Handcrafted

The capo squadra had to call rain stopped play at 4pm yesterday. The olives really musn't get wet - so nets, pallets, containers, ladders, people all made a dash through the fields to the house. But they weren't released to read books, write papers, have a nice lie down, or talk among themselves.

Local kindly hands guided them through the rituals of picking out all the bits of twig and leaf that get caught up and thrown into the baskets in the rush to use all available light and clement weather. So they stretched out cloths across the floor of the boiler room and sieved through chicken wire frames and wondered if they would ever be able to think again, or walk, or even raise their arms higher than their shoulders.

There are machines, of course, serried ranks of moving belts and filters and observant workers with their hair in nets picking off the baddies. Then the whole shebang roars down a chute and enters a sealed system of chopping and crushing and squeezing and quality control and bottling and labelling and boxing and is transported off to Harrods and Waitrose and Sainsburys and Tesco and Asda - on down the chain as the pressing gets crueller and crueller and the chemical levels to extract the remaining oil get higher and higher.

But that's Mr HG's cousin. He's got a fattore and all the trimmings, including the hectares. We've got me, and the few, the valiant few. There are enough to go to the mill even now, though. And our oil is better than his. Of course it is; every olive has been personally selected.