The Life and Times of Monculi di Sopra

Keynes and National Socialism

2010-06-27T14:12:00.002+02:00

Recent fisticuffs over what Keynes meant, would have done, said, have raised past sins. When the Complete Works came out it was noted that in the Introduction to the German edition of the General Theory Keynes's expressed approbation of the Nazi economic proposals for dealing with the Slump - counter-cyclical spending, a raised degree of economic nationalism etc. - had been silently suppressed either by Richard Kahn or the nominal editor.

Which calls into question the worth of supporting present-day political viewpoints with sacred texts, and just how much those texts have been fiddled with.

Disbelief

2010-06-27T13:57:00.000+02:00

Awful silence in Monculi. "We deserved to be out," being muttered bravely, followed by the eerily unreal, "It's only a game, anyway."

Going about remarking "Forza Kiwis!" has been strongly advised against.

Ripeness Lost To Rain

2010-06-21T13:14:00.000+02:00

The heavens opened on Friday and remain so. Not camparis by the pool then, but lasagne al forno and the red. The fire has been lit for two evenings so it's also been bruschetta and grilled sausages on skewers with bay leaves in between (and more of the red).

Finishing Blood's A Rover has been aided by rivers of water pouring off every path and way through the woods, which is the only way over 600 pages of Ellroy inimitable prose style could have been downed (or drowned) as walks and outings are under drizabone and in wellies. Reading Ellroy does lead to disjointed conversational speech and hearing too.

A particularly posh conversation on the merits of various sherries became more surreal (after all, discussing sherry is not the norm, is it? Though norms are easily lost in walls of water advancing across the valleys) as provenance - which was OK-ish - moved on to a consideration of types of trees. Trees? Sherry? I'll down a glass of dry fino with the best but obviously there was more to it all for afficionados who even used plurals for the stuff. When talk of colour turned to blackness and visions of a kind of sherry stout tried to form, Ellroy interference with modes of communication had to be set aside.

"What are you all talking about? And why are you all suddenly so fogeyish about sherries? And how do you all know this stuff?"

"Cherries? Well this part of the world is famous for them. We were comparing the various sorts and flavours, and which we can still find - given the hail and difficulties with the downpours."

Oh.

Choice Cuts

2010-06-09T10:35:00.000+02:00

The removal of twenty four billion euros from Italian public expenditure has had no effect whatsoever in Monculi. Zilch. Everyone is out and about as usual, working gold, making clothes, gardening the countryside, entertaining paying guests in farms (agriturismo is a huge wealth creator) as far as the eye can see. And speaking of sea, everyone has spruced-up their mobile home or renovated their seaside flat/villa in time for the annual mass migration to the coast at the end of the school year.

They are also tending their tomatoes. We are to have four sorts this year, up from three last: large, ribbed salad; small, on-the-vine, salad and posh cookery, for those who can be bothered; smooth round, and smooth elongated (sort of soccer and football really) for bottling.

I am well on the way to bottling already - not the sterilising of the jars and lids, scrubbing out of giant brushed steel vats, checking-through of outdoor gas rings variety; more the familiar bottling of British political cowardice variety. My kitchen garden is very like the European Union: I supply land, seed (well, little plants), water, and the men grow what they want and ignore pleas for radishes, carrots, jerusalem artichokes, brussels sprouts, and potatoes. Not even spinach will they grow, they prefer rape.

My lovely apple tree (planted, nb, by an Australian) flourishes; all other proposals (other than the loving pruning and feeding of scattered, ancient figs) for fruit and nut trees have been nixed on the argument that the birds/deer/boar/scrumpers will get them.

Mr Cameron does not begin to grasp the mountain of immovable cultural obstruction he must climb. What was once grown here has not been forgotten, despite the half-century hiatus, and folk wisdom reigns over modern decision-taking. Meanwhile, as Prime Minister Berlusconi knows, no-one gives a hoot about so-called cuts. They aren't cuts, they're just using a different model for allocating resources.

Cultural Behaviour is Often Wrong For Political Health

2010-06-08T13:12:00.000+02:00

The aging of the political class in Italy is getting embarrassing. All of a sudden the entire lot of them are over seventy. (Well, they are completely worn-out and used-up, even if some might manage to squeeze under the class of 1940 bar). While keeping down the generations below is a national pastime - the socio-legal structure is given over to holding back the oncoming generational tide - the slippage into dotage is becoming marked again.

There has been some improvement, insofar as not actually gunning-down the under-forties and fifties is much practiced any more; and the two most impressive politicians of the centre-right and centre-left are both middle-aged women with lots of business and political experience, and lots of money (always such a blessing -lots of money). But the mano morta rests still on the Italian body politic.

The slow death of social democracy because of its contamination by infiltration from elderly communist, socialist and fascist personnel - what you might call the Former Party - is devastating for the achievement of quite basic aspects of social justice: land redistribution, access to capital, support through advanced intellectual and technical training, access to elites various, and must be interrupted.

We need rid of old authoritarian men.

And if we really insist on having them, then at least let's have Giulio Andreotti (who puts England's Peter Mandelson into withering context).

Tripe

2010-06-07T11:24:00.000+02:00

All this talk of the collapsing euro is tripe. Tripe was the standard word for an argument or thing without value, in my father's usage of the word. You'd be surprised how many aircraft are airborne tripe, how much German philosophy (borrowed from the library in English translation in pursuit of understanding 'what made them do it?') is tripe.

Disgusting tripe ended up in the kitchen boiler: The Grapes of Wrath got it; but that was nothing to The Red Room - a small misunderstanding had led me to Francoise Mallet-Joris instead of H.G.Wells - and its fate as unnatural disgusting tripe.

Here we see that the kitchen boiler is possibly the best place for all the tripe being printed in the Sunday papers about the end of the euro and European Union as we know it.

Travelling Sensibly

2010-06-07T10:49:00.000+02:00

People carrying lots of luggage on European flights are weird, so I was taken by this site.

After all, wherever you go there is all that is needed already there - other than your own clothes (and even those can be replaced in Germany. Well, Paris too but that's very expensive. Moscow was disappointing - no valenkis, despite all those Russian novels where people tramp through the snow with felted-up feet; they even denied they understood what I was talking about - though that's not unusual.)

So, while returning from London involves filling a case with ginger cake from Waitrose (which means arrriving with spare capacity in the first place) for every other European destination one small bag is enough.

The Knight Bus

2010-06-03T15:08:00.000+02:00

Leaving late from Rome and arriving only an hour later near London, the Knight Bus carries Mr HG this evening to a conflab on this'n'that tomorrow.

Costing only 11 euros it charges extra for amenities such as hot-water bottles, toothbrushes, and hot chocolate, not to mention large suitcases, and portmanteaux stuffed with entire lives and fear of flying.

Lots of Muggles resent flying Ryanair, they say it spoils the pleasures of travel. Well, that depends on what you want, with respect. If you want to get somewhere else reliably, fast, on or before time, and cheaply -

Go Knight Bus!

Russia Revisited

2010-06-03T12:19:00.000+02:00

The villages of the Don were portrayed in pen and ink sketches by my father-in-law, taken by their rural loveliness, as he led his small band of soldiers to disaster nearly seventy years ago. At least, unsually, he led them out again, most of them.

Now we see the President of Europe, the President of the European Commission and the Prime Minister of Russia (someone else is having a turn at being President of Russia at the moment) in Rostov-on-Don sorting out further relations between Europe and Russia more amicably.

Perhaps we too will soon be able to board a train and set off for Russia without a visa ( and without an artillery unit) wave from our sleeper car at Monculi, glowering on its hill in its long outworn defences across the Giotto landscapes, as did my dear father-in-law from his troop train, and on through a Europe that must hold fast to the vision of no more fighting. Russia is as much part of Europe as it is part of the East and, indeed, part of the Mediterranean.

Big, Russia is, as Field Marshall Montgomery noted. And not an enemy, as perhaps he didn't.

Forza Ireland!

2010-06-02T18:34:00.000+02:00

The Irish aid ship Rachel Corrie continues on course to break the Gaza blockade. The Prime Minister of Ireland has called upon neighbouring powers to allow the aid ship free passage.

Italian citizens dragged from other aid ships by piratical state action in international waters and falsely imprisoned are demanding to be charged with any known offence under law.

Italian television and media continues to decry the behaviour of rogue elements of the state of Israel in their assault upon the lives of others.

Australian journalist Paul McGeough (56), an Irish-born journalist and chief correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, who has reported from the Middle East for two decades, is among those held in a detention camp in the southern Israeli city of Be’er Sheva.

Republic Day

2010-06-02T18:06:00.000+02:00

2 June is a great day here. Not surprising really - how many places have real live centaurs in their celebrations?

Not the kind of person you'd fancy meeting in a dark alley though

Muddy Waters

2010-06-01T09:58:00.001+02:00

The well-digging is going slowly because the ground is solid earth; if it were solid rock I expect it would be going slowly but with another set of explanations. The men are having to shore up the sides, or something. This is a whole new vocabulary so understanding of what is going on is one of those exercises in pragmatics where the listener has to make a real effort to read every possible sign and sound but the whole undertaking is limited by a profound lack of interest in the mechanics of what the communication is about, and the mechanics themselves. I find I don't care about wells.

Oil wells, Somerset, paintings of men being hauled in and out of by the hair by chaps in outrageous pink leggings, treacle, truth at bottom of, rising-up of emotions..., I turn away from them all when the word appears. Imagery for wells is too obvious, used too often. Wells are deeply boring.

Redistribution, Redistribution, Redistribution!

2010-05-29T12:03:00.000+02:00

Digging a well sounds so biblical, at least to me, from a place where water comes out of taps connected to the Water Board's supply system. And really I had thought the spring was enough. But if the ecohouse is to be truly and reliably self-sufficient then springs are not enough. In part it's technical and in part it's bureaucratic - obtaining permissions to drill and build is possible now but might not be as restrictions tighten round a scarce resource; and when there are lots of people the spring-fed water supply is too close to the edge for our water-consuming habits.

There used to be a family of fifteen living at the ecohouse when the farm was a full-time occupation and source of income; but they didn't have three bathrooms. They didn't have any bathrooms, or electricity, or heating other than the open fire in the central kitchen and the beasts stabled on the ground floor under the living quarters. We forget how close such deprivation lies, the family were there until 1953 and the great abandonment of the land lasted for twenty years, from the early 'fifties. It's all been put into reverse now and, as usual, it's the rich that gets the credit and the poor that gets the blame.

The poor get the flat-bound periferia of the towns and cities, not even the beautiful, historic centres, and that's it. The isolation, the silence, the views, the woods and pastures, the dawns and sunsets, the groves and gardens - all the compensations for the cold, the dark, the loneliness the deprivation, are taken by the owners cocooned by modern technology (and bathrooms.) The classes who kept these landscapes for centuries couldn't begin to afford them.

Everyone can walk and picnic through our woods; the hunters are welcome to cull the deer and boar (but not kill the birds and hare), keeping it functioning costs far more than it yields in output of wood and oil (and terrible tomatoes), but there remains an immense social and economic disjunction. Without the rather miserable modern world there cannot be the (rather miserable) modern populations.

It worries me: if anything goes wrong, even by narrow margins, individual opportunity to act effectively in straitened circumstances is minimal to non-existent. Notions of 'fairness' and 'aspiration' are irrelevant politico-economic categories except in the current settlement.

Something, and someone, has got to give.

Pink Always Precedes the Perfect Tan

2010-05-27T15:33:00.001+02:00

Pink! As the scaffolding came down, floor by floor, the colour of the palazzo emerged. There was no way of pretending - it was pink. Pink may be fine in Portofino but it is, shall we say, unusual, two hundred metres from Brunelleschi's dome.

The architect arrived in a hurry (or do I mean flurry?) Pink? We all looked at the palazzo and at him, in turns. Accusingly. A long explanation of the chemical interactions that take place between the various layers and composites of the intonaco and its colour was listened to with respect - and disbelief. Even the architect didn't believe the sound of his own voice; and the only thing holding the tongue of the representative of the Sovvrintendenza was the knowledge that he had accompanied the restorers to the colorists and approved the final layer of the building, himself, in person. It's an important piece of renaissance Florence streetscape, after all.

Blushes all round, from the palazzo outwards. Putting back the scaffolding would cost a fortune and insurrection from the neighbours, and from users of central Florence. And if what the architect said was correct, who knows what these complex chemical interactions of air, and layers of building-cover, and colour might produce at the next attempt. So we all gave our palazzo one last chance and a stern warning - turn glowing, apricot blushing cream by the day after tomorrow or .....or what? Else, we said firmly.

This morning the sun rose on an apricot confection of total loveliness - shutters coated in a very best quality dark chocolate with a dash of milk colour, walls glowing golden in the dawn. Phew.

Debt and its Nature

2010-05-25T23:02:00.002+02:00

The Eight O'Clock News has warned us all and reassured us all (this News is Prime Minister Berlusconi's personal News, you should understand):

we are going to have tens of billions of euros cut off public expenditure debt to meet the requirements of the eurozone but, mysteriously, there will be no reductions in services and pay-outs, or tax rises.

So that's all right then.

Of course there is the slack of tax evasion continuing to be taken up - as it has been for the last few years, during which we have all learned to be punctilious in keeping our bits of paper and handing them over to the accountant regularly (no-one in Italy is without an accountant, it's not the avoiding so much as the claiming and allowances that are so easy to lose track of); but equally, we have all now agreed that we don't want to be unable to show our innocence of ducking and diving. The ending of mass evasion alone is yielding most of what is needed - as Mr Berlusconi, himself a member of the masses, at least in his heart, knows. And then there is the rectitude of so many Italians who don't do debt: not personal debt on credit cards and for, or from, silly behaviour. They do private debt, very private debt over generations and extended family; but that sort of debt is really private and, as it glues society together, behaves differently and exists under wholly different rules from just the rules of economics.

So despite the ill-mannered acronyms and expressed derision of Anglo-Saxon journalists and financial commentators, Italy only has public debt, which can be readily covered if the government insists, which Dr Tremonti and Dr Draghi do, without much embarrassment and certainly without any of the bad behaviour displayed in Greece recently. And without the discomfort of the English and Americans who have covered themselves in all and every kind of debt. So we were probably told the truth this evening. But then, though perfectly capable if lying serves, the Prime Minister isn't a liar by nature, whatever else he may be.

And the bank at the bottom of the hill is ready and willing to lend - to the credit-worthy.

Keeping an Ear Out for The Door Bell

2010-05-24T21:20:00.000+02:00

Employment and unemployment are states with shifting boundaries here. This is because everybody has multiple jobs. There is the posto that carries insurance and employer and employee contributions to pension rights; then there is the self-employed job, usually agricultural or highly-skilled tradesman that carries another set of rights guaranteed (and paid for) from within a trade union protection set that is more like a medioeval guild; then there is the casual, but often fixed for years, service with a local firm or individual doing a relatively unskilled task; and finally there is the contribution to the household economy - self-build, gardening up to and including market gardening, deliveries locally, etc.

Frankly how they all manage to have dined and turn themselves out round about nine in the evening, bathed and dressed in fresh clothes, for a stroll to the bar, a game of cards, a chat, an ice cream a piece of skulduggery, is amazing. I think that they rely on what could be called recession-in-turn to manage to get everything done. No-one is ever sacked except for personal action that asks for it, it's just that attention shifts to another part of the individual and family undertakings as economic tides wash in and out.

The secret is to keep a close eye on the person whose skills you wish to command, let them know a touch in advance, make sure you have all the permissions, supplies, tools, seeds, clarity of thought lined up, and be ready to take up the offer of some hours of work when it comes. I've let it be known there are a couple of trees that died of the cold (sigh) to come down and be cleared away from the garden now I'm back. And then all the external woodwork on the ecohouse is due for a revarnish; it was a dreadful winter.

Early Start

2010-05-23T11:00:00.000+02:00

Peas, I wrote blearily, carrots, beetroots, mangetout, radishes, Brussels sprouts (surely they come later?) different sorts of lettuce, endive, gooseberries, red currants...

The phone had rung as I drank my tea and stared at the plain, and the city on its hill.

"Signora, buon giorno!" Sunday morning, quarter to eight! Right, this was not my call, and its real recipient could get out of bed and discuss tomatoes forthwith. But it turned out it was my call after all; if I wanted more variety in the vegetable garden up the hill a list was needed.

The mind goes completely blank when threatened with nothing but a tide of tomatoes unless a list is produced now. Trying to imagine a summer table all that came up was lettuce - absolutely pathetic. So this year it will be my fault - celery, peppers.... but they're off, gone in that uncomfily early morning way people do things here. By a more Godly hour I'll have thought of all sorts of things - spring onions, basil..

Slash and Burn

2010-04-20T11:30:00.000+02:00

The olives are pruned. They look very fine with their perfect shapes and neat plough furrows filling with the Spring grass and flowers. An executive decision was taken to burn the olive prunings. After all, there is a limit to how many can be waved and blessed in the processions around Easter.

Yes, it's been made the wrong thing to do, burning the olive branches and raking the ash around the trees. Tuscan slash and burn has triumphed though. What are they going to do - send in Cathy Ashton's army to fight the entire Mediterranean?

Queue Jumping in Monculi

2010-03-30T16:25:00.001+02:00

The dentist is obsequious. I'd be obsequious if I planned to inflict fear and pain on willing victims. Anyway, I walked through signorina Borri's olive groves, down to the appointment with doom, at the bottom of the hill, just like the bank. A filling efficiently consigned to target in one of the finest departments of dentristy in the UK had yielded to the finest of Tuscan meat. Chewed out, I suppose.

With Lillian Hellman's 'An Unfinished Woman ' jiggling in my hands (why did a small HG give me a book with such a title, jiggling about in my mind) I sit in the waiting room. Silence, apart from the musak, reigns; no screams, no urgent, barked orders. Perhaps it will be all right? Then a little old lady of the petit bourgeoisie enters. Nothing could direct the adrenaline better.

'O, Signora, thank Goodness it's you. I need to see the dentist. You know how it is. Cold March, I've come out without my scarf and gloves, though I have my umbrella, I was in such a rush. Do you find this a cold March? Mind you, I expect you are cared for, though of course you deserve to be, the wages being asked these days, and by people from who knows where. (By this time I am frozen wordless: with outrage that I am being queue-jumped; by the implication that I am the kind of person who condones this behaviour; by the implication that I have slaves; by the identification of her values with my own; by the fact that the door to the dentist is closing behind her and I am still in the waiting room with my book. I wish I could speak Italian like my aunties-in-law. Or at least display their calculating, extensive, local knowledge. She wouldn't have dared do it to one of them - the vengeance eaten cold would have been casual and deadly.

But my teeth are back in eating form (never try to eat with teeth out of action, I have lost pounds in the last few days); and it's a very interesting book; and books are as good a read in one place as in another.

I suppose.

No Blackout

2010-03-29T12:16:00.001+02:00

Earth Hour came and went without a flicker of conformity from the Comune or the Monculisti. The floodlights aimed at the church and next door buildings (ie us) flooded on, into rooms that never know darkness now unless the scuri are fastened tightly inside and the shutters closed without. Not a hope of walking through the place by moonlight, or looking from darkness out at the night sky, at least in the front of the building.

Looking from the back, the whole of the valley was lit up with towns and villages glowing on their hilltops and hillsides, roads lined orange; night was made day, as usual, from all the street lights in the village itself, just in case a danger might hide behind the newsagents, or lurk near the fountain.

People resent the dark; it's a loss of control, a return to a not very distant past when being in the dark meant poverty and over-simplicity of life-style. Or external threat.

The greenies are on a loser trying to bring the dark back.

Utterly Uteless

2010-03-13T18:56:00.000+01:00

The mechanical collapse of two of the runabouts (both over ten years' old so that's not a surprise, they've lived a hard life) and their exclusion in the near future from entry into any city as they passed into the categories condemned by greenery, meant buying a car.

It has to be with sufficient ground clearance to go off-road - or at least on to roads that are a bit off; it has to have carrying space for trees and wine casks and bits of furniture and thus be able to be swilled out with a hose, near enough. It has to drive quietly and fast enough along the motorway. And have the latest eurogreen number.

This is it, I thought. The perfect foil to my Driza-Bone. My Ute! I was foiled at the last hurdle (which, come to think of it, was also a requirement for fitting into this wonder vehicle).

It has to carry at least five people.

That would be a Tardis, I argued. Anything less than a Tardis and it's just Ute-discrimination. AND NO GENERAL MOTORS (unless Mandelson is handing them out free, which he is until the English elections).

But lots of car-makers offer Cubes that meet these requirements which is nice - I suppose. I'll trade in the Lanci for the Ute. Once I've got the dog.

New Mac

2010-03-02T12:27:00.001+01:00

Driza-bone day! Chocolate brown and smelling of waxed cloth, it has arrived. It had its first outing in Florence teamed up with choccie-brown suede flat boots with thick crepe soles, and longish black underskirt with soft grey cashmere over-dress, so that the skirt swirls a bit at the hem; then the drizy - I've got the shorter one as evidently you need to be quite strong to carry the full length around particularly when wet, and you have to tie it to your legs, so it would have been hard to manage it without a horse really.

Mr HG had received a hat (but has conceded it on a long-term loan) in the same stuff. It didn't actually rain, but I didn't actually want it to get wet, just be a day when I could wear it justifiably, which it was. Galloped into Cibreo for lunch and eyed everybody who got up to leave fiercely to ensure they were in their own coats.

Many women are wearing dear little embroidered damasky coats with contrasting panels of flowers let into the back, very tight and long-sleeved then flaring from waist to hem. But you could see the thought forming that a drizy is essential for the well-dressed latest.

For the Public Defender and the Prosecutor

2010-02-23T21:03:00.001+01:00

This isn't quite as good as stealing a path, or painting a chicken, discussed over dinner on the summer terrace, but going off piste in your ute must surely be a personal choice?

It’s not often health and safety law is big news – but it has been in Australia this month, as a result of the judgment of the High Court of Australia in the Kirk case.
Graeme Kirk was director of a company that owned a farm in New South Wales, but left the management to an experienced farmer, Graham Palmer. One day Mr. Palmer was transporting some steel on a off-road vehicle, when for no reason anyone can explain he drove the vehicle off the gravel farm road, and down a steep hill. The vehicle turned over – and Mr. Palmer was killed. As a result, WorkCover (the Australian equivalent of our Health and Safety Executive) prosecuted Graeme Kirk, who ended up being convicted under New South Wales’s Occupational Health and Safety Act 1983. Section 15(1) of that Act states that

Every employer shall ensure the health, safety and welfare at work of all the employer’s employees

while section 53 provides defences:

It shall be a defence to any proceedings against a person for an offence against this Act or the regulations for the person to prove that:
(a) it was not reasonably practicable for the person to comply with the provision of this Act or the regulations the breach of which constituted the offence, or
(b) the commission of the offence was due to causes over which the person had no control and against the happening of which it was impracticable for the person to make provision.

Stopping at this point, it’s difficult to see what any employer can do to stop an experienced worker from literally going off-piste and, in a moment of uncharacteristic madness, taking an unacceptable risk at work. What was Mr. Kirk supposed to do? How could any training or workplace rules have prevented the accident? Surely, you’d think, one of the other of the section 53 defences would have helped Mr. Kirk – but no.
The Industrial Court saw the section 15(1) duty as absolute in nature. An offence under that section was charged without any real identification of anything Mr. Kirk or his company could or should have done to prevent the accident – the charges skirted that issue by referring vaguely to inadequate training and an unsafe system of work, without saying what a safe system might have consisted of, or what training could have prevented the accident. Even though it was subject to the section 53 defences, viewing section 15(1) as absolute distorted the Industrial Court’s approach, as the High Court of Australia explains (para. 38)

A consequence of the matter proceeding to conviction on the charges as stated, absent the identification of measures the Kirk company should have taken, was that it was denied the opportunity to properly put a defence under s 53(a). Instead, the Kirk company was required to show why it was not reasonably practicable to eliminate possible risks associated with the use, or possible use, of the ATV. The guarantee against risk, seen as provided by s 15, was treated as continuing, despite a defence under s 53(a) being raised. The operation of that defence was treated as largely confined to an issue of reasonable foreseeability.

In practice, therefore, section 15(1) was applied as though it were absolute, so that an employer would be guilty of an offence almost automatically whenever an accident happened.
The High Court of Australia has now roundly criticised that approach, and has quashed Mr. Kirk’s conviction. Charges under section 15 must specify what risks the employer should have addressed and how he or she has failed to reduce or eliminate those risks. ABC Radio National interviewed Mr. Kirk earlier this month on its excellent show Counterpoint – you can read the transcript and may still be able to listen to the interview here.
The World Socialist Website sees this as a victory for capitalism at the expense of workers’ health and safety – but I disagree. I’m not the sort of person who shares the Fox view of law according to which employers should probably be released from all and any legal burdens. But I do think interpreting the legislation in such a way as to impose criminal liability on someone without any factual basis for holding them responsible for Mr. Palmer’s death was oppressive. Health and safety at work is a serious matter: it should not be brought into disrepute in this way, and laws aiming at securing it should not be used as as instruments of arbitrary oppression.
Nor do I think imposing absolute liability was good policy. If employers are faced with a reality in which no amount of sensibly-targeted expenditure on training and equipment can hold them safe from litigation, then it becomes economically irrational to invest in safety. Instead, you’d be better off buying insurance to enable you to meet legal bills and fines in case one of your workers is injured when something happens that you could never control. Absolute liability is the enemy of health and safety, in truth. Law and regulation ought to focus on practical precautions – on what employers can and should do now to reduce risk – not on the steamroller of perfect legalistic hindsight, a blunter and less effective way of trying to improve workplace standards.
Which is why I’m glad that a few years ago the UK fought and won in the European Court of Justice when the European Commission argued for an “absolute” interpretation of the equivalent EU health and safety legislation.

So anyone returning to the ecohouse, olive-picking assistant or no, had better watch out for the terracing. Once past the bar, you have to get to dinner without mishap, or it's no dinner!

Bless

2010-02-15T14:51:00.003+01:00

Adorned with a reproduction of the lovely fresco of the Annunciation taken from our house in the settecento (grrrr, the ancestors handed over a large part of the garden too, on which the 'new' church now stands; before that the village church was further down the hill and the room from which the fresco was moved was a dear little chapel, part of this building) the parish priest has sent out his leaflet on the dates and times when we should be at home to be blessed. The parish priest barely clears the bar for blessing, in my book.

Where I grew up, Hatfield, our parish priest had a DD from Rome plus various other minor Oxford-conferred degrees, and movable teeth. These last were watched by an enthralled congregation as, the tenor of his sermons being well above our heads, their positioning indicated how close we were to the resumption of Mass and, mutatis mutandis, Sunday dinner. We would reel home, our senses blurred by clouds of incense both intellectual and from the vigorously wielded thurible, eyes with dancing patterns of lace feet-deep on cottas and altar, and candles ranked like angels in burning rows.

Here they play guitars and have ragged singing in local dialect. Confession here would be an act of desecration to all the subtleties of sin learned (though not necessarily practised - a considerable lack of opportunity reigned in Hatfield to sin in the ways our parish priest was able to envisage) as an interested frequenter of Sunday School. Nope, this parish priest opens the Easter blessing batting with this:

"Every year, in preparation for Easter, we undertake Lent and think of the poverty of the human spirit, not always adequate to the demands of our life's journey [il cammino della vita is an obligatory hat tip to 'our cultural heritage, we all know our Dante', which we don't but who's checking? ed.]
We feel reassured, thinking our times of poverty long gone, never to return [this village has one of the highest per capita incomes in the country, ed.] as we enjoy our place among the world's richest countries (at least from published classifications) [a point must be given for suspicion of statistical data presentation there, ed.] and view from our plenty the miseries of the so-called Third World.

BUT THERE WILL BE NO BUTTER IN HELL! [all right, he didn't write exactly that, but he would have done if his literary excursions had extended beyond Dante to Joyce, ed. What he actually wrote was]:
"But we have woken up one of these mornings and found ourselves impoverished and alone!
Today being alone is a great burden for many; and when it is taken with economic uncertainty, which only yesterday was so reassuringly absent, it makes us feel really poor, as human beings. [mmmm, that's not quite the Christian message from the Hatfield perspective; being alone but compensated by being rich was not an objective as I recall. After all do we admire Cardinal Siri of Bologna with his ringing endorsement of the local view:

Homo sine pecunia, imago mortis. ed. ?]

"So, this time of the year is particularly suitable for rediscovering the measure of our real wealth, which no-one can take from us. Our dignity as children of God who partake in the resurrection of Christ. [now what kind of rallying cry is that to the multiculti hordes? And he presses on! ed.]

"We cannot walk alone and, though nothing can stop us illuminated by the light of God's word, the difficulties could provide paths other than those paths designed by human kind [does he mean the paths of Angels? ed.] to return to vigour, strength and hope for tireder and weaker members [or a hint at viagra? ed.]

With God's help we shall rise again!"

Gosh. Should we be at home on 12 March?

Diversity

2010-02-10T14:31:00.000+01:00

Would you be able to pop out into the village (or your local Waitrose) and buy a stick of sealing wax? The joys of shop diversity where brought home today along with half a dozen drinking eggs, a new salami, the dry kind not the wetter sort from the North, teeny-weeny lamb cutlets for deep frying like Mars Bars (the result of the slaughter of teeny-weeny male lambs, baaah), and 20 litres of white@a euro a litre with a convenient little tap on the front.

No kings but cabbages are piling up downstairs from up the hill.

(Disappointingly it's not that the entire population is flinging back the velvet sleeves of its doublets and mantles and stamping rolled parchments with rings and seals, they use it to double-secure the corks of wine bottles.)

Lunch in One Gulp

2010-02-05T20:41:00.001+01:00

'Lovely fire, Why are you adding more wood?"

"....few people... on way to conference in Siena.... passing by from Rome.....might call in."

"What time?"

"One-ish."

I set off to put clean towels in the bathrooms, and dust the more obviously undusted - Philip Pullman should have set the novels here, we have dust for universes unknown to man, which is where it all must be coming from.

"What should I get from the butcher?"

"Meat." This is the tight-lipped, growly bit of discovering that a salad with a prosciutto pannino isn't the menu for lunch, you understand.

Enthralled I unpack half a cow and most of a pig's insides variously stuffed into skins and casings.

"Did you tell him how many?"

"Oh yes. He said he'd be able to send over more if that seemed insufficient."

So I put a bowl of fresh pasta with Australian-bottled tomatoes and parmesan on the front end; laid out the fire in a bed of coals and the meat (plus my hands and face) on grids and griddles over it; boiled the latest greenery from up the hill (that, at least, was an uplift to the heart), and stood in front of the shelves where the tablecloths are contemplating the likely damage. People get carried away eating barbecued meat, even when it's indoors - no, particularly when it's indoors in the middle of winter. So it was a deep red, robustly woven linen, and large paper napkins. Well you try getting tomato sauce followed by barbie off cloth ones.

Noticing a touch of fluster, Mr HG picked up a stray umbrella queueing to go downstairs with one pair of pruning shears, and some bright green plant ties that had settled in on the fireplace, began refurling it correctly, and asked what else he could do to help. I eyed him as he neatly pleated the edges of the refurled umbrella:

"You go into your study and earn lots of money after you've popped that umbrella downstairs."

"Right - they've just rung to say they've left the motorway, but everything looks under control now."

Burned

2010-01-08T21:10:00.000+01:00

The 12 days may have passed but we are still coping with the enthusiastic stocking up for Christmas. This evening (a Friday - oh, the guilt) we are having roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Blithely I opened the oven door, oven glove on one hand, took out the pot of roasting carrots in ginger and caramel, and helped it onto the work surface by grasping the handle with the other, bare, hand.

Then I threw it across the kitchen. Hot? I didn't know such pain. Fortunately, after shoving poor hand under the cold tap till it all calmed down, I remembered where the anti-burn is - I know, I should keep it all in the first aid box but things move about ON THEIR OWN here.

God bless the St John's Ambulance and modern medicines. Hand and fingers are feeling stiff and glisten with unguent, but they were treated in time.

Serving dinner with one hand is a feat.

Covered in Icing Sugar

2010-01-02T18:29:00.001+01:00

Great generosity and hospitality has been shown over the holidays by friends and relations. So the annual ceremony of opening the Bauli only happened today. A Bauli is, as it says on the outside, il pandoro di Verona.

So I swathed-on a clean pinny, took a short vegetable knife in one hand and the Bauli in the other and started hacking into the bottom of the carton. Fail. I ended ripping it out with tooth and nail. Inside the Bauli sat smugly encased in see-through, the tightly sealed packet of icing sugar and the refastener coyly out of sight. But I just tipped the lot out onto the table, stood the B on its head and sliced open the inner wrapper. Hah. Pass.

I readied the cellophane, rolled down to half way, and opened the icing sugar packet - just the corner, of course, otherwise it comes out too fast. Pass.

Icing sugar tipped in, sides rolled up over Bauli, opened end of cellophane closed and seized tight. Shake.

The trouble with triumphant shaking is it's too violent. It only takes a little split, the slightest loss of total grip on the neck, and the icing sugar is out and all over. Fail. Again.

I will get it right in 2011 - or 2012 - or?

Buon Anno

2010-01-01T15:52:00.000+01:00

Happy New Year to you all, in all the lives you are leading now.

Le Vacanze

2009-12-31T16:04:00.000+01:00

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

2009-12-25T10:50:00.000+01:00

Yes! Oil Is Us.

2009-12-22T15:10:00.000+01:00

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

2009-12-20T14:57:00.001+01:00

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

2009-12-19T10:30:00.000+01:00

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

2009-11-29T21:32:00.003+01:00

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

2009-11-22T17:39:00.003+01:00

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

2009-11-18T11:14:00.002+01:00

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

2009-11-15T15:43:00.003+01:00

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

2009-11-14T20:46:00.003+01:00

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

2009-11-06T12:52:00.003+01:00

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

2009-09-21T21:12:00.003+02:00

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

2009-09-21T20:57:00.004+02:00

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

2009-09-12T19:54:00.005+02:00

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

2009-09-06T11:04:00.003+02:00

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

2009-07-03T13:39:00.002+02:00

Sauce for the Goose

2009-06-11T20:07:00.003+02:00

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

2009-06-10T14:59:00.003+02:00

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

2009-06-09T18:00:00.003+02:00

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

2009-05-26T20:41:00.002+02:00

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

2009-05-20T07:56:00.003+02:00

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

2009-05-19T00:53:00.003+02:00

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

2009-05-17T21:00:00.004+02:00

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

2009-05-02T20:02:00.002+02:00

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

2009-05-01T09:57:00.003+02:00

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

2009-04-24T14:22:00.004+02:00

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

2009-04-15T19:21:00.004+02:00

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

2009-04-15T14:54:00.002+02:00

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

2009-04-12T16:58:00.005+02:00

"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

2009-04-10T09:56:00.002+02:00

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

2009-04-05T10:33:00.002+02:00

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...

2009-03-20T13:32:00.005+01:00

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

2009-03-15T18:35:00.003+01:00

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,

2009-03-14T19:04:00.004+01:00

Gates to the ecohouse

La Ronda

2009-03-12T18:17:00.004+01:00

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

2009-03-12T17:37:00.003+01:00

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

2009-03-07T19:30:00.004+01:00

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!

2009-03-07T15:29:00.002+01:00

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

2009-03-05T17:56:00.003+01:00

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

2009-03-05T13:55:00.002+01:00

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

2009-03-01T12:39:00.001+01:00

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

Out of Place and Out of Time

2009-02-26T22:45:00.003+01:00

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

2009-02-24T16:23:00.004+01:00

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

2009-02-22T16:07:00.004+01:00

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

2009-02-21T13:02:00.003+01:00

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

2009-02-19T12:17:00.005+01:00

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

2009-02-15T10:51:00.002+01:00

'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

2009-01-28T19:30:00.004+01:00

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

2009-01-22T00:21:00.004+01:00

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

2009-01-17T12:16:00.003+01:00

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

2009-01-15T17:25:00.004+01:00

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.

2009-01-14T21:30:00.004+01:00

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

2009-01-14T17:26:00.002+01:00

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

2009-01-13T19:33:00.002+01:00

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

2009-01-08T10:52:00.004+01:00

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

2009-01-07T21:17:00.002+01:00

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

2009-01-07T21:04:00.003+01:00

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

2009-01-06T11:45:00.004+01:00

A Happy Christmas to all our Russian readers.

Toothiness

2009-01-05T12:00:00.003+01:00

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!

2009-01-02T11:54:00.003+01:00

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.

Bare-faced Cheek

2008-12-30T18:27:00.003+01:00

'While nudity is illegal in Australia except on designated beaches, [wow, nowhere else? ed.] local councils consider toplessness acceptable.' A Mr Nile now wants the legislation tightened so that it is clear. “The law... must say:

‘Exposure of women’s breasts on beaches will be prohibited’.” [well, that's leaving a lot of ambiguity as well, but we know, more or less, where he is coming from, ed.]

Though his proposal 'elicited howls of protest from sun-loving Sydneysiders, who have just begun their long summer holiday', Paul Gibson, a Labor party MP, claimed that topless women made people uncomfortable. “If you’re on the beach, do you want somebody with big knockers next to you when you’re there with the kids?” he asked. [Why not? ed.]

Sally Betts, the mayor responsible for Bondi, daringly has asserted that toplessness is not the same as nudity:

“Nude is when you’ve got no clothes on.”

Ms Betts, there you are wrong, and the entire history of art proves it. However, when you state that Sydney faces far worse social problems than bare breasts you have a world of trouble and economic pain on your side.

Here, we're all in Speedos all summer.

What Recession?

2008-12-29T18:27:00.003+01:00

The butcher tells me he has sold the entire Christmas stock and is eyeing up frisky little early lambs. The grocer is busier than this time last year. There are no sales until after the Befana on 6 January. The family business has no workers laid-off or on short time. And the wait for the small Mercedes runabout is three weeks.

The skiers return from Austria tonight and tomorrow, there is lots of snow and lots of people.

The factories are opening a few days later but only because the public holidays and weekends fell in such a way this year that the whole of Italy is doing a ponte regardless.

We nearly got lost on the way to lunch because so many new houses had gone up near our host's house in the country we couldn't recognise the village or the bar where you have to turn.

The money has turned up again to have decisions about what to do with it but bonds are really boring in the face of all this economic acivity. At least shares will provide a bit of excitement.

Down the Chimney

2008-12-27T12:00:00.002+01:00

So Father Christmas brought me:

a cabin-sized case, on wheels that move effortlessly in any direction (I haven't tried time yet but I'm sure they do that direction too), with pockets for exciting and precious things. There are going to be many outings in 2009.

Orwell's 'Keeping Our Little Corner Clean', which is a constant objective of Angels.

A cushion for my comfy chair embroidered with a pair of silver Angel's wings.

Blusher (perhaps I should more often?) against permanent pallor.

Softest angora, grey and black striped, long socks (cold strikes upwards from stone floors).

The Galactica dvds are half way through (levered off the sofa every few hours to eat but otherwise I am bug-eyed).

The ute (and dog), the Drizeabone, and the parrot are doubtless being brought by La Befana if I have been good all year, otherwise it's coal (which is not so bad after all in 2009).

Oh, and there is a jar of hand repair cream. Beastly olives.

Coming Soon... The Nativity

2008-12-24T15:17:00.004+01:00

This is one we made earlier.

Responsibilities

2008-12-22T16:47:00.003+01:00

Richest per capita (or nearly) in the region, the Comune has decreed we are too poor to put up Christmas decorations in the village. There is one, mean Nativity scene attached to the wall of the old post office. And I don't like it.

Every year the banging and crashing and roaring of hoists on lorries makes me cross as they festoon the house and its outcrops with lights and shooting stars. 'They'll wreck the intonaco' I moan, 'they have been making that racket for hours and they still haven't started in the church square.' I groan. Every year one of the local civic organisations (or even two or three) borrows a cantina to set up the manger and its wonderful figures. My absolute favourite was the Tennis Club with short-skirted angels in white, and Mary and Joseph with golden Slazenger haloes; even the ox and the ass carried raquets in their front hooves, like the Lamb of God.

Some years there is a tableau in the Piazza, with the shepherds carrying baa-ing lambs across their shoulders, fires burning outside the grocer and the ironmongers, and the three wise men (played by villagers from appropriately distant lands but settled here now) leading asses laden with gifts.

This year - nothing. I have been down to size up the entrance, usually closed with wooden doors, but suitably cavernous and with walls of enormous, hewn stone. I'm eyeing up the dollies, long put away, to represent the Christ Child, we've got the old mangers somewhere. Draperies? If the moths haven't got them, trunks full. Lemon trees often stand for the figures in the Nativity scene, and flowering staffs and things. I can do pomegranate trees too, and straw; can't do the animals but we can rig up a bit of mooing and baaing off stage with a suitable soundtrack.

They'll have to listen to English carols though.

Wood Chopping By the Book

2008-12-18T22:28:00.003+01:00

Leo came this evening to give the men's various details for the new work regime under health and safety regulations. It was a surprise. Concern that the willingness to work on the woods might dissipate with any increase in paperwork, had been expressed by him as well as felt by us.

But either rational acceptance of insurance provisions and safety information at work, or the recession, or a mixture of both, have prevailed. After Christmas they'll be cleaning the woods and cutting this year's allowance.

I cling to the hope that I won't be expected to say anything to them about how to wield a chainsaw.

Thurber Strikes Again

2008-12-16T16:23:00.003+01:00

I must stop idling through the internet as the rain pours down from battleship-grey skies, and complete shelving the books instead (Yes, I know it's ages but there are trillions, in modern measure, of them). In the meantime, do share this:

What's your head all bandaged up for?
I got hit with some tomatoes.
How could that bruise you up so bad?
These tomatoes were in a can.

I wonder what Miss Groby would have thought of that one.
I dream of my old English teacher occasionally. It seems that we are always in Sherwood Forest and that from far away I can hear Robin Hood winding his silver horn.
"Drat that man for making such a racket on his cornet!" cries Miss Groby. "He scared away a perfectly darling Container for the Thing Contained, a great, big, beautiful one. It leaped right back into its context when that man blew that cornet. It was the most wonderful Container for the Thing Contained I ever saw here in the Forest of Arden."
"This is Sherwood Forest," I say to her.
"That doesn't make any difference at all that I can see," she says to me.

Don't Throw Your Ferragamos

2008-12-16T10:09:00.005+01:00

Armed with my Berkies I have just been up to the stanzone vecchio (it being the biggest room in the house) to try shoe throwing. Watching the video, the accuracy and force of Mr al-Zeidi's shoes had surprised me. I can report that shoes make good missiles.

Heavy, a handy (or footy) size, with a good grip to be found under the arch of the foot; they stay on line but turn over and over as they go - and go they do. I was throwing from the pool table end and could hit the far wall with a bit of effort and practice.

Now we all know just how rude we can be with them, and that Sunday is shoe-throwing day, all I have to do is find a war criminal or chi ne fa le veci -a suitable representative .

The Lungarno Vespucci would be a spectacular site for a mass shoe-throwing; I've always hated those ugly, concrete bollards and the gun-toting gorillas with which the United States consulate defaces one of Florence's lovliest river views. That's a crime against humanity by itself.

Rain All Night and Today

2008-12-11T20:05:00.003+01:00

The Arno has returned to roaring along, fed by the renewed rain. In Florence there are watchers on the bridges; the river is at the primo livello di guardia.

There are watchers on the bridges much further up the river too. You should see it at Ponte alla Chiassa, both rivers are incredibly high.

Elf'n'Safety

2008-12-10T12:25:00.001+01:00

The concern about industrial and agricultural injuries among the workforce has been fed by some catastrophic accidents recently. Agricultural accidents have a tendency to catastrophe as the machinery and tools are designed to concentrate the use of force. As a result anyone employing labour, casual or otherwise, must now complete a full week's course on safety at work. The courses are being run by the Coldiretti.

I had them all insured, but the prospect of teaching my grandmother to suck eggs - be careful with your chainsaws now, and mind the tractor, and the logging chains. And imagine the specialist vocabulary.

I hope there isn't an exam. I can't face another exam., for the rest of my life. They don't let you take in a dictionary, not even in the German.

The Woodcutters and Little Red Riding Hood.

2008-12-08T22:11:00.003+01:00

After the olives comes the woodland. On Sunday it was decided which sections of the oak woods should be coppiced (I think that's the right word, I'm out on a bit of a limb, farming. Planes, now, that's another story).

The rules are: any tree under 10 years, go for it; trees older than 10 years up to 20 years, with a DIA (notice on official forms to the Forestale); specific permission required - 20 to 30 years; and over 30 years is a monument and cannot be touched.

Well, those are the rules. Strict instructions have been given to leave the big trees alone. Lesser trees are to be touched only if shadowing cultivated land . If in doubt call before the chainsaws bite. "Si, Signora", they smile.

We have Leo, the Fratelli Giorni (when available), Tonino, Tonino's son (currently in Cassa integrazione - don't ask, I'll have to post on that separately), and The Neapolitan (who is from Naples). Leo is doing his last year on the woodland, due to his knees.

Why do I think they aren't taking a blind bit of notice of me? Is it my cloak?