Le Vacanze

People here take their holidays in the most extraordinary places.  Probably it springs from their residence in what most regard as an idyllic place to go on holiday.  Off they set to Mauritania, Iraq,  Afghanistan...., the better to enjoy their earthly paradise on return home. 

This story in today's WSJ :

'Afghan police said militants beheaded six Afghans for cooperating with government authorities.  ... a seventh Afghan man is being treated for serious neck injuries.'

was greeted with the local response -  'three times they miss then you're let off'...   and -   'keep still'.

Buon Natale

Yes! Oil Is Us.

Calls on the landlines can be irritating; rooms to cover, stairs to dash up or down, unheated bits to fly through.  Not this time.  The fattore from Florence was gathering in supplies of good oil to meet international orders, even small quantities. 

Yes! We have oil.  Yes! It's the best.  Yes! we can take some for sampling.  Price to be negotiated - well, it might be upwards, how desperate are they to have arrived at Monculi?

Impressive

Depending which windows we look from there is a view of just about every rooftop in the village.  Not one has lost its mantle of snow.  Even the houses with skylights have insulation so effective the skylights are still snow-covered.

This is the result, undoubtedly, of the European Union funded availability of grants for housing insulation.  When I came here with the New Dawning to renovate what had been discarded so long ago - other times and another country - snow would have been sliding off every roof, threatening passers-by.  The Comune served me with a notice to immediately repair all gutters giving onto the pubic street (seeing as I was here and they could at last get hold of somebody responsible).  Now it would not matter if there were none at all, until the thaw comes.  Every last degree of heat is inside the buildings.  The News has shown the gorgeousness of various cities under snow, but there is no suggestion of a breakdown in power supplies.

I was unnerved by  the snow and ice-clearing yesterday morning. Luca with a giant squeezy bottle of pink  alcohol rather than men broadcasting salt before the shovellers and sweepers seemed unconcerned about potential inflammability.  Salt harms cars, so it seems alcohol is the de-icer of choice in Monculi.

Climate Change overwhelms Monculi

Snow has covered everything.  Deep snow and it's freezing cold.  This snow is more than settled - it's settled in.  It has also brought down a large branch from the pine tree doing duty as an olmo in the middle of the piazza.  Unfortunately my little red Lancia caught it.  Couldn't come down on the Landy, which would have shrugged it off.  It can't even be taken down the hill to be mended because it hasn't any chains. 

From the upstairs sala windows I can watch the cars skidding round the bends towards the city - chains are no exaggeration - so no festive outing to the last market before Christmas to load up with tinsel and toffee, pomegranates and pandoro and presents wrapped like works of art (the bookshop does particularly fine Bauhaus-style wraps, it must be the all those geometric forms dictating style).

I shall boil a fine piece of beef with some veal bones that Mr HG skated across to the butcher for earlier; carrots, celery, a red onion; make a maionese of hard-boiled eggs and chopped capers with the new oil.  There is pearl barley  I brought back from Poland in the store cupboard, and long leaves of tightly crinkled dark green cabbage, beet leaves, a big jar of those summer-bottled tomatoes, so resented then but so welcome now, thank you for all that hard bottling work, some of those white, fluffy potatoes -not the yellow, waxy small ones - and we'll have soup for a seige.

Good thing I dressed in my velveteen track suit this morning, with fluffy socks and one of those fleecy-lined undershirts from Brussels; I must have known I wasn't going across the doors even before I opened the shutters.  The light was all wrong, the bells were muffled, no footsteps on their way to Mass; open the window, unlatch, push, and it wasn't just the cold that took the breath away.  Miles and miles and miles of perfect white.

Avoiding Chilblains

Eco living is not going to suit everybody. Solar-powered heating, hypocaust style, is not for the cosy comfort seekers. What it gives, free (after the instalation costs are met) is a damp-free, virtually maintenance-free, environment. Turn up at the ecohouse on a blustery, grey November day after a week of similar weather and the house will have consumed what sunshine there has been and kept it indoors. But it isn't enough for our soft, centrally-heated selves.

I arrived with the bags of food, ahead of the breakfasting, newspaper reading, coffee drinking, well, I could manage a boiled egg to go with this toast, brigade down in the village. Anoraked-up everything was lovely as I lit the fire in the kitchen, swept up a fat and disgusting spider and threw it out to face its fate over the terracing, put on large pans of water to boil, and checked where the olives had been stored to make sure it had been thoroughly swept after the last round (we don't want trampled in olives on the treated floors do we). But when I sat down to well - have a sit down - I wondered if I would have liked to wake up and find wrap and slippers at these temperatures. Certainly there wasn't an icicles on the inside of the windows scenario (there had better not be with triple glazing and whatever gas lies between the sheets of glass), we could have made up the perfectly dry beds with perfectly dry linen and taken up residence forthwith. There was none of the get you by the throat icy grasp that used to greet us in the house in the village when we arrived for Easter and the building had been closed since the previous summer; it didn't matter how big the fires, how loaded the stoves, it was always days before a single intake of breath didn't chill the lungs. There were wooden frames with metal containers full of hot coals slung within them which had to be placed inside every bed for hours before people dared to slip between the sheets warmly clad in night clothes - not a phrase for nightie, but a full outfit, in brushed cotton with night undies under, and woolly, large socks. Mr HG used, as a child, to be sewn into a fresh vest after his bath. Anyway,

If we have to live the good life after meltdown it's going to be at lower temperatures than we enjoy. We need more clothes, all the time, and life has to be lived with zip, with energy, with keeping warm by keeping up effort and busyness around the house. I've been there before and just keeping clean and warm and healthy takes up a lot of effort. All those granny-level admonitions are probably true as well - draughts, taking off wet things, no bare feet.....

Woodcutter Next

The very last of the olives were milled at 10.30 this morning. The mills work round the clock and with the harvest in full swing it's best not to forsake a booked slot. Which is how you can find yourself driving a heavily laden Landie through the fog on deeply curvy roads. And when you get there everyone who hangs about offering to unload and tip the olives into the hoppers has gone to mass, so you have to haul the crates about yourself muttering unChristian remarks.

The very high yield of the previous lot seems to be a rogue; this lot was giving 18 kilos a quintal, so I put it down to dogs. You drive your vehicle onto the weighbridge. Then you empty its olives into the hoppers. Then you get reweighed with and without the crates in. Then they do sums. If a dog or two joins in during the weighing - they go in for a lot of tyre-sniffing - then you get dog diversion of totals. Happens all the time they say.

Still very fine yields though, particularly for a bad year.

At crack of dawn this morning, loading up, the groves looked very fine. All ploughed freshly, ready for the winter. If they are ploughed now it keeps down weeds, specially brambles, aerates the soil, allows winter rains to get well into the ground, and looks lovely with the autumn colours on the oakwoods as backdrop and that cared-for, groomed look in the fields of silver-green trees.

(Well, I didn't know why the ploughing had been done so immediately, but I know beautiful fields when I see them).

Now for the wood cutting. The woods are kept best by constant thinning and harvesting; bit like the hunters shooting the deer and the boar, only not so distressing. After that everything goes nice and quiet, which is best because frankly farming can be a bit archersish, as a day after day occupation.

Reactions to Sheep Stealing

Somebody has stripped four heavily laden olive trees and crept off into the mist.

How are we to react to this? Cross? Certainly. Surprised? On the whole. Care? Quite a lot. Confused emotional response? Yes.

I feel proprietary towards our olive trees; they have had years of cash and care lavished on them that could easily be spent on other ends that would not have been as socially inclusive - a lot of farming here is park-keeping to some extent, this is a highly constructed and maintained rural landscape that is, generally, socially not privately enjoyed. So taking the crop has something in common with scrawling graffiti on a restored palazzo - taking the trees, which happened to our neighbour this year and to us last year, is a step worse, like smashing windows and stealing roof tiles.

But is it stealing? Mr HG owns the land and the trees, we have paid for the labour and the fertiliser and the tractor, and done the waiting. Whoever wants some of our oil can come to the cantina and buy some. People are getting poorer though, and olive oil is a staple not a luxury foodstuff, yet its cost has risen astronomically while unemployment has advanced. They can see the olives hanging there while they are in enforced idleness and without wages. It's not scrumping, a bit of fruit or figs taken from trees by passing children, you need nets and ladders to pick a fully grown olive tree bare, and you need crates and a vehicle, and a mill to take the olives to. It's a bit like shoplifting perhaps. Is shoplifting stealing?

Our fellow pickers reacted as variously as we did and with much the same puzzlement. "Whoever did it must be very poor indeed poor things," Graziano remarked; all agreed it was quite a risky thing to do, which is why the trees chosen were down near the river, out of sight of the house. Others wondered if it was foreigners - not immigrants but, literally foreigners in Italy not understanding the rules about crops. But that was ruled out by the equipment needs and the milling. It's locals, but who?

Mills won't take really small quantities readily so either our olives were to be assimilated with someone elses's crop or someone had access to a mill. Everyone knows who has trees, who would be an unexpected possessor of a few trees worth of olives. Minds were being turned over, though not to me (being a foreigner myself).

Thank Goodness. Whatever would we do if we were told who did it?

Oil Like Ribena

The second milling is now in the cantine in the house in the village.

22.7 kilos a quintal. These are the olives from the great sweep of olive groves beneath the ecohouse: perfect exposure to sun, protection from prevailing colder winds, watered by the acquifers above them. Even so, that is a yield and a half.

One more milling to go, from the high fields, and from the great field reaching almost to the water meadows along the local river. The great field has the oldest trees, loaded this year with teeny tiny olives. These are the trees that the Foreman had wanted to dispose of, to completely replace. This time we will get 'ancient' oil. It was me who defended these beautiful old trees so I hope they don't blot my copybook.

In any case, next year all the olives must be milled together to produce the oil from various types of tree that marks a particular producer's oil. Next year will see the return of the real thing, if it doesn't see the return of the fly.

We Needed Ladders

The yield on the oil is 17 kilos a quintal. YES - 17 kgs.

And the oil is delicious. Not peppery and pretend-valued for it when actually peppery means picked too early: it is smooth, green as the eyes of a goddess, and just perfectly viscous.

They've been picking for a week - no, I found the strength of mind to declare olive-picking outside my remit - I cooked for the hungry-as-hunters. A strong Sydney-sider showing has made the finishing line next Tuesday. The second tranche (or whatever is the correct term) goes to the mill tomorrow, then one more on Wednesday morning.

The Foreman is beside himself; this is the result of years of faith and work. The olive groves were collapsed, ruined, abandoned, frozen by winter cold and burned by summer droughts. Overgrown by scrub oak, infested with brambles. But we, and it was me too in the early years, have coppiced and chopped and cleared and ploughed and organically fertilised and pruned and chatted to the trees until they have at last stopped sulking and dying.

People ask us for the oil. Have we enough yet to sell? Always noted for its quality it is coming back into repute, not least because in all the years of dosing the countryside with every chemical known to man (I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the local peasantry had used Agent Orange, so great is their hatred of their enemies in the olive cultivation field) our olive trees stood untouched or molested by man. There is a lot of fear of what was sprayed and poured onto the fields in the bad old days; the empty waters of the Arno are only now beginning to have wading birds, fish, skimming insects and even swimmers (hardy Germans and close to the source, admittedly). We used once to cross a field of violets to swim in the Arno, where the river bed had been paved with pietra serena and eels lived near the bridge. I wouldn't get in now, probably be cut off at the knees still, but it is getting better, although the wading birds are only risking one leg, I notice.

It's so exciting, all that work and ad un tratto as they say round here, it yields.

It yields, to be absolutely accurate, 16.977 kgs a quintal.

Olives 101

The olive picking is supposed to start tomorrow morning - first light sharp! Only it's been raining on and off for the last few days and wet olives are best stored on trees so the start picking date has become a movable feast.

Most people have had an appalling year and there are very few olives. (Don't even think of going to the reasons). Most people are probably planning to sit cosily indoors sorting their cupboards and switching their husbands to winter socks. My trees are olivishly laden with plump dark beads waiting to be unthreaded onto the nets. For once we are counter cyclical. Except that we have not summoned up the English forces to eat boar stewed in red wine, or just drink red wine, and get the olives into the mill. We thought we would go down like everyone else.

Oh well, I shall have to go to piazza Donatello and summon up zombie assistence. Or pay local pickers in euros for they are unimpressed by the views, the camaraderie, the chit chat and the evening fires, the wine or the stewed boar.

Don't you just hate the economics of farming - all so first year.

Cobwebs and the Tomato Cycle

One of our oldest friends farms in Zambia. I thought I had tomato problems but I have lifted this from a Zambian newspaper (he has, after all, cannibalised and republished a post on exit strategies), where he sets out at length tomatoes and the troubles they bring.

Tomato Song

There is an idea in some academic circles that markets are wiser than the people who play in them; that they find the “intrinsic” value of things; that they serve as the guidance mechanism for the economic rocket, leading us passengers to fantastically prosperous places. This idea, which is based upon oversimplified models of market workings, and which is propped up by a form of secular religious devotion, should have taken a fatal beating when the recession took hold. Many of the world’s markets had basically become bubbles, defined by the ever increasing need for new capital to pay off old capital and interest, technically known as a “Ponzi” condition. When the new capital was suddenly unforthcoming, the bubbles popped and recession ensued. But despite that experience and the abject dependence of the world economy upon government intervention for its survival, the notion that “market forces” rule OK seems to be making a comeback, in Zambia as elsewhere. It needs another beating up and I will give it my best shot. I am going to deal with one of the simplest and bubble-proof of markets: that for tomatoes in Zambia and its vicinity.

First off: how much does it cost to produce a tomato (perhaps this has some bearing on its intrinsic worth and its price)? You have to give me several bits of information to get an answer to this question of which “When is the tomato in question to be produced?” is the most important. Being perishable a tomato has to be produced close to the time it goes on the market (unless you add much cost with cold storage and ripening facilities and so on). The cost of growing a tomato, other things being equal, varies greatly across the average year. In the early-to-mid dry season its cost is low because there are few pests and diseases and generally plentiful and cheap irrigation water. As conditions get drier and hotter in the late dry season pest control and irrigation costs, including management costs go up. The cycle repeats in the rainy season, with the early period being pretty cheap and tolerant of poor management, but the latter part can be extremely difficult, with high humidity and consequent assaults by fungal and bacterial diseases.

So the first thing you must accept is that there is a seasonal cycle in cost of production even in the best of years, and therefore there tends to be a seasonal cycle in the price the consumer must pay at the end of the chain. This should not be problematic but in practice it is. When citizens wish to complain about their suffering they cite the changing prices of basic commodities: if tomatoes happen to be on the increase for seasonal reasons, then the increase in their price will be duly cited as evidence of government incompetence and cruelty. Indeed, there is a famous Zambian pop song – “Tomato Balunda” by the artiste called Twice – that does exactly that. When the price comes down again in line with the seasonal cycle, Twice does not cut a second song “Hooray for the price of tomatoes and our wise government”. So there is a political dimension even to the laws of nature; and at one point the UNIP government introduced price controls on the producer and retail prices of tomatoes to try, King Canute style, to stabilise them and stop all the singing. The result was disastrous. The Price Controller first set the producer price too low for the season and caused a severe shortage (which resulted in very high black market prices); he then adjusted the price upwards by too much and farmers started offloading surpluses on NAMBOARD which that organisation then doused in diesel to stop them being recycled.

In addition to regular seasonal changes there are climatic shocks, such as frosts or floods that wipe out crops. These of course add to the variability (and give more inspiration to musicians).

So far we have just been talking about cost of production. Is this the same thing as the price at the farm gate (given some allowance for profit)? Over the long term, on average, the price to the farmer and the cost of production are intimately related. But from day to day or month-to-month the producer price and the cost may diverge widely. There many devils dwell amongst the details. Every new vegetable grower quickly learns that there will be times when the price is way below cost (if indeed it is even worth marketing the crop) and there will be times when that the price is well above cost. These divergences are the result of good old supply and demand combined with imperfect knowledge.

Farmers do not have perfect information about what other farmers are doing or planning. It is easy for farmers to get into a situation, collectively, where too much is being harvested at one time (price drops) and too little at another (price rises). A particular model of production variability is “cobwebbing”. The price of tomatoes is high; lots of farmers are inspired to plant; four months later the tomatoes are ready for picking and there are too many of them; so the price drops; farmers are negative about the crop and their capacity is anyway tied up so they do not plant more tomatoes; four months later there are too few tomatoes again and the price rockets skywards; and so it goes on until Armageddon supervenes or until enough growers learn the basic rules of economics and go “countercyclical” – planting when prices are low and abstaining when they are high. You will sometimes hear cobwebbing described as the “pig cycle” because of a classical analysis applied to the pig industry in West Africa .

As a new tomato grower long ago I noticed – as all growers do – that the middlemen seem to make all the money. I would plant, irrigate, spray etc. and then sell a kilo at, say, 20 ngwee to some marketeers in Chilenje. They would promptly retail the same kilo at 40 or even 50 ngwee. I resolved to be the Henry Ford of the industry and provide affordable tomatoes to the masses. I went into partnership with an entrepreneurial wholesaler/retailer calling himself “Lord Dicks the Great A. C. D. Manda”, who had a stall in Chilenje market. One morning I lent him a Landrover and ton of tomatoes and off he drove. I remember it clearly: he was sporting a top hat and had the demeanour of the Cat in the Hat. He reappeared later in the day, as dejected as an undertaker whose client has miraculously woken up and absconded from his coffin, with a few broken planks from the tomato boxes and some nasty dents in the vehicle. What had transpired was as follows. He had set up his cheaper tomato enterprise and started selling well under the prevailing market price (say 30 ngwee on the example above). The market committee, which is those days was effectively the same thing as a branch of the ruling party UNIP, observed and discussed him for some time. They then lifted his table, his unsold tomatoes, himself – and the Landrover! – and tossed them all over the two metre wall surrounding the market. It took him some while – during which he survived by selling UNIP membership cards – before he was allowed back into the marketing business. I last heard of him when he was taken to court by a fellow tomato grower over an unpaid debt. Apparently the magistrate asked the grower: “How can you sue such a nice fellow? Don’t you have enough money already?”

After the Lord Dicks episode I made a more careful study of the retail side of the business and discovered a couple of things. First, all the markets in Lusaka (save Cha Cha Cha) worked as welfare societies for party members in good standing. Prices were accordingly fixed at a level where everyone could get a reasonable “welfare payment” and price cutting was forbidden. Second, given the steadfast refusal of Zambians to accept a weekly paid wage there was (and still is) a monthly cycle in customer liquidity; leading inevitably to a lot of business being done on credit, mid-month, for repayment at month end. And, with defaults, credit is expensive; and the last thing anyone wanted was Lord Dicks and I siphoning off the repayment stream around pay day.

I do not know of any actual tomato business that has “gone Ponzi”, at least for very long. But the Agriflora export horticulture company that took over one of my farms certainly did. At some stage it came to need ever increasing quantities of fresh finance to make up for the inability to clear outstanding accounts from its current income stream. As I have explained before, the incentives for both the client and the financier to “stick it out” rather than pull the plug are strong, and the bubble only burst when a reported US$30 million had been blown.

OK, so markets are pretty funny but they are cleverer than a certain Price Controller I could name – and probably better than any price controller you could imagine. But they are very far from perfect.

Finally, what is the intrinsic value of a tomato? There is no such thing, its value is what you can get for it. You may think there is some measurable quality – such as nutritional content that could serve as an objective measurement of value. But if you do the sums you find that the value of nutrients in a tomato is laughably low – you could pack more on to a pill the size of a Panadol using maize and soya flour for a small fraction of the price. And anyway, people prefer the low solids fruit (e.g. in my day “Moneymaker”) to the high solids (e.g. Roma). What about taste then? Any vegetable breeder will tell you that the punters do not care about taste: the most popular fruit these days are fibrous and taste of a close approximation to nothing. That leaves appearance then?

Yes, appearance it seems is what sells fresh produce. It must look symmetrical, rosy red, turgid and eminently graspable. If I were not a hard scientist I would allude to one Sigmund Freud whose basic thesis is that all attraction is made up of forms of sexual attraction. But I will have nothing to do with that Viennese voodoo man.

Boiling the Greens

Cauliflowers from the kitchen garden do not arrive in the pristine condition that they do from Waitrose. But I had washed them and inspected them, and washed them again with such care. So it seemed unfortunate in more than one way that there was a caterpillar lying, reasonably discreetly, among the florets dressed in tomato (wouldn't you guess?) and gratinee'd in parmesan and breadcrumbs, on Mr HG's plate. He hadn't noticed. Although he is also capable of eating a caterpillar out of sheer politeness (or hunger, the diet continues) and might have been planning to down it before I noticed.

I had blanched the cauliflowers first, plunged into boiling salted water to seal their colour and crispness before later cooking. Surely the same sealing effect would have been undergone by the caterpillar? So it wouldn't have leaked anything from caterpillar insides into the dish.

And then the full horror dawned. What is inside caterpillars? Butterflies. I had boiled a butterfly. Sob.

Oppression

A dead, vacuum-packed duck in one hand and  the latest vampire book in the other I walked through the village feeling put upon, and driven from my ecohouse retreat.

It's very startling to be summoned back from the American undead by a sepulchral voice saying,

"Signora."

Particularly when you have done your laps (still 21 degrees but it's getting close to being too cold) had a hot shower and are lying down in a deck chair with a glass of Campari and tonic. (I don't LIKE it with soda; I'd drink my lager with lime if I dared). At least I'd got out of my towel and into some clothes. My visitor had come to tell me 'per correttezza' (see fn) that at crack of dawn tomorrow the hunters would be opening the second front and killing everything that moved but mostly the boar. Watch it. It would all be over by 8.30 am, apart from removing the corpses.

Assured that Mr HG and I would be down in the village till lunchtime, I was left in peace to vampire gore, until.

"Signora."

Not again. What was this one planning to kill? Mistake. He was coming to tell me he was going to cut wood. All I needed. A woodcutter, on a Sunday, in the middle of a boar hunt. Despite the recession there can be no refusal of skilled working men. Would he need Mr HG? No the trees for the chop had been singled out. Did he know about the hunters? Sneer. By this time I had had enough, shut the house and stamped on the clutch all the way to the village, then stamped through with the dead duck. When I got to the house I found cloth of gold banners had been left to hang out of all the windows for the 'baroque masked figures' who had every intention of walking through this 'delightful medieoval and ancient centre', naturally accompanied by the very latest in Italian swimming pool music, until 2 o'clock in the morning - when they will all go straight up hill for the boar massacre, pausing only to arm themselves, and possibly remove their splendid clothes to be replaced by equally splendid war get up.

Mr HG had nipped out for a couple of fillet steaks, some oven chips, and a bowl of fruit. The salad will be tomato, naturally. How did he guess that duck a l'orange might lead to a hissy fit?

FN. Correttezza is right up there among impossible Italian words: go on, try. Every consonant should be clearly enunciated and that includes each one of the sounds in the doubles.

Over Fulfilment of the Plan

The tomato wars are over; the last red tide flowed to the door on Saturday. Fortunately Mr HG had hidden some of the crates still waiting consumption or bottling, as we were all out and failure to keep up with the flow would have been discovered. It was still a shocking sight to see them glowing with the promise of yet more work, (rather than glowing with promise of winter pastas cheered by summer plenty) but this lot really are it. Production norms have been over-fulfilled; there's going to have to be some better planning next year - like NO TOMATO OUTPUT.

The attempt to dry them - sun dried tomatoes so expensive in Waitrose should have been a free lunch - came to a sticky end. After all we had sun burning the skin off our backs and we had the beastly tomatoes. Admittedly just leaving them in the sun was more in hope and exhaustion than the application of scientific method, but I don't think the wasps were deserved for failure to find out how it's done. I can state how it's not done, anyway, now. Don't leave them in serried ranks in the sun and hope for the best. Nothing agricultural ever is that obvious. I expect they have to be dropped in boiling oil, fished out with the bare hands, skinned with a special skinning knife (the tomatoes not the hands) only available at feast day markets, threaded on a special, unidentifieable piece of vegetation like the inner stalk of the corn on the cob, blessed, and hung up somewhere inaccessible with special linen cloths to catch any drips.

The next inundation will be rape. Not the Sabine women variety, the nasty green and yellow cattle food that is regarded as fit for humans here. I've taken an executive decision to cart it down to the village garden and put it straight into the compost without the intervening stages of washing it, boiling it, and freezing it.

In Villeggiatura

Sauce for the Goose

People are determined to live in this landscape. Readers will know that piles of paperwork were needed to meet the requirements of the planning regulations under five separate headings to permit the reconstruction of the ecohouse and the recultivation of its land. And that was where there was a house and buildings and fields designated for the various local crops. Had been since 1629 - or whatever stood in 'planning regulations' place over all those centuries.

So everyone knows how beautiful it all is, but all of us want just our bit allowed. I opened the windows on the very top floor, turned to gaze at the untouched fields and hills and found that someone has built an open-sided barn. We all know what that means. It's like my tractor shed. Yes, there is a piano agricolo agreed with the local agricultural authorities. Yes it needed years of established cultivation, accounts, a real agricultural need for the agricultural building. No, of course it is to house equipment, store produce, shelter animals.

Shelter animals. Humans are animals. They need shelter even in the midst of such rural tranquility. So within five years the sheep will have all been eaten, the pigs ditto, the machines will be on a subterranean floor, and there will be a house.

And I haven't got a leg to stand on. Even as I type we are reinforcing the roof of the tractor shed to meet antiseismic regulation and, conveniently, rendering it strong enough to bear the weight of studio and terrace, looking across the glorious Arno plain to the mountains beyond Trasimeno. Oh well. There will be another building, tucked into the rebuilt vineyards (too low for decent olives there), and more people saying 'Gruss Gott' to us while hiking through our woods.

Cherry Ripe

Cherries are the local product. Every region (well, perhaps zone would be more accurate) has its speciality. Some ghastly, poverty-stricken disaster zones go on about acqua cotta - cooked water, gives a complete description - others go OTT with giant platters of boiled dead animals, but here we do cherries. We start out with pale gold and white cherries, small, slightly tart but infinitely Spring-like after the winter, move on to the red cherries that go into clafoutis as well as straight down your throat, and end gloriously with plump, black, juicy almost apple-sized mouthfuls.

Every cherry comes with its own in-built missile, ready for spitting at real and virtual foes. So I sit on the big terrace and spit cherry stones at passing Fascists. By the time they arrive two floors down to street level they have lost much of their force and go unnoticed, which probably is best as Fascists are not cowards, they are perfectly, indeed reliably, capable of swarming up the downpipes and making me drink oil where I sit.

The Rewards of Eco-Propriety

The solar panels excess hot water cooling device is up and running again. Andrea came yesterday, stripped off the cover, cleaned it all out thoroughly, topped up the levels, emptied the traps of unspeakable contents, set the pumps running, dumped in the chemicals, and said:

"Giovedi. With a bit of sun, 27 degrees."

Then he directed all the hot water being generated from the panels through the body of coolant and wished us a lovely summer. Tomorrow I shall be washing down the loungers and the umbrellas, looking out the bath sheets in bright colours, and trying on my cozzie.

Deep-fried Flowers

The courgettes are up and running wild again. But one of the few compensations is the flowers. Washed quickly in ice cold water, left to dry on a rack (in the shadow, sunlight will wilt them as it does us all).

Beat the pastella from one egg, its weight in fine white flour (fancy having to specify but there are wholewheaters out there ruining a great deal of cuisine), and enough good quality white beer to make a thick cream consistency.

Heat a mix of last year's olive oil and sunflower seed oil, which will permit a higher cooking temperature and preserve the house keeping account, then plunge the flowers into the mixture, drain and immediately into the hot (not burning, watch it) oil. Fish out, drain and place on plate with coarse paper for the fried flowers and pretty greenery at each end.

Salt lightly.

Eat. (Try to avoid gluttony).

The next course was tomato and mozzarella salad under basil, this year's oil, and a touch of s and p.

A cold white Fiume is good too.

(Drink rest of bottle of beer as afterthought).

Seeing is Believing

The predawn sky is very beautiful in early summer. Deepest blue, not quite black, and filled with stars that even the lights of the towns and villages set across the countryside cannot dim. Last night was cloudless and absolutely still: the house is on a hilltop so no wind at all is unusual enough to have woken me.

'I'll just go and look at it all from the big terrace' I thought, and set off from bed, opening and closing doors quietly. Passing through the salotto I glanced from the window (we don't usually close the shutters on the second floor in fine weather) and stopped dead.

An enormous white/blue light with two smaller but even more intense lights, side by side beneath it, was shining lowish on the horizon, to the east of the village. I stared and stared, then opened the window in case the glass was doing something odd with the light from a particularly bright morning star. It stayed the same.

So I went on through the kitchen and the dining room, unbarred the terrace door and went outside. From the far end of the terrace you can see further round behind the church to the north and east. There was another one! Just as bright, not doing much. So neither did I. Just stared at them for some minutes, comparing them with other things in the sky. They didn't look like anything else.

What is the etiquette of these occasions? Wake the house? At that moment the church struck 4.30. In the end I went back to bed. They'd gone when I woke at quarter to seven, or become invisible in the full daylight.

Update:

I did look the last two evenings. No sign of the bright whatever they weres. It's overcast this evening so I wouldn't have looked again. When I mention it to people they don't believe me. I don't mind, but I do wonder how many oddities are not mentioned for fear of the smiles and then glances at the wine rack I've had. If we don't say things, no matter how outlandish, they will not be part of our understanding.

Distance and Indifference

Every now and then there is a population clear out. A cluster of the very old just give up, all together. The death bells ring day after day at 7 o'clock in the morning - not a good start to the day - and they have been doing it since the beginning of the weekend this time.

I look at the notices pasted up across the Borgo but recognise no names. The village has become too big, almost a town now, and names are not even local. So instead of feeling sorry that so and so is now in the camposanto, I catch myself feeling irritated that there is so much noise so early.

It doesn't toll for thee. Don't send out to know. You won't care and it makes me worry that I should.

Dinner

That's it! Chianina is beyond me. What does one do when the ultimate prized and offered meal is giant slabs of lovely white ox? They are beautiful, dainty feet carrying heavy but graceful bodies, manes and tails braided with scarlet ribbon, and flowers on high days and holidays.

When we were to be married Mr HG gave me a pair of buoi di razza chianina. To be honest my father-in-law to be was much more impressed than I was, but I did think them very lovely.

They used to be seen ploughing, in the farthest reaches of Toscana, though now they are just bred for eating. But not by me. Never again. This is not just touchy-feeliness.

Have you any idea how much chianti you have to drink to swallow such a steak?

Passing Examination

The first case of swine fever has been notified in Tuscany. A man recently returned from Mexico was taken into hospital in Massa and treated for the dreaded lurgy.

In an interview this evening on the Eight O'clock News the professore di malattie infettive awarded him the mark 'piu che sufficiente' for his recovery.

Bravo!

Memorials and Propaganda

There was a Mass for the Dead on 25 April, and then people walked to the memorial on the road to the next village and remembered the 14 people who were killed there in 1944. Every village along the Lines that criss-crossed the Peninsula as the Allies advanced from the south has its memorial. Some are to entire villages massacred. Most are for fewer victims, reprisals carried out as fronts moved back and forth leaving desperate pockets of troops fighting, cut off from their orderly retreat or advance.

In our village an English soldier entered the grocers and found himself face to face with enemy troops and promptly shot one of them. Then a truckload of soldiers sent to investigate was ambushed by the partisans on a hillside nearby. The rastrellamento began at dawn. Some of the victims were on their way to work at first light, others were taken from their houses, pointed out by locals accompanying the soldiers.

Twelve were taken. Much later in the day a small boy was heard telling his grandmother he had seen who was pointing out the victims. She shushed him too late and they were both taken to join the others.

Later, when the Front had passed on towards Florence, the villagers took some of those who had given up victims into the Piazza for their retribution. My father-in-law was in the house, recovering from the Russian Front, and went out to end the dreadful scene. He said that there has to be an end, before we are all drawn into barbarity. Even now there is gratitude that he did stop the killing that day in the Piazza, and at least for this village, reconciliation started there and then.

Religion has the rituals to remember those lost without reigniting rancour and revenge. But apart from a religious rite in remembrance each anniversary, perhaps it is time to stop using sad memorials for political purposes.

Lost in the House

I can't find bits of the plough. Not the heavenly body, the one that's dragged behind the tractor. It's impossible, you might think, to lose large, bright blue metal blades with curly edges (more than a dozen of them) but I've searched the limonaia (confidently, surprised not to find them), the cantina-cantina (nervously, the c-c is a kind of glory hole filled with everything that cannot be thrown away because either it is in a sealed box and the label has fallen off, or it's useful in a not-currently sort of way but were it to come back it would be irreplaceable, or it's a huge lump of wood of enormous value that's been there for centuries and one day will be cut into planks and turned into furniture without price but no-one has the time at the moment. The cantina-cantina is also home to many creatures that snuffle, rustle, stalk about, have googly eyes, live in webs that brush across my hair or legs, and has sacks of unknown contents. And huge, wooden wine vats resting on stone plinths with dark spaces under.) Am I the only woman frightened of bits of her own house?

I have searched the cantina-ingresso, a rather grand space with polished cotto and polished beams but where things tend to get dumped on wet nights 'to be put away later'. Huh. The cantina-ingresso is also haunted so that's a bit of a nervy place too. Mostly everyone comes in and out of the old main door which precipitates you straight up the stairs to the first right-angled defensive bend (or catches you as you precipitate down as happened to Mr HG last summer. Yes thank you, much better.)

The men say the bits are not in the tractor shed - still standing despite the best efforts of the envious to have it down, the Forestale are on my side - and if they say no then it's no, the tractor shed is a model of orderly work space and hung up tools, and vehicles and trailers.

There remains the little house, which is just that, leaning against the back of the main building where some of the braccianti, the landless labourers, used to be. I want to pull it down but as it is effectively planning permission for building in the historic centre, it has to stay. I'm not going in there, the place gives me the creeps. And if the plough bits are in there then whoever put them there had better remember and own up.

If any one of consanguinity, affinity, or spiritual relationship, or any other link with here whatsoever (to borrow a phrase) knows where the bits are, speak now.

Short Back and Sides

The garden is full of light and the trees are wondering what hit them. They look worryingly bare, lopped, but I suppose the men knew what they were doing. There is a side to people who work the land and plants and crops. They have a capacity for resentment at all the hard labour I think. So every now and then they take a swipe at their life's work which is personal and over-enthusiastic.

Don't we all. In the days when a typescript was a physical object it was wiser to have a copy made before editing the text. An unexpected outburst of revolt over usage, punctuation, argument, or persistent misspelling could lead to a chapter's worth of savage perfection being imposed - and then it would all have to be retyped when, tranquility of mind restored the following day, or even after lunch, perfection had to be toned down to pedestrian competence and polite suggestions for recasting. Not least because really high quality upgrading might have led the author to demand uniformity of such standards for all the hundreds of pages. Now you can just click on undo. And make do with a lesser text but a quieter life.

They will look at those trees on the way to Mass next Sunday and feel a bit guilty. There's no undo on a tree.

Flying In

One doesn't make a summer, but their outrider has arrived, wheeling over the terrace. They're very late, I'd feared they might have met with a mishap or global warming.

Heads

"Would you like something absolutely free?"

Mr HG, "Well, how kind. Might it be.....?" hesitates.

Butcher, "It's a lamb's head. For Easter.'

"Now that is astonishingly kind. The brain, particularly, but the eyes too, have always been so sought after."

"I'll wrap it for you then."

"There is the problem of the Signora. Can I, I ask myself, put a lamb's head in the fridge?"

'Ears and everything." urged the butcher helpfully. "Or I could trim it a bit".

'Between you and me, almost nothing could be nicer. But you know how it is. No shocks when the fridge door is opened. I'm going to have to pass. The kitchen is not run as once it was."

"Just wanted to let you have it if you liked it. Severino, You?"

Honestly. If I had opened the fridge door this morning, all geared up to cook Easter day lunch, and found a little lamb's head, ears and everything, I'd have fainted clean away.

Cross

Standing on the big terrace I watched the Ape carrying a load of crosses round the piazza. One to the ironmongers, one for the headquarters of the blood donors, one for the butcher:

'But where shall I put it", he asked struggling to hold it upright as it was taller than him and quite robust.

"Put it where you like", snapped the ironmonger's daughter.

The butcher looked pained and, shouldering it manfully, disappeared into his shop. Perhaps he plans to put out a good display of Easter lamb, prosciuttos, and his delicious salamis and finocchionas he makes from his own pigs.

There's to be the Via Crucis tonight but that's no reason to miss a marketing opportunity in these hard times.

Awakening

Prince Philip, the tortoise formerly known as Lenin, is under the stone bench next to the church wall. Covered in mud and blinking slowly, he turned his head to take a look at me and took a bite out of the dandelion flowers dipped in rainwater I had rushed off to get for him.

He has grown.

No sign of Queen Elizabeth (formerly Rosa) yet, but she is fairly small and could be under the acanthus leaves in the wilderness bit. Actually, most of the garden is looking a bit wildernessy, blackened cactuses, lots of nipped branches on the shrubs, a fallen arch of honeysuckle. It's been a long, cold winter. All the citruses are still indoors.

Ready, Steady...

Boxes of intellectual goodies, other boxes of iron rations (but delicious with it), small pieces of furniture to make me particularly comfortable - very pretty little arts and crafts table, lamps, pictures etc., all the things you can't leave in an empty house - at the ready.

Boots for walking, wellies for mud, thick socks, warm clothes to lounge about in, all brushed cotton (or winceyette as once it was known) - at the ready.

New gardening gloves (when will I learn to wash the mud off before putting them aside?) This weekend would be the 2009 season's opening of the ecohouse.

It's snowing.

Quite possibly there could be wolves. Yes there could. Something has eaten all the lines of irises.



Iris-eating wolves

March

Still no sign of the tortoises but while working with the large digger at the ecohouse the road builder noticed something wriggle in the freshly disturbed ground. Being a kindly and gentle man with all the respect for other creatures hunters display he got down from his cab and found a tiny hare trembling in its destroyed home.

Knowing that its chances of survival were now very low, separation from the mother almost always leads to death although they are born fully formed with fur and eyes open, he put the tiny creature in his pocket and took it home to his wife.

"Put your hand in my pocket!" he told her.
"Stop it. It's lunch time. Give over.'
"Go on. There's a surprise"

So she did. The whole family is now engaged in bringing up baby. Feeding bottle, rota, artificial form built in the kitchen (outside the dogs would have it in no time). Hares are not supposed to be domestic creatures, they are unlike rabbits often kept as pets (I have quite large holes bitten out of a kelim covered in flowers the rabbits thought to test for tastiness), but this one is settled in happily and growing fast, recognises everybody but loves the road builder's wife the best.

We're invited round to meet it when it's a bit bigger. I'll get some pix.

Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita, Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

Gates to the ecohouse

La Ronda

Out looking for the tortoises I found a slaughtered pigeon at the bottom of the garden, next to the apse wall. It has taken this long for anyone else to venture into Guglielmo's domain.

Here he is on his last patrol.

Entitlement

Mr Berlusconi has announced that we are all right for those little adjustments to our living spaces we have all made while the various planning agencies that hold la Bella Italia (or it wouldn't be) so tightly under control were not looking. He has even stated that the regions can now permit up to 30% expansion of buildings within the local plan regulations. Most local plans are currently in a state of suspension as there are so many factors to be embodied. Our Comune's local plan has not yet materialised but when it does it will contain my tractor shed denounced to the authorities by the owners of the night club which, in turn, had been denounced to the authorities for change of use by a disturbed neighbour (those throbbing summer nights must have been hard to bear but he landed us all in retaliatory doodoo).

Anyway, not only have we now squeezed the tractor shed under the bar ( the authorities thought it most tastefully and discreetly done and only denouncable because of the lack of local plan) but can add 30%.

I thought an upper floor with large studio, curtain glass walls, gazing out across the upper Valdarno towards Siena and opening out onto a live-on verandah (which wouldn't count in the 30%), with separate kitchen and wet room. I could write my novel !

But 'Room with a View' and 'Where Angels Fear to Tread' have been taken. Blocked already.

Corruption and its Pitfalls

The question is, which was called in first: la Guardia di Finanza (with golden wings emblazoned on their caps and uniforms, and empowered by drachonian laws) or the Carabinieri (with red-stripes on their trousers, cloaks and cockaded tricorn hats, empowered by local knowledge). Both are armed.

The Comune is reeling under financial inspection of every nook and cranny. Who set it all going? And if the Carabinieri came in second, what did the Finanza find? Or were there two denuncias? And who has denounced whom, and was it openly or anonymously? It must be very serious to have got both lots going.

The allocation of four units of social housing to the ruling giunta's client base without reference to the housing list was but setting the match to the blue touchpaper. Unfortunately the giunta didn't retire quickly enough and the whole place is going up.

Monculi Towers and the Palazzo del Comune march shoulder to shoulder on the two sides of the Borgo; our windows look into their offices floor for floor (I have blinds and linen curtains deeply inset with aging lacy crochet-work that stops them looking right back.) We can hear every word in the summer and retire to the top floor to have scenes, the Towers being taller than the Comune, but it's winter and we can't hear properly.

The Giunta has run out of money to pay the employees, and is all ready charging top whack of permissable council tax. No credit of course because of the Crunch. Could the disgruntled losers among the client base have turned upon the hand that, up to now, feeds them? Has some whistle-blower's son/daughter/granny failed to be allocated one of the social housing units? More follows if sunny and warm on Monday.

Update

Overcast. Cold. All windows closed. Come back tomorrow.

Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are!

Here is Prince Philip (the tortoise formerly known as Lenin) last summer. Whereabouts currently unknown, though he's somewhere under the garden, and re-emergence is expected momentarily.

Lay-Offs Strike Monculi

The gold factories are beginning to lay-off workers. Half the village is sitting about at home irritating their wives and fidgeting about. The wives have cleaned everything inside and out and are now eyeing my establishment - long regarded as a centre of casual dusting and too much laughing going on.

There have been phone calls about the need for domestic staff. I do not want domestic staff. They bully me and make me clear out cupboards that are full of the past laid to quiet rest. They polish clock faces and ruin them. They make me look through piles of papers that have grown on handy surfaces and put them away or throw them away. They tell me terrible stories of the past, right back to the beginning of time. They are very kind to me because I am not Italian (though it isn't my fault and isn't as bad as being extra-comunitare). They wonder what I need all these books for.

They talk among themselves about cooking with butter and eating brussels sprouts, not to speak of Mr HG not having his socks switched to mezza stagione on 1 March. Or getting his own lunch (I cook the dinner, but we can't eat three courses twice a day).

They are out there while I polish and arrange and sweep stony stairs to deny them access. This recession has got to end or I will be taken over and italicised

Prosciutto

It may be the delicacy; it may come in various forms - dolce, nostrale; it may be hand-cut or wafer-thin from the machine; it may head the league of companatico (that which is to be eaten with bread), of salami, mortadella, soprassata, a quick rub-over with half an onion.

I write as I eat my merenda - prosciutto pannino with radicchio and a smear of soft cream cheese, glass of local red. But I write too as the figurative subaltern found (early in my mediterranean life) discreetly frying up a couple of slices of prosciutto, with tomatoes and lettuce at the ready, roll sliced open on the bread board.

What a waste of best back bacon.

Mimosa

Thank goodness winter is over. Mimosa now, tortoises soon.

Out of Place and Out of Time

The bridge that crosses the Borgo to the Comune has become a gibbet. Carnival figures, caged by cruel railings and anchored by hand and foot are torn by wind and rooks (and pigeons too but they are not so grand), their finery shredded, stripped, their hats and wigs askew. Unmasked they look so frightened, up there in the cold, exposed between the towers.

Lent has begun and still they stand, forced to continue their challenge through Ash Wednesday and on to who knows when. Perhaps the carnival organisers will send out a search and rescue mission soon for their creatures, before the forces of disorder are publicly overthrown.

They'd better have them down before Sunday or the priest will have a fit and I won't let them use the bridge next year.

Leaving Them To It

Collecting a repeat prescription at the doctor's surgery was a lesson in the effects of recession. As people have less disposable income they become more than ever determined to consume 'free' state provision of things like health services. A mob of aggressive mothers accompanied by suitably wailing infants surrounded the nurse. Taking a seat in the empty waiting room it was soon clear why there was near fisticuffs going on in the corridor. Sit in the waiting room and wait for ever.

'Might I make an enquiry on whether there is an envelope waiting for collection? '

Request refused by phalanx of health consuming, well, consumers.

Hat raised to harried nurse over seething peasantry. Two hours later the phone rings, heartfelt apologies - not at all, merely a repeat prescription, can be put in the post, happened to be passing and thought to collect it.

But even a year ago there was courtesy, recognition, reasonable acquiescence to the friendly and efficient conduct of the doctor's business. Rationing, even by time availability is reducing patients to competitors. And to the wholesale abandonment of the state health service by those whose presence made it formerly truly universal.

Update

Now the doctor has called (twice) although it isn't her fault, consulting times have been cut, ancillary staff have been cut, heads have rolled (no, actually, she didn't say the last). Arrangements have been made with the pharmacy for supplies to be collected without further prescription; yes, indeed. The pharmacist was the next port of call and handed over without a murmur. Memo: avoid falling down the stairs and doing your knee in (not to mention collar bone and shoulder, though those are better now). Medical services can no longer cope with civilised demand.

By God They Frighten Me

I shall die of cold out on the big terrace but the drums are not to be denied. In tights and doublet and hose, velvet snoods and beribboned, they swagger past - the drummers from ages past throbbing out the rhythms heard in every Tuscan city and town as they lead the alfieri. What is less obvious but just as scary is the whoomf, Whoomf, WHOOMF of the flags as they are furled and unwound, hurled into the air, thrown from on flag-bearer to another as if they are as light as the air they fly through. Getting womped by a flying flag could be a mortal blow.

I've never seen a modern military parade passing quite so close, but this lot exude testosterone and battle, up close and personal, like the paintings show death by head-cleft-in-two or lance-right-through-your-armour, or even trodden-on-by-passing-charger.

The carneval figures they lead, twice the height of humans, wholly masked and very beautiful, are not reassuring either. Representing the world turned upside down, time reversed, all categories disturbed, they bow silently to applauding spectators. I'm glad I'm up here. I wouldn't like them to turn their gaze on me.

Lent will restore order to the world - won't it?

Wining-Up

The Valdarno wine co-operative has been offering a third off - and even more on various wines. The Landie has just left to pick up as much as it can carry of Dovizio (white) and local chiantis, including some of the grander ones.

There is nothing like a month of being subjected to WC1 wine prices under the collapsed pound regime to realise the priority of cellar restocking when the iron is hot (so to speak).

We used to have vineyards but the Years of Abandonment led to their collapse and then the English made a fuss about wine lakes (what is the matter with them? What could be nicer than a lakeful of wine?), and we lost the right to grow more than a hectare's worth. Honestly it's preferable to put in the effort elsewhere, like at the keyboard, and benefit from other people's expertise and low prices. The trouble with the ecology movement is it tends to denigrate the worth of the division of labour.

A Perfect Gift

The gates are nearly finished. Before giving the impression that there is an 18th century-style enclosure going on around the ecohouse's land, these are the kind of gates that stand about in the middle of fields and woodland looking civilised and often beautiful but can be walked round as they are not attached to fences. You can see lots of examples in Ireland, as well as in Tuscany.

What they do is send a message: Welcome guest, is what they say. We don't want vehicles inside the inner area of the farm, though people and animals on foot are free to roam. The gates can close the road if we choose, though everyone is in a half-track (all right, four wheel drive) so roads are messages too: drive here, not anywhere.

The builder has made such a kind gesture, apart from the gate pillars themselves being a work of art, built from the worked stones that remained after the village house was restored. He has had a stone carved with the name of the farm and with Mr HG's initials in the corner, and incorporated it into the pillars. This is his gift, organised and secretly prepared, and delights us.

Everywhere on the ecohouse the initials of the earlier-generations owners are carved, together with the date of building works and restorations. The earliest we have found is 1629 - same intials of course; so it's lovely to have the current bearer's efforts recorded on the gateposts.

Dancing With Cars

'I'll nip down and put the cars inside the garden then. it was 11 they needed them off the streets by wasn't it?' Bright sunshine suggested no coat - it would only take a couple of minutes.

In the garden a long file of pots holding unidentifiable and apparently dead twigs had appeared on the paved area. Moved those to similarly exposed position - dead twigs are very susceptible to light and shadow, shelter and frost exposure. Find large gates have rooted themselves to the ground since last opened on both sides. Fetch hammer and wallop the fixing thing at the bottom. Get gates to move. Drive little red car into garden and park so snugly I have to crawl out through the passenger side where I discover I have run over tendrils of ground cover particularly beloved of Mr HG. Hastily snip away evidence and hide in compost bin.

Locate landrover behind a Mass-goer's gleamingly polished Audi but heroic manoeuvres with one of the widest turning circles in any vehicle short of a tank gets me free and into the piazza, where the only way into the garden is in reverse as the landie is now facing the wrong way and more Mass-goers have closed down the options.

Having been away for some weeks I must now greet and be welcomed back by everyone on their way to church in their Sunday best while I am coatless and dressed for drinking coffee and reading the papers while desultorily putting the lunch on (fortunately I had taken off my pinny). The cold is biting through as well. Everyone directs the reversing of the landrover up the narrow, deceptively straight when actually curving vicolo, and a small party gather in the garden to gesticulate instructions about the gate posts. They are all waiting for me to hit something (or I am paranoid, or both). Once inside the only way out is through the cantine as the vehicles are now blocking the way. Small party is led through the house and waved off to church. Back in the piazza I get the Panda and drive it up to the gates ready for an early departure tomorrow morning. It is immediately blocked in by yet more intent on communicating with the Almighty and each other.

Finally get back into the kitchen frozen to the marrow, arms aching from heaving on steering wheels and plant pots, after nearly an hour. What a way to spend Sunday morning. I should have gone to Mass.

Next to Godliness

The opening of a launderette in Monculi is to be marked on Saturday with drinks and nibbles. The launderette is not your usual but has only giant machines that can cope with duvets, curtains and other soft furnishings, and specialist machines for work clothes - Monculesi do not like to look other than clean and well turned out even in their overalls, but equally they do not like to have serious dirt going through their gleaming domestic machines.

Worryingly there is to be a special reparto (section) for washing dogs. Images of paws braced desperately against the glass and expressions more usually seen on the roller coaster at the Prater, during the final spin, are hard to brush from the mind.

Eating Well is Wrong

Every Monculenzi knows the blood pressure, sugar, triglyceride and every other measure of fellow citizens, as well as being able to recite their own as readily as the Catechism. All enjoy a remarkably high standard of living, given that the economy is supposed to be collapsing, bonds offered by the Italian government unsaleable, and Italy's imminent ejection from the Euro the source of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's salivating joy (goodness knows why he so has it in for Italy -he can't keep his mouth shut on when and how horribly we are all going to receive our just deserts).

So how are we to reconcile what is on offer with what we may permit ourselves to consume (pace Ambrose)? Pausing at the butchers to take a salami, 2 etti of finocchiona, and a healthy helping of prosciutto , other customers were noted being seized with desire. The butcher was particularly irritated by half the queue wanting to buy the counter and the other half quoting the local health centre's latest scores. Unfortunately the pairings tended to be by household.

We, as a household, were united. '...Eat or you will die...' was sung as a grace in my Butlin's holiday camp childhood. The experience of post war austerity before the Italian miracle has faded, it seems, from the general Italian conciousness, though not from our family's.

I did wonder just how much populations are harried by the health police these days.

Packaging Has Its Uses

When you buy a bottle of cognac, grappa or marc of any kind, do you expect to have to fight your way to the cork?

Hearing cries of denial from the kitchen I hurried from the salottino to find packets of chocolate, spirit measures in cheap stainless steel, and layers of resistant plastic wrapping being flung aside.

"I wanted a small brandy and they seal it away with all this ....dross."

"Well as you've broken past it, I'll have a small brandy too."

Cheerio!

La Discesa

The bank is offering a yearly interest rate of 1.85% on a sight deposit. Three months treasury bonds (BOT) yield 1.89% minus commissions. It's a no-brainer.

Should running be required, its down hill all the way to the Bank of Monculi di Sotto. I can be there in next to no time.

Here's Looking At You.

Nothing is more scary than your eyes going wrong. For the last few days we have been facing needles in the eyes type surgery - before, during, and after.

"Perfect" said the surgeon staring with bright lights into the portals to Mr HG's brain. So they've nailed back the retina and removed the weird bits. The minute we set foot in the village cars stopped, the eye was inspected, total support and good wishes were offered. People really matter and it's lovely when they know they do and act accordingly.

Only in Florence

Hanging up my coat and scarf before lunch at the local tavola calda, I was struck (sorry) by the neat row of hammers and chisels laid beneath the coat rack. Their artisan owners were inside downing pasta al ragu and beef stew before getting back to keeping the city in shape.

Hibernation

Every year there is the complete post Epiphany shutdown. Staggering under the weight of Christmas past and without a public holiday to bless themselves with the people retreat into a daily drudgery of work and indoor maintenance. It will be like this until the second half of February. Then, armed with freshly turped paint brushes, cans of white semi-gloss, rust remover, newly patched rubber boats, household items down-graded during winter clean-outs, there will be a mass migration to the seaside. The apartments will be rehabilitated, washed, painted, polished, readied. Giant lunches of seafood everything from pasta to pudding will be downed before very careful return trips are undertaken (white wine doesn't count, it isn't really alcoholic but the carabinieri have got picky recently). And then gardens will be dug over and planted up.

Then we all wait, consciences clear, for Primavera and la dolce vita coming round again.

What recession?

Taking Trouble Over Gas

No-one seems concerned by fears for their gas supply. The village is on mains gas that comes in part from Russia. But many have liquid gas tanks di riserva. We have at the eco-house (yes, it's cheating, but you try making coffee in the early morning pre-coffee state on anything but gas) and I wondered if it should be filled to the brim or just left till the lorry comes next time.

And coffee isn't essential - is it?

Empty

All the food is eaten. The fridge is respectably stocked with milk, juice, butter, some cold cuts for hunger twinges, and a couple of tubs of yoghurt. There is some salad in the crispy and a chilly bottle of white on the rack.

Honestly, it was a worry, roaring out into the room every time the door was opened, full of threatening notes about what must be eaten when. Mysterious packages of feet and necks, giblets (whatever they are specifically) and livers waiting to be rendered into cooking bases. All gone. All devoured, quaffed, munched, slurped.

I'm dining out for at least a month.

Looking to the Future

The Christmas tree has burst into full bloom. After all, why have a boring fir tree when there are camelias? This year it made it using another calendar, next year it will be kept in the warm for longer so that it can match our own.

Those gloomy groves of ecologically correct surviving Christmas fir trees will not mar the gardens of the eco-house. And long into the future descendants will sit in the camelia garden in all its flowering pink and white and crimson glory - and think of me.

On the Feast of the Epiphany

A Happy Christmas to all our Russian readers.

Toothiness

The Monculi dentist has done us proud. Despite the best efforts of the London dentist and those gods who strike down celebration and holiday by visiting non-life threatening but beastly conditions on revellers. And if it's not us, they go for the cat when the vet's away.

London teeth passed as in tip top condition, bank account depleted severely, it took only one day for things to start going bad. And bad on a bad day for recession-proof, holiday-making professional Italians. Our dentist, actually a German married into and settled here, he who offered Mr HG 'the final solution' on his teeth - in the mountains skiing. No substitute offered either, just keep on taking the tablets but they would provide a prescription for pure morphine if it got desperate. As the household is addicted to alcohol rather than other substances that was not a solution at all.

We called the Mr Teeth of Monculi. Yes he could come. Yes it would mean squeezing him in between appointments, if we would excuse the waiting. Waiting? Had he any idea what getting dental treatment is like in England?

All you need is courage in Italy. As there was no time it was going to be without anaesthetic which would have brought into play all sorts of unbreakable regulations, and took time. Out came the London filling, clean up the abscess, prescribed the antibiotics (dentists here are doctors too), pain stopped before nightfall. Careful chewing over Christmas and Boxing day but no misery. Then back in the chair, complicated manouevres with drains and roots removed. Back two days later for a permanent filling, all clear.

100 euros. Done and dusted. Over Christmas. Popping in for a check up before setting off next week. Wouldn't you?

Auguri!

Walking to the newsagent for the papers and then to the bar for a coffee is a progression of "auguri!"s at the moment. Yesterday an elderly chap auguried and then said, "wait there, back in a moment'', and re-entered his house. He came back with a discreet, bound fascicle, privately printed, of his poems.

Presenting them formally to Mr HG (whom he had known since birth) he said:

"I want you to have these. As you know I am self taught. After the Quinta (the school leaving certificate at the end of elementary school after five years of formal obligatory education), of course I went to work. But I have written poetry always."

No, they are not the poems of a William Blake; but in their existence they are a tribute to the human spirit and to the Italian education system. In the five brief years of morning school in which his Maestra had drummed reading, writing, calculation and as much history, geography and general Italian culture as could be fitted round the edges, four hours a day, six days a week, he had learned enough poetry by heart for declamation in class, and a grasp of the formal structures of his language, not to speak of a life long passion for words and their expressive capacities, to be a poet. And the confidence in a piece of work well turned out and meeting the criteria is not to be ignored. We may no longer commit to rhymes and feet, but those who do, commit, too, to a small perfection.