Cooling Pond

Solar panels produce so much heat that the excess hot water has to be cooled again before running off back to the stream. There are two ways to do this:pass it between special stones that take the heat, or pass it through a body of water.

The body of water (otherwise known as a heated swimming pool) was chosen by acclaim. In the last few days I have learned about water and colour and light. If you want a pool in palest turquoise green, and who does not?, then the inside of the pool should be the colour of white sand. Light, reflection and water do the rest. The effect is added to by paving round the edge with pale gold stone, which is the local stone colour anyway, rather than the grey pietra serena, because the blue water and the yellow stone trick you into seeing green, don't they, which is very restful for the view from further away as well because there is no violent, blue shape screaming out of the ground,

The paved area is only 60 cms wide around the pool (I mean cooling body of water) and then the garden which is being planted up in the micro climate the warm water will create starts. Isn't that lovely? Gin and tonics and sprawling about on slatted furniture are up at the house; this is a serious body of water for swimming up and down very fast and doing those somersault turns at each end.

Crumbs

In the east-facing wall of the big kitchen is a low, reinforced, heavily barred door which, when opened, gives a view of the road from the provincial capital so that Florentines could see insurgents coming.

It's handy too for shaking-out the cloth and letting out the cat (sob) for a last constitutional across the rooftops and terraces. These were deserted by all birds - even the swallows swept over in Star Wars formations, without pause, while paws beneath them slashed and leapt.

A pair of ring tail doves have set up home out there now, strutting in beauty and cooing their little heads off.

Nutwood

There is a poor-terrain field quite close to the farm house which has failed over the centuries to be anything but a nuisance: poorly drained, poor soil, rejecting of whatever is planted there, but with a good south west exposure.

Driving to buy sheets today in the best linen shop in the whole world (oh yes it is), I was struck by how beautiful the newly greened woods are looking and, particularly, by the nut tree plantations. Nut wood is highly prized for furniture making; noce nostrale is one of the most lustrous yet discreet surfaces.

So the campo cattivo is to be planted up into a nutwood; both beautiful and, eventually, profitable. There might even be grants.

Whether Rupert will take up residence is not known.

Health by Numbers

The farm foreman has told us he will make appropriate arrangements for the continued pruning of the olive trees while he is in hospital. Naturally we were concerned for him but he hastened to reassure us.

"I'm having my knees done. My name's come up."

"What needs doing?", we winced.

"I'm over sixty."

During the 1950s, when healthcare first became available widely, people would present one another with operations, as gifts. Having your appendix out was a popular and acceptable present. As state provision rather than insurance provision advanced, the practice faded, to be replaced by a consumer view of, particularly, hospital treatment.

If your name is put down, at the appropriate age, for an operation, when it comes up in you go. The number of heart bypass procedures, shunts, hips, and knees closely matches the population in the appropriate age bracket.

Who is to say it isn't more efficient to do a steady flow of non-emergency surgery before a part conks out, rather than have people in pain, or under threat of death, in a queue to get a bed?

Hot Food

Some foods are hot. Those cooked with lashings of tomato? hot; anything egg-laden? - certainly hot (though not stracciatella, chicken broth with raw egg and parmesan cooking in the heat) which is for invalids so cannot be hot by definition; elaborated dishes costing time devoted to their individual creation? hot (unlike what I would regard as pretty elaborate like home made pasta with sauces made of the innards of animals, various, which are daily bread, more or less, therefore not hot), food containing bought ingredients, particularly cream, sugar, vanilla (though not nutmeg - that is a naturally occurring substance in the Tuscan world) and cinnamon? hot.

There is a constant theme revealing itself to my foreign eyes: are these ingredients readily available from home production or local exchange? Not hot. Does this dish use inordinate amounts of a staple? Hot. Does it require cash expenditures? Vindaloo.

Guglielmo

Dusk is the time to look at the magnolia stellata. And in the light just before dawn. Those were his favourite times in the garden; when all the prey was at its most vulnerable a glowing cream shape would materialise from the gloaming and rake a deadly claw through dinner or breakfast.

I look down from my window at dawn and at dusk at his present manifestation, a lesser form of being on the wheel of existence than he enjoyed, to pay no doubt for all those little birds and voles consumed.

And yet, still he is the Angel of the Burning Bush, who came with me out of the land of taxation and oppression, and into the land of CAP subsidies and grants for solar panels.

Keeping Face

Living frugally is competitive in Monculi. Paradoxically cutting a fine figure (la bella presenza) is just as important.

At the butchers it is as possible to be caught behind a woman buying the shop for a family lunch - family is upwards of twenty people from nought to ninety - and making sure the queue knows what they will all be missing on Sunday after eleven o'clock mass, as it is to be consulted on the possibility that a boned, trimmed and flattened chicken thigh (just the one) will be too much for three people.

'You see, Signora, there's tagliatelle with hare sauce (my family are hunters, as you know, and my mother-in-law made the pasta sfoglia this morning), stuffed artichokes - if yours are finished I can let you have some - and then crema with savoiardi (this last is home made custard, bright yellow from the free range eggs, with sugary biscuits). But the Doctor told us all we need to keep our triglycerides down - how are Mr HG's blood counts? Now my husband has...... Anyway, I thought a little chicken thigh couldn't raise anyone's blood pressure.'

I contemplate the little chicken thigh, imagine it sliced paper thin, rolled into saltimbocca with prosciutto, giant sage leaves, dripping in melted parmesan and garlicked olive oil.

Two fillet steaks? I ask the butcher. Heads toss, eyes flicker with contempt - it's only Thursday, after all. Show off spendthrift.

Lifestyle Choices for Girls

' They're laying waste to the olive groves!'

'Merely pruning.'

"PRUNING? Sticks are all that's left. Lines of lovely leaves and branches lying there that the trees have spent all winter growing.'

'Cruel to be kind.', (tucks pruning shears into trousers' pocket (specially sewn) and exits to cold, windy hillsides.

Is this a metaphor for the global financial crisis I wonder, settling back with my Kaldor's Kollected, in front of the fire, dinner already simmering and teatime's late afternoon bliss to enjoy.

Fences not Hedges

Fence posts must be cut when the moon is waning; cut under a waxing moon, they will rot as soon as they are sunk into the ground. I know this because a number of posts on new fencing, and some supporting the new olive plantings, have had to be replaced after rotting at the base within the year.

'Which shows, Signora, that they were cut under the wrong moon'.

'But how do you know the state of the moon when they were cut?'

'Because they are rotting.'

Right. So it's not just bottling wine that is excited by the pale moon.

Another earthquake

The grocer has announced he's going to vote for the Democratic Party. He 'isn't happy' with a government coalition 'led by Mr Berlusconi'.

That'll be a 7 on the Richter scale.

In the Teeth of History

The suggestion by a United Kingdom Home Office Minister that identity cards in the UK should be regarded as internal passports has the same chilling effect as the dentist's remark to Mr HG, whose teeth were undergoing their annual inspection:

"Ah", said Dr Deutschbein, "Not yet time for the final solution."

Earthquakes

London unable to pall (or I should be tired of life) it is Spring that brings me back. And I am greeted by another earthquake. Florence shook more than Bloomsbury but that was not really the reason why the civil protection forces and drills operated here - there aren't any civil protection forces and drills in Bloomsbury.

Geologists have defined the area bounded by Santa Maria Novella, via della Scala, the river, and the Cascine as most at risk in the city. Moral - always live in the eastern parts of the loveliest parts of a city; it tends to be cheaper and avoids the worst depredations of the state and of nature.

Still, bits of the painted ceilings floated down; it feels dreadful sweeping them up.

Monculi di Sopra suffered no damage, the denizens would be claiming for everything if it had.

The news that Labour members of parliament from Westminster are moving into Sinalunga was met with a stoical response from Mr HG.

What is there at Sinalunga?

Long Pause.

There's a railway station where you can change for Siena, otherwise it's as ugly as sin.