Let Down Reveals Undiscovered Leadership Qualities

Leo has been called away on Monday morning. He thought to delay the olive-picking until next weekend and the following week. There is a cultural gap. The olive-pickers are flying in and being collected from the local station even as I type.

A quick check round has established that the only person amongst us who has ever laid hands on an olive in anger is me. Even Mr HG has only regarded the labours benignly, over all these years, and carved for the festivities. So the entire crew are going to harvest in English. With the caposquadra being me. Gulp.

Slave driver is my middle name.

Gloved Up

The lady olive tree strippers have gold gloves with dark blue wristbands. Gentlemen olive tree strippers have dark green with white wristbands. I have given way to temptation and bought a pair of pretty turquoise special surface gloves for me which cost three times as much (but I could do the dusting in them later, if they don't get over-used in the fields).

The fields are sopping wet after violent thunderstorms so an urgent wellies acquisition expedition is now first order of the day that the olive pickers arrive.

The wild boar is marinading nicely.

Getting Ready for the Harvest

Nets, ladders, green plastic crates - all I have to buy now are the gloves with plastic dimples all over the palm and fingers. You grab your laden branch with one hand, as close to the trunk as you can get, and drag it through the other, closed, hand letting the olives fall onto the net at the bottom of the tree. A subtle grip takes off the olives but doesn't strip the leaves and shoots. Too many leaves and shoots landing among the harvested olives and caustic remarks start to be made. There are usually three or four pickers to a tree and a clumsy branch stripper reflects on them all.

Before the weekend there is a giant vat of boar stew to make (the hunters kindly delivered our portions cleaned, jointed and in bags ready to go straight into the freezer). Then some fennel under bechamel sauce - good with the strong taste of wild boar and the fennelliness makes the local red taste even better. Restaurants offer boar cooked with black chocolate; I tried it once, disgusting, it just sounds luxurious. The meat sauce is all bagged up in meal-sized doses in the freezer, and I'm going to cheat and buy the pasta. I can't face making the spreads and stuffings from various creatures' innards that go on the toast, so it's cheating there too. Cheese and autumnal local fruit for afterwards keeps it simple. We have to get those olives in.

And if people are kind enough to come all the way from England to help they need to wonder why they didn't choose to be Tuscan peasants; no mercy must be shown to their livers, either.

Burying Tortoises

Prince Philip (the tortoise previously known as Lenin) is half way dug into the soft earth along the church wall. The question is: should I haul him out by the back legs, tap him on the snout and tell him to get digging harder, winter draw(er)s on? Or should I assume he knows what he is doing and it's only his front end that is cold at night while, during these glorious days, he pops out and suns himself?

Or should I act as if he has fallen fast asleep in the middle of getting under ground and bury his rear end in compost? Queen Elizabeth II (formerly etc., Rosa Luxemburg) has disappeared weeks ago. But we all know she's a little minx and leads poor Lenin/Philip quite a dance.

Rien Ne Va Plus

Just in time Mr HG has bought my lottery ticket. So at 8.30 tonight I shall win one hundred million euros. Yes, one hundred million. If I don't it will be because I've never had a lottery ticket before and it probably takes practice. But things are looking good, and optimism is at optimal levels.

Update

It takes practice, as I feared. I didn't get any numbers at all, but will do better next time there is a prize as big as this offered.

Pig Ignorant

The economic slow-down is causing a crisis in prosciutto quality in Monculi . The butcher has his own pigs which he rears, slaughters, cures (do I want to think about this? ed.), and his prosciutto is acknowledged as the best there is. The grocer buys in, locally sourced of course, and first rate suppliers, but there is that extra frisson involved in eating pigs you could have seen on walks (not the pigs, your walks) munching on locally produced pigswill...

All of which is reflected in the price. So there has been a switch to grocer's ham. And the butcher's has begun to hang about, thus the quality gap is being closed by the grocer's higher turnover.

There is a proper term for this behaviour in development economics (why is it pigs seem to occupy a special place in economic theory?) but, as usual, no satisfactory solution. Typical. That's economics. Price of everything and the value of nothing.

When I Grow Up

It has been so wonderful swimming up and down in the warmer months that the determination to keep going in the winter is redoubled. The problem is that quotes for covering the pool run from euros 7-10,000 to ten times that amount (including some extra electricity generating solar panels to give the temperature a boost.)

I do hate having to learn something completely new, and this stuff about heat and energy and condensation and ventilation is really hard. In music there are pieces that are said to lie under the performer's hand. Even with little familiarity they emerge formed, phrased, enchanting. That is true of other understandings.

I was not born to be an engineer. But it is interesting to find that out. I knew always that being a doctor would be horrid. A poet, now - if only.

Failing to Save the Panda

Alfio's wife, Rosina, tells us that the Panda has been walloped again by a reversing vehicle in the piazza. And no, she didn't quite see whose car hit us. The trouble with the piazza is that most of it is owned by the frontages around it but most villagers think it isn't. So we all assert our property rights; we park conveniently near our gardens and front doors while the rest of the village fights for parking space and then has to walk (and if we think it's bad here, just look at San Gimigniano).

All this causes minor attitude changes. Did I hit your car? Serves you right. We of the little marble tablets let into the ground saying Proprieta Privata and enjoying property privilege pay in repair of bumps and scratches. But the Panda has the most exposed of our parking spots and is now reduced to jelly from the rear bumper to just behind the front seats.

So we're off to buy a ute. If we get one with a dog in the back that should stop people bumping into it.

Cash On The Nail

Sometimes I wonder about the economy that surrounds us here but never touches the records. While no-one in their right mind would wilfully attract the attention of the Tax Collectors and their astonishingly wide-ranging powers, most family-sized transactions take place in cash. Anything from a coffee, through three-monthly provisioning, new outfit including shoes and handbag, to major household purchases, a vehicle - cash.

There's always a receipt, the till whirrs, or presented bills, replete with codes and numbers, are signed and dated as having been paid in full. But only foreigners offer plastic for payment. It's a bit off to offer plastic; and any cheque, for such a purchase as a house for instance, is certified and payable on sight, ie., it's cash. It's only there because it's inconvenient to carry suitcases of smaller bank notes.

It was reported in Repubblica that sales of safes have risen by more than a third in the last year, presumably people are carrying even higher sums in cash during the banking crisis.

Somehow it all feels very empowering, democratic. No-one is looking at what we are buying. The money isn't shut up in banks that might go bust or shut their doors. It's out here among the people, circulating just like it's supposed to. And if you can't find the cash in your handbag, then you know you can't afford it.

A Leap In The Dark. Be Very Afraid

Mr HG tells me that he no longer understands what is going on. This is not to say that he doesn't have the historical, analytical, intellectual, technical, professional, experiential tools to analyse events. After all, he has hung on to almost all of our wealth and safeguarded it for the children. And done quite a bit of that sort of thing for others and their children in the turbulence of the last 20 years.

'There is no precedent for what is happening. Well, except in the 1930s when Mussolini responded by nationalising ailing banks and enterprises, putting them under the control of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI). This was a successful operation but it provided the playground for post War corruption, the spoils system, clientilismo, the illegal funding of politcal parties, and it had to be dismantled under the requirements of economic efficiency and the demands of democratic politics. Prodi took it apart.

Just as there should be no taxation without representation so there must not be subsidies without government management of those subsidies. But this is extremely dangerous. Our institutions are not built to contain such transfers of power. Moreover it is not clear whether the massive intervention of central banks and governments will be sufficient to stem the crisis. The commitment is open-ended, both in practice and formally, and could well end in hyper-inflation.

The range of alternative outcomes goes from the maintenance of everyday normality to Armageddon. Armageddon being chain bankruptcies, mass unemployment, deep and prolonged depression, and hyper inflation. That set equals war - civil war and interstate war.

When current events are without precedent then this range of possibilities is without means of assessment.'

With Lenin, Mr HG would say "There is no such a thing as no exit". Unlike Lenin, he is eternally optimistic about the adaptability of capitalism.

Which kind of capitalism contains our best hopes for the maintenance of everyday normality (the hopes of all normal people, not the confrontationist, wilful disrupters of reality who slouch in every society). Are Russia and the former socialist bloc better placed with their skills and experience of the planned economy, to avoid Armageddon?

'No. Planned economies didn't work because politicians are not willing to surrender their power to the market. We know that. Planned economies failed.

We appear to be moving towards some kind of state market economy - the worst of all possible worlds with all the inefficiencies and rigidities of state planning and fewer of the benefits of the capitalist market economy.'

Could you run an economy like that?

'Oh yes, certainly. But you might not like it. Though once I had the powers needed to run such economy, I might not mind what you liked.'

Might not mind what I like! Fortunately lunch is served.

Bankruptcy

They used to break the bench on which a financial man of business stood and hawked his wares, in the loggia behind the Porcellino in the centre of rinascimento Florence, when he could not meet his commitments. Hence bankrupt.

The co-owner of the area's posh restaurant had what is locally known as a good bankruptcy. He had transferred his property to his wife when his gold dealings met a bad end with gold price volatility. A good bankruptcy is the removal of all assets from creditors' reach before nemesis strikes. Unfortunately he didn't have a good wife. She has made off with house and restaurant and filed for divorce. He has left for Thailand to remake his fortune, in what has not been discovered - yet.

Magic and its Effects

My accountant has accepted the resignation of the office assistant. The woman was serving the required apprenticeship to obtain her accountancy qualifications and, times being what they are, was not paying for the privilege, but being paid something above the minimum wage.

She was madly, wildly in love, also, with a man who had his doubts. Undeterred, the apprentice applied to the sorcerer for a love potion. (There is a great deal of local commitment to magic and sorcery in Monculi and its hinterland).

The lovelorn apprentice used the office computer system to choose her mago and, after the divinations and recommendations, to obtain the potions at the best possible price via internet. The dose, unusually for these kinds of circumstances, having been delivered safely to the unwilling lover, it worked well enough for a holiday to be enjoyed together. After which, he dumped her. But written in the entrails (or whatever - who would like to guess at the horridnesses of Tuscan divination?) was that she was pregnant.

Swain, unconvinced by rituals that bore a remarkable resemblance to old-style family pressures, had some samples in for analysis in the twinkling of an eye. Not only not guilty - not pregnant.

My accountant regretted, but a resignation was a resignation. And opening the office computer system to magical influences was overstepping the mark.

A Word to the Wise

"Listen to him, he knows", declared the grocer's wife confidently. So Mr HG found himself giving an impromptu seminar on the financial crisis, backed up against the pasta shelves and fronted by the biscuits while the crowd of interested listeners drew additions from passers-by in the street.

As he laid out how Italy was relatively unexposed to many of the causes of the trouble, protected by conservative practice and a vigilant Mr Draghi acting more than a year ago on over-enthusiastic investment in high returns by relatively innocent public bodies; as he he succinctly explained the terms and content of higher finance, his audience listened gravely and judiciously.

"I'm in gold bars myself", remarked an elderly lady who'd come in for a small loaf and an etto of prosciutto cotto. "Not in the bank though" remarked another in lisle stockings with outside temperatures of 25 degrees (it's October - time for stockings, rules are rules). All assented that there wasn't a lot of point going into gold and then leaving it in the bank.

Usually he gets paid quite a lot of money for these kinds of discourses. And to add insult to injury, they all had much more gold than we have, solidly supporting their families/old age/ future needs. What is more, he had the uneasy feeling that it was a far better thing to give of his best, than try to put them off with a few platitudes.

Cash Out

After the great reckoning on Wednesday morning we have decided not to sell off land and buildings that were distant and derelict. Distance, even when interrupted by a range of hills and a tricky road, no matter how beautiful, is merely an irritation. Dereliction translates into otherwise unobtainable planning permissions to build in protected zones, and the marginality of land is changing its contours, not least because of EU investment availability for irrigation and other improvement often sought by co-operatives of which ownership makes us members.

In the current climate I want to be part of any co-operative and of as many communities as possible. As well, what possible determinations can I make about the worth of cash next week, year, decade...? Furthermore delapidation reaches a point where it doesn't matter any more. Under modern standards and rules of habitability, everything must be restructured anyway, as much for 50 years ago as for 500.

There is one last indicative factor. If you want to buy a podere in Tuscany, there isn't one for sale for love or money. They are worth their weight in gold.

Lament

The men came today and put away the swimming pool until next Spring. They cleaned it, and its pump and its filters and the skimmers. Then they dumped all sorts of chemicals in the shining water and covered it in dark green tarpaulin. It was lovely just to sit beside even though the water temperature had fallen to 16 degrees and it was unswimmable for the last ten days.

The nearest indoor pool is 20 kilometres away, difficult kilometres too. Still, by next winter we should have had the agricultural development plan accepted and the pool will be part of a glass house complex for forcing vegetables. It will be like swimming in a jungle of cash crops.

I wonder if parrots like early tomatoes?

Even in Tuscany the Australians Hold their Own

Celebrating depends so much on what there is to drink. So if you can lay your hands on Shaw and Smith Shiraz Adelaide Hills 2005 you are there.

From the label:
made from low cropping vines and aged in barriques following fermentation.
www.shawandsmith.com

Drink lots of it. And thank you our Australian family.

We Only Have One Life

Wedding anniversary today. Over the years we have bought pictures, lithographs a few, a very few, bronzes. So the biography of Afro that arrived at breakfast was both a fascinating account of the last century's world of Italian artists, and a reproach - so much lovely work, why didn't we buy more? Of course the usual suspect was responsible - poverty. The artists were poor sometimes even at the height of their powers, but we were younger and poorer.

There are many reproductions of Afro's paintings, but almost more interesting are the photographs of his contemporaries and friends, of the Rome of the '50s onwards: their beautiful clothes, ateliers, bars, restaurants, lives, and their beautiful selves.

I want to live in those places. We can only live one life and where I am and where I was is not to be sneezed at. But if I could have been a grown up just a little earlier, and born in another country, it would have been fun too.

Beds'R'Us

The correct Italian bed has two mattresses - one for winter and one for summer - which is understandable as it can be as cold in winter as in England and as hot in summer as in Hell.

The lambswool filling of the winter mattress is taken into the fresh air to be beaten and sifted back to curly, honey-coloured freshness each year, then restuffed into laundered, ticking mattress covers in brown and white stripes. Each smallish section of mattress and stuffing is held in place by pompoms of white cotton that pass through the mattress to be secured on the other side.

The summer mattress is filled with the dried stalks of gran'turco (corn on the cob to you and me), and thrown away at the end of every summer, and clean covers restuffed with this year's dried harvest.

In summer the sleeper has the lambswool under the dried stalks; in the winter the curls are on top. There are a number of cultural corollaries to all this.

First, who can't keep up with the mattress changing, laundering, beating, drying, etc., is frit.
Second, the cleaning of mattress fillings yields second-stage and very serious indications of attempts at magical harm.
Third, any movement on the dried stalks mattress resonates through the building.
Fourth, interspersing bank notes in the crispy mattresses is standard practice - tanto- the crispy notes don't add any more snap, crackle and pop.

Our Lady's Bicycle Race

Innuendo and double intenders lurk every word of the way in describing the preparations for the Madonna's bike race.

Legs shaved and oiled, they strip off their track suits to reveal, well, all, or nearly. The cycling shorts are as transparent as last year, and after carefully adjusting their saddles and themselves they set off for a little ride round, like the horses in the Palio being wheeled in tight circles in front of the rope, waiting for the gun.

The support cars, all in metalised silver and covered in advertisements, are invariably sporty hatchbacks driven by balding afficionados whose cycling days now are expressed in Sunday morning peddles up and down the local hills. They coddle their 'boys', fiddle with the bicycles and little cans of oil, and carry spare wheels about which they pump up for reassurance every now and then. There are so many extra wheels around someone could make a fortune supplying a few frames.

The loudspeakers are chanting the names of the riders like some medioeval litany, and away they go, pursued by the silver cars driven by the silver-haired.

Apart from Our Lady, there isn't a woman to be seen.

Crunch Time in Monculi

The man who lives across the road at the bottom of the garden has gone bankrupt. Having built a nasty new house that obstructed a view across miles of classic countryside to the Arno (not interrupting my view or I'd have decked him), he was sued the moment it was finished.

The people who sued him had given him money to invest for them (he was a financial adviser in a local bank) and he lost the lot. Unfortunately he had been doing his day job in the evenings as well, so he was liable. How ostentatious to build a new house, now sequestered, after losing all that money that belonged to other people. And the house he lives in has this monstrosity blocking what was once his garden and his lovely view.

It seems he was lending out the money entrusted to him, at usury interest rates, to poorer people wanting to buy flats. They defaulted.