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.