. But try to achieve she did; and showed such amazing courage in the face of obvious pain and continuous discomfort.
She had her second birthday some two weeks back and she was so proud that she was beginning to walk and talk, if just a little, and even feed herself with a spoon.
On Wednesday she went in for a routine check up before she was to be taken to the US
where her parents had found a specialist who might have been able to help her to grow up in a more normal fashion.
She was to have a simple scan and the doctor there decided that she should be sedated to stop her moving during the process. He couldn’t find a vein in her arm to inject into and told her parents that he would give her gas instead. He applied the mask to her face and despite her struggling to pull it off, he held it firmly and then after too long a time he was seen to ask an attendant nurse to switch the gas on. There was then a whoosh of gas and Margi took a deep breath and her eyes rolled back. The parents at this time realized that something was wrong but the doctor told them he knew what he was doing and then tried to revive her. At no time did he call for assistance in what was obviously a deteriorating situation. Nor did he even after an hour of pumping her body for response when she had obviously died. But this he did not have the balls to tell the parents saying all the time that he had the situation under control.
Yesterday morning we went to see her at the morgue in Castel del Franco.
She looked so sweet and peaceful and was still dressed in her pretty little outfit all dolled up for her final hospital visit before her trip to the States.
The family of course is in pieces.
How can you handle this? You can’t, you can’t.
All that we can ask is that you say a little prayer for her.
And for those of you who have never met her to hear, if only from me, that such courage, albeit during a short short life, was something one comes across rarely.
Courage, that’s what she had.

And I shall never forget this that she has taught me.
That above all you need courage and to be brave in life.
Thank you Margi.

And the doctor?
I hope he gets struck off and put in jail.There will be an autopsy and investigation next week.
He is being prosecuted for culpable homicide.
But that doesn't bring back our little Margi.

2006-06-27T10:05:00.000-07:00

Diabolika
This little mite of a creature!
What good is it to anyone?
Adoptable? No way!
But little mites can be family too you know, especially if they are insistent and say (in a meeeoowish voice),
‘Take me home with you, go on! I know you don’t know me and I know I look small and useless… but I’m brave, that’s what I am’
I’d gone down to dump the rubbish in the bins at the bottom of the road and opened the door of the car to find a little face looking up at me; one infected eye and a wasted body.
‘Please take me home’ she meeoowed.
Nope, I don’t do this…this I do not do. What if I were to pick up any stray kitten when I drive around, why, the house would be full of.......
‘I’m not any stray kitten, my name is Diabolika, and I intend to play a part in your future’
Oh no, absolutely not.
I go to close the back door of the car and she jumps in before I can slam it tight.
I pick her up and throw her on the ground and she positions herself under the wheel.
Look, I say, I’m busy and I just can’t deal with this.
‘Just give me a trial then. Feed me and fix my bad eye and if you really can’t love me, then I’ll go away’

Two weeks later.

She has won the heart of Forch, our aggressive, rude and indifferent male cat. He has fallen deeply in love with her. Eva was and is still a wee bit jealous but Diabolika is working on her now too.
Bessie our dog just noses her and laughs.

Last night as I tucked her in at bedtime with her toy tiger she looked up at me and said.
‘You see, I was right; I knew you would all come to love me. We’re all one big family now aren’t we? I’m a loveable addition to your family, aren’t I? And the more love there is, the happier we will be, won’t we?’
Yeah yeah, I guess you’re right, I mumbled softly to myself as I staggered off to bed.
Softly so she wouldn’t know she’d touched my heart too.

2006-04-03T06:22:00.000-07:00

Spring's here!

With a message

2006-03-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

Sambuco Newsblog March 006

Pets and the weather

It’s March 20 and it’s still snowing. Will it ever stop? I don’t think so.
Most of the neighbours and folks here about blame Bernie the Bolt, my New York - Irish -Romano frequent flyer neighbour across the road, often.
‘ Hey’ they say.’ Do you know if Bernie’s here this weekend, we’ve got a garden barbeque planned’ and… ‘I want to put my potatoes in this weekend. Have you heard whether Bernie’s coming over from Rome?’
Orlando, who has a house in the village of Botundoli below us, stops by and says (he always speaks to me in pidgin Italian, I never ask why…. a habit he has picked up from the trials of communicating with the English invaders I guess)… He says ’Leak … aqueduct .. Area lose millions water crisis summer….Orlando call water people, Orlando say fix leak, enter bad water daughter get sick last year. Water people no come, Orlando call them Monday, Orlando angry’ .
‘Me say it to Bernie’, I say (in equally perfect pidgin Italian). ‘He fix plenty good. He have water magic curse’.
Orlando drives off with bemused look on face, convinced more than ever of the need to speak this strange fragmented language of his to get his message across to the invaders.
Maybe he thinks we are Native American Indians? Who knows?
Anyway, general consensus is that we have a whip-round and send Bernie to Pepa, our local witch, to have the curse taken off.
It’s the very least we can do, both for him and the micro global cooling climate he is so obviously responsible for.
Yesterday was a mini break from the white splattered grey gloom. It was sunny the whole morning and we zoomed up to the ski slopes at Sassotetto. No wind, just warm sunshine and blue blue sky misting over at times. You know that deep winter blue that makes you sigh and maybe even hiccup.
I’m not a very good skier…just the basics, like I can zigzag and I can stop, but no fast fancy stuff. It’s the second time in the last fortnight I’ve been up there and I like the buzz you get, just a few people (it’s a sleepy family ski center) and I guess I like the slow mechanical repetition and the concentration.
Kids learn faster than adults. This we know. When it comes to skiing they haven’t got as far to fall and they love the dare and the approbation. I went up with my grandson, Bertie, and he wanted a snowboarding lesson. Why? Well that’s the trend now with youngsters they say up there. In fact they only have one snowboard teacher at present and next year there are going to have to get more boards in and train up more teachers.
After one lesson though, Bertie decided he preferred skiing.
More control, he said.
Do nine year olds say things like that nowadays?
Lili’s in Treviso and I’m in charge of the animals…a thankless task as they always seem to be hungry when I’m manning the ship.
Fortu walks in with his face swollen up again. He’s limping too and has an infection in his left rear paw which is also swollen. Oh great ! He’d had an operation two weeks back for a cyst. We’d had him castrated at the same time and, I must confess; I was more concerned about this than the cyst. It’s a male thing.
Driven to near obsessive madness in his ‘season of love’: mere skin and bone and torn to shreds by fighting nightly, we figured that he’d be happier without his bits and that he’d stay at home at nights, put on weight and get a healthy sheen on his fur. And purr happily, incessantly.
Fraid not! He hasn’t changed an iota.
So off I go with him last night last night to the Vet and I have to hold him whilst she attempts to sedate him and he in turn is growling and deciding which part of my face to disfigure. I know him well and pin him down, paws flat on the operating table.
She finds a piece of something or other, maybe a bit of tooth when she opens his cheek up again and some equally messy stuff in his paw.
We arrive at our dinner date far too late and I feel grumpy.
Even grumpier still this morning when I have to crush his antibiotic tablet and hide it inside a piece of chicken at breakfast time. He eats all of his chicken breakfast except the piece with the antibiotic inside.
Grumpy.
That’s me.
With a cold.
Perhaps flu.
And a double toothache. (see below)

If I could get out into the garden and do a bit, it might help; but it’s grey and chilly still with patches of today’s snow still lying.

Our shrubs have arrived. (Virburnia I think ) They’re to make a division between the garden and the parking area, and we’ll put them in as soon as Massimo has worked on the field opposite and cleared a parking space. He’ll come when the ground is drier he says but best to tell the Forestale first he says because there are ten small oak trees in the field and you’ll get into trouble if you cut them because the are protected. I go over to look and they are twiglets, no more, less than a metre in length.

Thing to do he says is cut them down before you call them.
I wave him off and stand awhile puzzling the logic of what I have just heard.
It’ll come to me; it’ll come to me.
Trip to dentist in Treviso to stop toothache
I never have toothache…only after a visit to the dentist. This is true. It’s like when you take a car to the mechanic and then after all sorts of things go wrong. Now don’t get me wrong…I’m sure dentists and mechanics are really necessary but there is a lot to be said for the philosophy of leaving well enough alone. I mean, have you seen Tony Blair’s teeth lately?. I don’t mean personally up front, but TV cameramen seem to getting at him lately and zooming in a bit too close. He needs urgent dental treatment.
But enough of UK politics, we have enough problems here with Berlosconi’s face-lifts and strange new hair growth.
Back to my dentist.
To enter his studio is to enter the future.
It’s in fact a space ship.
When I arrive there he is the middle of an argument with Telecom. Shouting he is.
I settle down meekly in the chair to await my fate and after a while he comes bounding in.
‘Telecom’, he starts off…..
Don’t wanna know I say.
In his futuristic space capsule he has constructed a huge flat screen so his patients can see the mouths being operated on in Cinerama. Problem is though that the screen is 20 degrees too far to the right and you can only see your giant mouth in glimpses between drilling if you quickly jerk your head to the right.
Tell you what though…it’s not very interesting.
Oh and get this.
He gives you valium before he starts, as well as an anesthetic.
Then I think he hypnotises you too.
I can remember him telling me that he doesn’t bother matching tooth colour, it’s all the same. Could be a dog’s tooth I put in your gum, he says, or a bat’s.
A bat?
Did he say that?
You get pretty relaxed with valium in you and stoked up with anesthetic and hypnotized too. Maybe he said piastrella and not pipistrello.
Plan is, he says, is to link his studio with his home so he can get a trained assistant to follow his instructions remotely.
And then he can work internationally, globally too: can stay home, make toast and read all day or even snowboard.
Seems a good idea to me.

Saturnia
Is near Orvieto.
Now this is a great little town on the northern borders of Lazio where it joins Tuscany.
The Duomo is black and white candy stripes: just like Siena’ Duomo but inside somehow more majestic.

But what fascinated me most were the catacombs and underground tunnels and caves, which run beneath the town. Mostly Etruscan in origin and expanded in medieval times, initially to preserve wine but also for hiding in, I imagine, in times of war and insecurity or to dodge paying taxes.
Saturnia? A great day out. Hot rivers and waterfalls of mineral water. The smell lingers on you for days
Monster monster
People are odd. Of all the things I write about, it’s the monster, AKA Il Volcano, AKA our wood burning heating system, which seems to grab folks the most (men mostly).
For heavens sake fellas! I’m getting tired of the guided tour. And it’s the expansion tank that seems to be at the peak of their interest. The expansion tank?
When I talk sheer economics….like our gas bills don’t seem to be that much less (who wants to get up at six am on a winter’s morning and load up wet wood in the dark?)… they just glaze over and focus on the plumbing. When I say this thing eats up almost half a quintale of wood a day, they look uneasy and ask about the flame adjusting mechanism.
It’s odd…they’re odd… getting on scary.
We just recently, up in Treviso, got close up to a new pellet-burning stove. Fascinating it was. Completely automatic, clean and light to use. Hot air directable and pretty to contemplate.
I shall contemplate this one.
The pellets are made from olive pips. Smart eh?
And what’s more, ace steel tubing and a brilliant expansion tank.
In the meantime..a typical monster scenario
Get a call from Lili saying the alarm has gone off but not to worry ‘cos Monia (lady who does for us) has fixed it. When I get back home to a heat-throbbing house, I have to rush to the boiler, switch over the taps and turn the hot taps on everywhere. Monia? You fixed it? Yes she says, I did what I do at home, I switched the alarm off. Great! Now this is the equivalent of going to your corner mechanic with an oil light which won’t stop flashing and the guy says Fix it in a jiff mate and he reaches under the dashboard and unscrews the red light bulb.
What had happened fellas (can’t wait to know huh?)..Was that I forgot to tell Lili I’d lit monster before going out…so…now follow this…. She had switched gas heating on and turned thermostats down to 17 degrees before going out herself. Now this means that monster boiling water has nowhere to go, it just stays inside monster tank walltanks so it bubbles up to 100% and sets off alarm.
Dangerous stuff.
Good job she’d spotted monster alight as she passed to go out.
Just as the alarm went off.
Telecom
Our line goes down twice in one week. All since they took away our IDSN line which has proven next to useless. We have heard that ADSL is getting closer so we’ve put our order in and then we will be happy forever (when it arrives).
I report the first failure and a nice guy comes around and tells me the break is one the line between our house and Vittorio’s but that he can’t do it by himself, he’ll send a couple of guys next week. Along they come and pull out all the boxes in the house, attach metres and probe boxes and I say look, your guy last week told me the line was broken between us and Vittorio. They ignore me and say that they have detected a break fourteen metres from the telephone, which means it must be inside the house. So they pull out cable after cable and find nothing. Then they say it must be between the house and the pole in the garden and one chap paces our 14 metres and it reaches the pole.
Again they can’t find break.
Where did the other technician say it was one asks. Just over there I say, I told you…..between us and Vittorio. They just shrug and go grumbling off and then ten minutes later I see them at the top of the poles twixt us and Vittorio.
An hour later they come back to the house and say it’s fine now, we found two breaks between you and Vittorio. He’s been cutting down branches they say, that’s what did it.

It’s now March 25th.
Tomorrow the clock’s go forward and already we are past the equinox.

And today the beach, in fact Portonovo

This morning I saw a Hopo bird in the garden. They fly up from Africa, usually in June.

Destroy Telecom : useful alternatives
www.telesconto.it
www.skype.com
You can read some of my other stories on
http://www.physikgarden.com/chronicles.html
and some paintings on
http://www.physikgarden.com/glasshouse/glasshouse.html

Christmas and the New Year

2006-01-28T04:58:00.000-08:00

Christmas and the New Year 2006

Lili, I say, I’m having trouble with the Christmas fairy.
Which Christmas fairy she asks?
THE Christmas Fairy, the one on the tree.
What sort of trouble she asks.
It’s a way of saying uhm…well...I..
Yes? Try and say what you mean!
(And here, with tremendous courage, I bridge the great cultural/linguistic divide)
She looks as if she’s been razzle-dazzled by the entire team of Father Christmas’ little helpers. …(Gulp!). There I said it! I said it.
I don’t know what razzle dazzle means, she says, but if it’s what I think it means, you should be ashamed.
Ashamed?
Yes ashamed. Elves wouldn’t do that.
Elves?
Yes elves she said.
Father Christmas’ little helpers are elves?
Yes, of course. Everybody knows that.
Lili, I say, I’m only speaking metaphorically but anyway, just for the record, why wouldn’t Father’s Christmas’ little elves razzle dazzle the Christmas fairy?
Because they are spiritual beings she says. And anyway she’s been my Christmas Fairy for 15 years and is dear to me.

The Christmas Fairy stays and, do you know? She just needed a little dusting and clean knickers, and, my, she’s as good as new and God help any elf that even peeps at her… even thinks about peeping at her.

But Christmas has come and gone, as have friends and festivities.
Not that we did much, just loafed around, kept the fires burning, the dragon fed.
Somehow managed to miss both King Kong (a boy’s film) and Narnia (a little girls’ film)
Which was a pity (we usually either see action thrillers (me) or love stories (Lili) and hell, it’s nice to be a kid at Christmas after all. Who wants to be an adult all the time?)
We’ll have to wait for the DVD’s
We did however go and see Mozart’s requiem in Servignano.
Solemn but touching.
AND the presipio (Nativity Scenes… oh dear yes) show, in Sant Angelo Pontana where baby Jesus comes in all shapes and sizes, as do the sheep, the donkey and the Magi.
Invariably BJ is bigger than both his mum and the Magi.
I daren’t ask why.

Dancing with dogs
New Year’s Eve was cold and icy and we were persuaded by friends to join them at the town’s ( Monte San Martino) NY celebrations. We left home really later to avoid all the boring stuff and got there just in time for all the hugging and kissing and a cake competition.
But there, but there… in the middle of all the revels were two men, seventy year olds, dancing with dogs. Seriously!
Did I have my camera? Nope!
One dog was a tiny Chiwawa, the other a minitoy midget something or other which the owner said was the only one in Italy so he was having difficulty finding a mate for it.
Yes, I imagine it would be difficult I emphasised.
They sailed around the dance floor gazing devotedly at the little beasts who were trembling and shivering.
Are they cold I ask? No it’s the fireworks they both said.
But the fireworks don’t start until after midnight.
Yes they say, it’s uncanny how they know.
We have the same problem with Bessie I say.
Is she a miniature too?
No a Belgian Shepherd I say (well, almost, I think)
Oh they ask, do you dance with her.
No, she’s too big I say but sometimes we twist together.
I head for the exit before they can gather any more words to pin me down with.
(Bessie, I should add, we left inside the house with Eva to keep her company, all the lights on and MTV blasting away…we return later delighted to find that this is the first New Year she hasn’t bitten down a door in her firework phobia frenzy)
Thank you MTV.
Thank you Eva.

Telecom Italia
Everybody here is at war with Telecom Italia.
Everybody has been wounded, financially or psychologically, usually both.
Countless are the stories I could tell, but here’s a recent one
We get a whammy of a bill for the first month of having broadband installed in the office.
(You know, cheap, even free, calls and 24 hour Internet?)
A call to TI takes usually 20 mins to be answered and up goes the heart rate and on the cold sweats because here comes Frank Sinatra (yes Frank Sinatra) with the fill- in while we keep you endlessly waiting music, singing
‘Someday when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold, I will feel a glow just thinking of you…and the way you look tonight’
I mean. Who chose this song? It’s deliberately intimidating.
Eventually the conversation (spread over two hours) goes like this….
On business line 192
‘We have a business line at home which we have been trying to change to private for 18 months
Oh then you must call 187 because they deal with this side of things.
Err, no, they tell us it’s not them, that we must deal with it’s you.
And this repeats itself call after call until they tell you the thing to do is send a FAX and you say you have twenty times already and then you hang up exhausted.
(TWO Italies, I think… the eternal blight.. the private and the institutionalized).
Oh then the absolute insanity and impossibility of getting broadband, they fitting the wrong modem which caused us depression and near insanity for weeks on end.
And it was only a chance call to a sympathetic operator that unraveled this dilemma.
They’d supplies us with the wrong modem. The wrong modem?
Even writing this is depressing, so I’ll stop.
Enough to say go Skype, go Telesconto. (See below for websites)
We owe it to Italy to destroy Telecom Italia, utterly..Forever!

Language class
We are at table with Scottish friends and gossiping as you do, this time about a certain businessman, colleague, tyrant.
I think she has spiders everywhere, Lili says.
He has spies, says Scottish dinner guest in a corrective tone.
Yes, replies Lili, like a big web.

The Volcano support group
Nails in bucket. Look at this photo and ref last newsletter’s woodpile. Now each piece of wood equals two nails, so you see how much the dragon is eating? And it’s spitting out these nails for goodness sake.
Where do you recycle nails?

The smell and now a leak…… Second rate and third choice plumber had layed plastic clad anti frost piping right along side dragon chimney pipe. Result, toxic fumes in guest bedroom for month. What’s worse I have to knock down a new wall to remedy crime.
Dear oh dear!

ENEL out. Electricity goes off in snowstorm and Lili feeds dragon extra to make up for energy loss. No electricity, thus no pump, thus no water circulation. Got the picture? Dragon throbbing then… Melt down! When electricity eventually comes back on the whole house shakes as the expansion tank fills with boiling water which it shoots out over the bamboo in the garden (which has since never recovered) and we rush around opening all the hot water taps and the house becomes one giant sauna.
Such problems… and they’re not only mine. I’ve been inundated with the saddest Volcano/dragon stories since my last blog.
So we’re thinking off starting a Dragon Help Group, an emotional emergency service to rush to the aid of dragon victims. (It would be men only and would include weekend workshops is a suggestion from one dragon victim)
Hmm. Can I get back at you on this I ask?

Animals
Fortunato has at last begun his season of love, which has made Lili very happy because she says it’s obvious now that he’s not gay after all and can safely join the Dragon Help Group.
Eva has stared to make these sudden rapid spurts around the house for no apparent reason…Worms! Lili says, She has to be de-wormed she says.. it says so in her cat book.
Bessie has enjoyed the two snowfalls we have had so far.
She barks until I make her a snowball which I have to through up in the air for her to catch… see pic. She has decided to make friends with all her dog enemies for whatever reason and now happily plays with Charlie, George and Rocco and no longer tries to kill
Vittorio’s sausage dogs.

Bessie and snow trick

People and plumbers
Got back the other evening after an afternoon advising on quality standards with a friend who is buying an enormous Villa nearby…only to find that odd job man and second choice plumber had made a complete pigs ear of building a bathroom sink unit. And the mess! We had to spend two hours pulling half of it apart and clearing up the plaster and cement on the terra cotta.
Lili, I say, when he arrives tomorrow morning he’s a dead man walking.
Instead, when he walks through the door, I say Hi, thanks for the brilliant work, but we’ve thought of another great design which is almost as good as yours..an idea which we thought might intrigue you. May I share it with you?
A coward that’s what I am.
But in my mind, plumbers fit into the same category as Bank managers and priests.
I just can’t, daren’t upset them.

On a religious note
A few weeks back we were driving out from the house to go to the cinema and there on the side of the road were Fiore, Graciella, Quinto, Renzo and Angela, standing in the darkness around a huge bonfire. An odd time to burn rubbish I said to Lili.
No it’s to turn the wind to blow in the direction of Loreto she said.
Uh, why would they want to do that?
It’s to help the angels she says.
Which angels?
Michael, she says, for goodness sake, don’t you know what today is?
Yes it’s Saturday I say.
Saturday yes but you should know being a Christian that today is the festival of the Immaculate Conception.
Look, I say, I’m not a Christian; I’m more of a Taoist.
Hmm, she says, you were a Buddhist last week.
Ok I say, leaving my dubious religious affinities apart, why should Fiore etc want to help the angels?
To carry the Virgin to Loreto she says.
Oh, I say.

The country diary
Avid Sambuco newsletterblog readers (all ten of you) might remember that last year at this time had started the great snowfall which lasted right through until March. The memory of this prompted us to buy a four-wheel drive buggy. But this year?
Driving around these past few days I see that everybody is out in their gardens, tilling the soil, planting onions, peas, relaxing in the sunshine. Doors and windows are left open and people are less grumpy and even occasionally they smile. They smile.
Birds are singing too, those that still exist after the hunting shooting season (which incidentally still has a few weeks to go). Sshhsh sshsh shhs I whisper to them, keep a low profile… keep your beaks close to your chests.
I hope our Nightingale comes back this year, Lili says, and hasn’t caught bird flu.
We’ll put cough mixture in the birds drinking tray I reply….. That seems to satisfy her.
Our nightingale is safe, in her mind at least, until the real Spring arrives

But I fear an easterly blast from Siberia and I hold back on the onion planting front.
As you know, I’m a weather freak.

Destroy Telecom : useful alternatives
www.telesconto.it
www.skype.com

You can read some of my other stories on http://www.physikgarden.com/chronicles.html
and some paintings on http://www.physikgarden.com/glasshouse/glasshouse.html

Just before Christmas

2005-12-12T07:12:00.001-08:00

Newsletter pre-Natale 2005

Our new heating system

‘It’s a beast, a monster.
It consumes 95% of carbon and leaves no ash’
This was my friend Keith’s definition of a Vulcano.
You simply must get one he says.
It’ll save you thousands on your gas bill.

Now you don’t know what a Vulcano is do you?
No no, it’s not a volcano a la Vesuvius but a wood stove, a wood eater, a fire eater, a time eater.
OK, imagine a monstrous grey and red dragon living in my studio that eats wood and breathes fire.
It’s got a huge mouth and an even bigger appetite …for wood, endless amounts of it.
That’s a Vulcano

What friend Keith should have said was… it will consume 95% of your day and energy.
The dragon.
40 kilos of wood a day, that’s what it eats. 40 kilos!
And if you feed it, it wants more.

And why? (I ask Gino our plumber who fitted dragon monster system) why does hot water spew out of the copper overflow pipe on the outside of the house all over our dry wood which we keep dry for monster dragon feeding times?
‘Dunno’, he says. ‘Can’t figure it out, must be a valve. And what dragon?’

A valve? I say

Yes a valve but I can’t come round for a week because I’m a plumber and you know we never, ever come around when needed, only when we are in need; like for money at Christmas time.
(Actually he didn’t really say that but I know that’s what he meant).
I say what I want to hear from you Gino is that you’ll come round instantly and do something about our hot waterfall which is soaking our dragon food.
Dragon he asks, you’ve really got a dragon?
Leave it, Gino I say, just come around as soon as possible.
I can’t he says, I’m a plumber.
A dragon, though, really?

In the meantime, second option plumber, Nicola, is around this morning trying to fix a mess left by our carpenter who has made a smart looking table for our wee bathroom but forgot to measure the distance for the waste water outlet. So it looks as if we’re going to have to carve up said smart table to accommodate extra pipes and tubing.
Form versus function I say to carpenter when he confesses mess.
‘What?’ he says.
Never mind, I say.
Second option plumber in the meantime looks at Gino’s plumbing for Dragon, scratches his head and says
‘Beats me. Who did this? Gino we say. He walks away mumbling Gino, Gino, Gino…

Wood
Renzo gives Lili a telephone number for a guy who sells wood scraps, he says, from a wood yard.
She calls from town and says I’ve seen them; they’re on their way. There could be some mistake she says but you’ll sort it out.
Sort what out I ask as I lose the line and as a multihuge container truck pulls up outside the house.
Driver hangs head out of window.

‘Michael?'
Yep
'Your wood'
You’re kidding.
'Nope'
This truck full of wood, for us?
'Yep'.
But it’s huge, there’s a massive amount here.
You ordered it he says.
I did?

So they back up and open the rear doors of the truck and then I see the problem…the castagno wood yard scraps are in fact wooden crates, dozens of them. (See image above).

Thanksgiving and the sexy disco.

I promised to tell you about the Sexy Disco.
You can read all about Thanksgiving in The Berniblog (http://sette-bello.blogspot.com/)
where Bernie the Bolt explains in graphic detail the deathly grip of the ice vortex which enveloped us for three days.
It happened to arrive the day after we saw ‘The day after tomorrow’ on Sky. Quite a coincidence eh?
Fertile terrain for the imagination.
At thanksgiving dinner, Bernie asks me about the Sexy Disco in town and I say Bernie how would I know?, things like that just don’t interest me: all those tasty young Russian, Ukrainian, Croatian girls doing lesbo dancing, lap dancing, pole dancing and striptease.
Do you ever see them in town he asks?
Are they, uhm …nice?
Sure, I say, gorgeous they are, although of course they are wicked wicked girls. It’s like the Old West here. Soon they’ll be married half of them, pushing prams and going to early mass and campaigning to close down the Sexy Disco, shameful place that it is.
But Bernie, I say, all this is hearsay.
Don’t you think for the sake of journalistic integrity you really have to get on down there?(ouch!) and tell the story to the waiting world.
Christina flashes him a ‘Yeah try it and die' look.
And I see desire, anguish, guilt and panic sweep rapidly across his broad face in a microsecond and, quick to control as ever, he replies (but with a conspiratorial wink) ‘I’ll go and check the turkey’
That wink, I whisper to Lili, says it all.
Pet’s Corner
We take our cats Eva and Forch to the vet’s in Sarnano for their yearly jab.
Usually Eva enjoys the ride and is like putty in the hands of the vet and Forch quite the opposite. He lets out a low whine throughout the trip and is manic when inside the clinic, biting wiggling scratching. This time,however, they swop roles, Eva’s behaviour is monstrous and Forch, by comparison, as relaxed and as happy as a Spring (uhm, not Christmas) lamb.
Eva it turns out has over indulged mouse- wise and her stomach is moused up so we have to give her castor oil for a week and jabs for her liver (don’t ask). In Italy you get given hypodermic needles to do the injections yourself and it ain’t easy for English people (i.e. me) to do (unless they are doctors, vets, nurses or junkies)
Just to say ‘Sorry Eva, I meant you no harm.’ But she’s speaking to me now after four days of sulking and limping and I’m going to ask Maria who’s a nurse to teach me how to inject at the right angle…for next time.
Problem now is that Forch has decided not to participate in the ‘season of love’. This means that he stays at home all day especially because it’s now warmer on account of dragon heating system. And he is as big and heavy as a mountain lion.

This really bugs Eva because she can only bear his presence for short periods and she creeps around the houses scowling in between lengthy sleeping spells in the wash basket.
Bessie is fine(ish)
She has this afternoon done two marathon sprints to Graciella and back when I went to borrow chainsaw. She tears along by the side of the car and hits a pretty fast pace for an eight year old. She prefers winter to summer, grows her wolfy coat long and just adores the snow when it comes, which it will again soon. Although, just at this moment she comes wobbling in, head down. She’s been fighting with hunting dogs by the look. She has a wound on her back and we try to treat it with disinfectant but she won’t let us touch her, she yelps when I try.

Language lesson

Is Sake a God?
Lili asks me as I am spreading marmalade on my toast.
Knife in mid air, the marmalade drops onto my pyjamas.
She says she has looked up Sake in her dictionary and it says it’s the name of God.
I suspend marmalading onto toast and go and find the dictionary.
No Lili I say, it says ‘In the name of God’
Who is called Sake she says.
Uhm, no, I say.
And why, she asks, do you have to forget him every time there is a noise from the dragon downstairs. You run downstairs and shout ‘Forgot Sake’
‘I…..?’
Oh, got it, I say, Ok Ok.
I patiently put his one right as I munch through my cold toast.

Later in the evening whilst we prepare to go out to dinner, she says your bird’s annoying me.
Lili, I say, I haven’t got a bird.
Yes you have, she says, shave it off before we go out, it looks messy.

Pino and Vittorio… those boys!

Pino spends three days cutting up wooden crates and thus wipes out entire savings in wood budget. He comes up for dinner and says I’ve got to tell you this but keep it to yourselves.
(Which I will of course)
The story.
Vittorio has come around to Pino’s to take him for a boy’s night out.
Pino has no idea what this might mean or entail but Vittorio is so insistent that Pino at last says OK, give me 20 minutes to clean up and I’ll come along.
On the kitchen table he’d left Georgia’s dinner (Georgia being Debsie’s dog); pieces of chicken breast which had been left out overnight and most of the day and which Georgia hadn’t touched. And Pino had washed off the day’s dirt and was debating whether to throw it away but just hadn’t got around to it.
So there it was on the table and when Pino finally came downstairs ready to go out, it wasn’t.
Just the empty plate.
Vittorio had eaten the whole plateful.
Pino says I couldn’t tell him, just couldn’t.
But we see Vittorio a few days later at the opening of the new commercial centre in Amandola; alive and well and putting down as much free wine and cake as his little elf-like body could handle.

The orto?
Un disastro

It’s Sunday morning.
My mouse is playing up. It’s sort of sending messages to itself
I drive to Sarnano because all the shops are open on a Sunday morning.
Except, it turns out, Andrea’s computer shop.
‘The bastard’, I say to the locked shop door.
‘Michael’ a voice says behind me.
It’s Andrea.
Can’t open up now he says. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning.
He looks cross. Maybe he heard me.
I drive back in miserable drizzle.
By the time I reach the house the light rain has turned to snow.

Read my other stories on http://www.physikgarden.com/chronicles.html

Vendemia time

2005-11-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

Sambuco Newsletter Oct 31 2005

Rome
It’s the 2nd of October and we are on our way to Rome; to meet friends, see art; try some new restaurants… all that cultural stuff that us country types need more than once in a while, or more often
Before we get to the Salaria, (the old Roman salt road to Rome), I look up and see that the Grand Sasso in the distance has received its first sprinkling of snow and to the right I see Vettore has too. It’s too early for snow even at that altitude but I remember that even in mid June we had a dusting across the Sibillini peaks. For a weather freak like me (one who visits the Met Office site everyday) this is interesting info. Did you know for instance that they (the UK Met Office) predict an old fashioned winter in Europe, the first for over a decade? Well of course you don’t, normal people don’t visit weather websites.
(You read it here first, right?)
But Rome was nice. Not too many tourists (it seemed at first)….and you know the centre is quite small really to walk around.
But it’s sunny and we all feel lazy and decide to catch an open top bus and do the tour. Why not? We can chat and learn a bit of history from the plug in lecture.
So there they are, the tourist buses. And we go to the first in line and the driver says they are having trouble with the door and we should maybe go to the one behind which we do. On the bus it says pay as you get on so we attempt to pile on in and the tour guide appears from upstairs and shrieks no no you must get your ticket from the, office. Which office where? You have to ask she says… ‘But it says here tickets can be bought as you get on’, that’s only if you get on at other stops she says.
Oh!
I begin to get ruffled but Lili says forget it, It’s Rome,…..they’re Roman.
We eventually find the ticket booth and here are the tourists, hundreds of them. And written on the window of the booth it says ‘closed for two hours’ (like from when?)
We walk away in despair and see a ‘Pilgrimage bus’ ‘Learn about Ancient Rome the way the original pilgrims did’ it says ‘ Take a voyage through time with a lecture on your headset which describes in graphic detail the wonders of Christian Rome’
We do, and it turns out to be more like an hour in Dante’s inferno. For a start the headsets don’t work, ‘Well they did this morning’ the guide says (to everybody on board who is fiddling with their bits of plastic) and we set off, lectureless into the Rome traffic where we get stuck in a mass of cars.
Great!
So we get off at the nearest opportunity and walk. Walk walk walk.
We have learned a lesson.
Visit Rome by train and walk when you are there.
And.. Say to yourself’ I am not a tourist, I am not a tourist, I will not do touristy things, over and over…and then walk (or catch a real tram or metro).
In the evening we find a nice restaurant by the hotel and as usual Lili reminds me not to behave like an Englishman (which means don’t drink before you eat and drink more water than wine and don’t eat too much and eat slowly and decline a pudding)
Our friend Silvia says ‘but Lili, Michael is not overweight’ Yes he is she says, he’s got an enormous pancia. But Lili, Silvia says, he’s got a perfect figure (ego massaged)
Yes, Lili says….. for a pear. (ego crushed)

A week later and we are back again to warm weather up from Africa and the frogs and toads are celebrating in their usual fashion by playing chicken in my headlights as we drive back from a pizza in town. I’ve given up trying to swerve away; they only jump in the same direction. But I felt bad about squelching a really big one. Must have been ancient, at least a hand span in width and, uhm, slightly wider afterwards (I saw as I drove past the next morning)
Frogs and toads playing chicken on the frog and toad?
I banish the conundrum from my mind.
Not easy.

This time of year we eat only potatoes and nuts.
This is not true but it feels like it.
Most of the nut trees hereabouts are to be found along the roadside; walnuts, chestnuts, almonds, hazelnuts. This makes sense of course because historically it meant that folks could collect nuts in the easiest way possible as they wandered along the ancient pathways. Now in this age where everybody has two or three cars, you see bunches of cars and people as you drive about, all within slippery red brown lakes of leaves and squashed nuts which spread across the roads and where you have to slow down on bends to avoid skidding.
And the road crews are out and about too at this time of year with their extending long armed grass and bush munchers, trimming the roadsides for better visibility now that the growth season has ended. A man at each end of these cavalcades (always there are three machines, munching at different heights) waving stop/go lollipops.
Driving back down from Sarnano yesterday, I see one of these guys darting about from one side of the road to the other and as I get nearer I see he is stuffing his pockets with walnuts as they cascade down in the gusts of wind. His pockets are bursting and he is temporarily de-lollipopped, completely oblivious to the hooting cars
Harvest time
It’s the time of la vendemia; grape picking. Usually we help Graziella with the harvest but this time we were away in Treviso. They kindly left us though some table grapes which Lili polishes off within two evenings. It’s a thing she has with grapes.
But the harvest this year is poor. Too much rain, not enough sun. But on Sunday morning it clears and we wander down to Graziella to ask if we can borrow their moto-sega (chain saw) to cut our logs in half because, (as you will no doubt remember), imbecile woodman didn’t do so. OK she says she’ll send Quinto up and we walk back ladened with a pumpkin, a dozen fresh eggs (plus as many not so fresh eggs from witch Pepa) and celery, potatoes and apples.
Sure enough, Quinto drives up half an hour later with the chainsaw but unfortunately he has been a bit too close to the wine vat this morning and he’s waving the chainsaw around like a tennis racket as he homes in on my logs…which he tells me to hold so that the saw won’t bounce. Bounce?
Forget it I say as I watch him slip for the second time and stagger towards the fig tree.
Oh my!
But then appears Graziella and prises the whirling machine from his grasp just as he slips again and plunges it into the metal log support which I had cobbled together for maximum operational safety. There’s a sharp whistling sound as the chain flies off the saw, sails between us and embeds itself in the fig tree.
Log sawing cancelled for rest of day.
Maybe forever

Our bread machine
It was a wedding present from Franca.
And I’ve really got into bread making.
Perfect life for me I tell Lili after another prize-winning loaf emerges from the machine. The perfect life would be days spent making bread, working in the garden, writing, painting, playing chess and the odd game of darts.
What about eating she says.
And drinking?
I pour myself a glass of water and go in search of the biscuit tin; find it; and swerve away, meaningfully, just touching the tin and no more. Touch touch!

End of the newsletter and I haven’t even mentioned little Eva and the T shirts, nor the gang warfare in Butundoli, nor even the miracle of the two plumbers and the electrician. NOR even the changes at our famous sinful nightclub, it's now a striptease disco!
Next time

Read my other stories on http://www.physikgarden.com/chronicles.html

Ferragosto

2005-08-25T02:27:00.000-07:00

Sambuco newsletter August 2005

I’m invisible, honest I am-

No, not really!
But nearly though.

This is the story of my near invisibility.
Ferragosto has reared its trafficy, whimsical, noisy and irritating head and I’ve become almost invisible.
And this is the proof. Read on..
Let’s face it. You could never ever honestly say that going into the post office or the bank in town is an experience which makes you feel like a valued human. No no, you always feel slightly guilty and you know you shouldn’t really bother the post office cashiers with anything as trivial as asking for a stamp for instance (frown) or if a special parcel has arrived maybe? (Look of outright disgust)…(I should add here that the signs above the cashiers booths in the post office are all deliberately confused, the indications for pensions, paying accounts, stamps and posting of parcels don’t really mean that at all. Instead you buy stamps at the pensions counter, pay bills at the parcel posting booth etc etc. Well of course, didn’t you know that?)
But at this time of year
It’s even worse.
Feragosto
Whooa..keep away, keep away
But today I can’t, just can’t . I have to pay a grossly unfair speeding fine; deadline this very day. So I’m stuck. And this is where the invisibility comes in.
I’ve already become partly invisible at the Bank a half hour before.
Naturally, none of the cashiers there like being cashiers, particularly at Ferragosto time.
They prefer to edge away from the living and instead peer with deep concentration and slight concern at computer screens.
So with me being part invisible and all, I suppose it was a bit much to expect anyone to notice my presence at the counter, which was open, but cashierless.
After five minutes I dare to say ‘hello’
And nobody looks up.
I say is anyone here to serve me? And I get a wave and a grunt.
I say sorry I didn’t catch that and I get back a tangible wave of hostility and I can feel on the point of exploding when the Bank Director (now he’s a very nice chap BTW) bursts through the labyrinth of desks and says ‘Michael, hi, I hear you got married, I sympathise I really do!’
And then they all look up and I’m obviously gradually becoming visible again and then lo and behold I have two cashiers desperate to serve me-
But the Post Office… the Post Office, the Post Office. Oh dear!
Not only am I becoming invisible here too but so are all the other customers (three lines of). There are pensioners lining up at the parcels counter. People with bills to pay at the stamp counter and I have to pay my speeding fine-
So I opt for the queue of pensioners. Big mistake.
An old lady two people ahead of me slaps her book on the table and I think OK five minutes but she gets paid and then for goodness sake gets out another book from her bag and gets paid this and then another book, oh my God, she’s collecting for the whole of her village! So I dare, I dare to ask if I’m in the right queue through the triple thickness glass to a couple of cashiers who are playing the ‘I’m on the computer you cant ask me’ game and I get cross looks and no response.
The guy in front of me explodes on my behalf. Jesus he shouts , if this were Rome, you’d all be dead in there by now!
Bingo, this hits the spot and suddenly all the computer zombies spin around and man (woman in this case) the cashier counters. He obviously had very good connections. Hmm, for some reason this type of threat carries some weight in the Bella Republica.

My theory is that these public service workers are angry that they can’t get away for Ferragosto too like the rest of the insane masses, and don’t really have invisible-making powers at all.
Or maybe there’s a connection between anger and invisibility. And Ferragosto. But I’m a bit muddled on this subject.

Erik and Harry

The baby owl.
This one’ll slay you!
Got back late the other night after seeing Aida at Ripastransone. Now I’m not an opera person but I like a good show. Our good friends Al and Al invited us to come along and see it with them and we thought ooh a trip to Verona, what fun.
Well Ripastransone ain’t exactly Verona and when to comes to putting on Aida it’s more like the Sound of Music except I wish it was and it wasn’t. More like the sound of an abattoir at dawn… on a Monday morning. A small to crippling stage with a cast of thousands. Everybody who ever wanted to be an opera singer and their brother was there, elbowing for a space.
So. We slid out early to have a look at the town. As good an excuse as any we thought. A pretty place, but deserted except for a few local sleuths. Maybe the locals were hiding from Aida; this being the sixth year the town had run it. Why six years of such torture? I’ve no idea.

Took us ages to get back home though those tortuous roads around Offida.I parked the car and a figure (it was Erik and it was well past midnight) sidled up to me as I attempted to disembark.
Now Erik, I should explain, does actually have red hair, which means he probably had parents who were either smart Alecs or School teachers. Erik is married to Lees who is Australian, Erik being American with obvious Viking ancestry.

And this how it goes.
It’s dark, it’s nearly one am and Erik asks is there a society for the protection of birds here.
At 1 a.m.?
What here in Amandola?.
No here as in anywhere in Italy.
It’s Harry isn’t it I ask?
Harry? Who the hell is Harry?
Our pet owl.
Oh Jesus he says I‘ve killed your pet owl? Oh God Oh God But I couldn’t tell if he was dead or not. I just picked him up and he stared at me.
Look I say don’t worry he’s always doing it.
Doing what?
Playing chicken
An owl playing chicken?
Look I say, trying to calm him down, he was just standing there in the middle of the road right? And he didn’t try to fly away, right? And you reckoned you ran over him, right? And the stopped the car, ran back and found him lying on his side and you picked him up and he didn’t struggle and just gazed wistfully at you, right?

Yes to all that he says.
That’s Harry I say,
He’s always doing it.
Erik wanders back to the house with a look on his face somewhere between shock and wonder.
And I hear him mumbling….’Harry? A pet owl? Playing chicken? An owl?
But then he spins round and shouts I’m going back to check and he jumps in his car and zooms off.
Come and get me if you need me, I call, I lie.
But I know he won’t.
I know Harry.
So I go to bed.

Up and down and back again and then down and back once more
That’s where we’ve been these past ten days…up and down and back again.
Down to Puglia, and back for a week in Le Marche, then up to the Venito (twice) once for our wedding and then for a family bash, then back to LM then Puglia for another wedding and then on the weekend across to Rome and then down to Calabria for a five day break and back again. Two weddings and a truck full of water melons (two thousand water melons spewed across the autostrada south of Pescara and we’re stuck for two hours in forty degrees of heat. Nice smell though, although I haven’t eaten water melon since. (just the odd banana)….Because with all the crashed cars around that overturned container lorry it looked like blood. It really did. Blood.

So it’s Ferragosto; it’s that time of year, summer, heat, traffic, chaos, everyone dashing about to get the most out of every moment which could, I decide, have something to do with the long harsh winter before.
No, heck, it’s because it’s Italy, it’s because they’re Italians, punt e basta.

On a domestic note
I order winter wood from Bepe, the woodman…€500 worth please.
Yes fine OK, agreed… then comes the day of delivery and as he is pouring a huge load over our Peruvian wall and Lili’s prize rosebush, I ask him are you sure this is 500 euros worth?, looks like a lot more lot to me.
Don’t know about that he says but there are 60 quintale (what are THEY?) and it’s 12 euros a quintale.
But that’s €720 I say, no it’s actually €780 he says.
Oh come on I say, we agreed on €500.
You must look on it as an investment he says.. For next winter.
I think you weren’t listening to me last week I say, and I think the extra €280’s worth is for Bernie.
What’s that in quintale he asks?
Our neighbour, Fiore, comes out of his house, looks and the mountain of wood, buries his face in his hands and walks back indoors.
Lili pops out and shrieks at the pile where once grew her prize rose and I just sit down on the wall with a deep sigh as I see Bernie’s load trundling down the road towards us.
I fear for his fledgling olive tree.

2005-06-03T06:16:00.000-07:00

Newsletter, May 2005

The Russians are coming.
And the Poles, the Croatians, The Albanians, the Ukranians.
Do I have any evidence of this?
Sure.
This is how I know.
It was Alberto who got me thinking about the matter.
I was passing by the notorious Bar Centrale. Now this bar isn’t difficult for me to pass by because it’s the hallowed haunt of the local Anglo Saxons and thus to be avoided at all costs.
But Alberto called me over for a quick drink and a packet of crisps.
I say it’s too early for me to drink alcohol but he says try this …a lemon non alcoholic cordial with mint.
And as I sit down he asks are you going to the opening tonight?
Opening? What opening?
The new nightclub, he says
A new nightclub?? Here in Sarnano? You must be kidding me .
Yes, they’re closing the discotec and opening a night club.
You mean they’re closing the only discotec left in the western world and opening a trendy night club?
Yes he says, who wants to go to a disco with only two people inside? In the new nightclub there’ll be low lights and music and Polish, Croatian, Ukrainian and most of all Russian girls and you have to pay €20 to dance with them for eight minutes…or talk for twenty.
Do they speak Italian I ask.
Probably not he says.
Can you talk for ten and dance for four minutes?
How could I know he says?
No chance I can ever go, what with the wife and all.
You live just nearby…you could pop in at some early hour I suggest.
He buries his head briefly in his hands.
I forgot to ask Alberto if there were going to be fireworks.
There were.
And the next morning I find Bessie (our dog) has destroyed another door.
(her firework phobia you’ll recall)

Dave comes to cut the grass the day after.
Dave did you go to the opening?
Yes he says and I paid €20 for a twenty minute chat with a Russian girl.
Did she speak Italian or English I ask.
No.
And do you speak Russian?
No, he says but I’m sure she really liked me.
I walk away and leave him to cut the grass.

Three or four times a week now, empty freight planes, huge ones, fly in from St Petersburg and Moscow.
They leave full of shoes and jewelry and the Russians pay in American dollars, cash.
This information comes from an indisputeable source…a guy I know who stacks deck chairs on the beach near Ancona, under the flight path of these beasts.
(I wonder why they arrive empty though? Maybe the Russians don’t produce anything we want…oh except gas and oil, but it would be silly to bring that n’est-ce pas?)
But, mind you, lorries full of nicnacs arrive every weekend from Russia and the Ukraine throughout Italy full of cheap stuff. Stuff, yes that’s the word, stuff. Military regalia(rubbish) and cameras (rubbish), telescopes, binoculars ( brilliant) and then mainly household goods.
And we bought a few weeks ago in Ascoli a Russian hunting knife for €7 which is an absolute beauty and according to my friend Keith who knows about such things extremely dangerous and illegal ( super!) and this I must confess I adore. To the extent that I pull it out of its equally beautiful casing at every opportunity just to play with it and to finger its very illegal snap close mechanism.
Lili bought a cigarette lighter which is about a foot long and in the shape of a rifle by way of celebration of her decision to quit smoking. It was empty of course so I had to buy the necessary fuel for it and to adjust its flame. OK, I admit, I should have tested it more extensively before leaving it around for her to (not) use but it could have been worse…the accident that is… the burned eyebrow.
Hey who needs two eyebrows I pleaded? Eyebrows are like kidneys, we just don’t need two of everything.
How would you like one knee she said.
I swiftly adjusted the flame thrower to a more manageable and less incendary state.
Oh, and my impeccable source of info tells me the Russians are buying property all along the coast too.
It’s a mystery to me where they get the money from. If it’s true that is.

The garden
It’s the end of May and we have decided to dedicate as much spare time as daily life allows us to our garden. For a start we are simply just grateful that it’s still there after the massive mud slides of the Spring. And then, too, we feel we should give it a bit of a thank you for surviving the harsh winter. Two months of deep lying snow killed off almost half of our shrubs and compressed the earth in the orto to the point where it turned instantly to concrete on the event of the sudden warm weather in mid April. The only thing I could do was to go at it with my cherished English spade.
It took me a week but I managed to dig over the soil (120 sq of it) into one foot square chunks. These too, after a couple more days of heat, were cubes of solid concrete and I had to admit defeat and asked Keith if I could borrow his rotivator. Never in my long years of gardening have I stooped so low, I mean.. a rotivator?
My old dad would turn in his grave.But it’s a beastie, Keith says, a real beastie.
But will it chew through the cement blocks? I ask.
It’ll make mincemeat of them he says, merrily mixing our metaphors
Hmm!
It’s an American machine, at least it says made in America…a Husqvarna and a Briggs and Stratton hybrid. It’s got a starter pullcord of about a metre in length and it says on the side of the machine ‘hold handle when starting’.
I’ve absolutely no idea what this means. Nor does Keith.
After thirty or so pulls it explodes into action in a plume of black smoke; I click it into forward gear and it takes me at some fantastic speed towards the orto; which it plunges into and ploughs straight through the sage patch before I can manage to punch it into neutral.
A beastie indeed!
But does it do the trick?
Nope
In the first run it merely leaps from concrete chunk to concrete chunk and spins over on it side, spluttering.
I think I’ve broken it Keith if you read this! Sorry!
Graciella appears from nowhere, as do Renzo and Claudio and Lili runs out of the house too.
She says you are not to touch that machine again and the audience nods in agreement. And she says, if you only have one leg I won’t marry you. The image of being single with one leg quickly has the desired effect and Renzo says we’re coming back with the tractor. And sure enough, they do and the orto is ploughed by their earth masher attachment to a fine tilth.
So the veggies are in and new shrubs too. New animals are appearing, a black squirrel has taken to the little wood on the side of the garden and our nightingale is back for the season. The garden is full of tail-less lizards once again (grazie a Eva the cat) and the butterflies are back from wherever they go to (Egypt I imagine) and Harry our owl is back too… oh and we’ve seen our first snakes.
To Lilia, every snake is a deadly viper and must be killed before it kills us. Roman law, I imagine.
I say, how can it be a viper if it’s thin and black with a yellow head. I say go ahead and get the book on indigenous creatures. She says OK but kill it first.
Spiders suffer the same fate. They are killed remorselessly. Well, what do you expect she says, They’re spiders for God’s sake.

See my other stories on www.sambuco-lemarche.com