Bare-faced Cheek

'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?

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

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

This is one we made earlier.

Responsibilities

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

Guess Who

Sitting in a window embrasure (yes you can, very thick walls, some of the windows even have stone steps up to them) looking at the rain and desultorily reading the papers and popping into people's blogs is not how to pass the days. If the smallest peek of sun would appear...

I spent most of the afternoon reading Mussolini's speeches, which I found on line. (There is concern at my morbid interest in Mussolini and his contribution to our degraded political culture). Believe me, someone else has been at the mussolini too; I have bookmarked the choicer bits and will put them on Angels, defying any reader to identify correctly who is speaking.

Playing With Your Food

We went round the corner to have dinner last night, I hadn't got anything in - rain stopped play. And this is what we had:

A bottle of house white (icy cold) and a bottle of Novello (red).

La Carabazada, principesca crema rinascimentale di zucca gialla
(a crema is a soup smoothed with cream, the pumpkin was flavoured with renaissance spices, principesca you can guess)

Pasticcio di vitella di Cosimo 1 con le pesche e la salsa verde
(pasticcio is a mixture - in this case of finely ground young veal flavoured with ginger, cloves and I think it was allspice, the green sauce was hollandaise but with parsley and something I couldn't get, but exotic and aligned with the sweetness of the peaches)

Perine cotte ripiene di crema di marroni
(braised tiny pears stuffed with chestnut mousse in a darkly alcoholic sauce)

Taken aback by the grandeur of the menu (you should see the rest of what was on offer) in our local trattoria, we asked what was going on. All the centre of the city proper restaurants - not the pizza and fast food places - are cooking from the old recipe books at the moment. The tastes are astonishing: spiced rather than flavoured; constructs of balance, equivalence, opposition, congruity. So much more fun than emphasizing freshness and natural tastes of ingredients.

Devils, those old cooks were, playing cosmic games with the dinner.

1966

Travelling through the upper Valdarno by train today was worrying. The line crosses and recrosses the river though often it is invisible. Not today. The flood plains are filled, stands of trees are up to their armpits in water. The centre of the Arno is a roaring torrent of khaki-coloured mud and debris, topped with white foam and broken by rock outcrops. The gravel beds that usually lie empty all summer long, flocked by wading birds are covered by flows of water like the Rhine. Tributaries boil in from the hills.

And it rains and rains. Icy thunderstorms, one after another rolling in from the north. They say it will never happen again. They say that the dams are no longer expected both to generate electricity and control the water flow towards Florence.

If it eases off raining tomorrow I shall walk down to the Accaiuoli and look how much clearance there is under the Pontevecchio. I'm expecting quite a crowd.

Confession

The sky is a battleship grey; it is pouring with rain; it is freezing cold. I cannot believe we were so recently cavorting in the picture book landscape and eating our hearts out (oh yes we were, boar stew does nothing for the heart).

Wrapped in my florentine shawl (with holes, beastly moths), feet on the raised hearth in the big kitchen, fire loaded up, glass of something, and Peter Temple's Dead Point in hand, I have given up on the finer points of 17th century constitutional behaviour in England, and -

I am eating the pandoro!

Datura

This evening I found the datura sheltering in the dining room (the big terrace has become too cold and windswept) had burst into pink and golden bell-shaped flowers.

Call To Arms! Scendiamo in Piazza!

In piazza per salvare la campagna toscana simbolo del made in Italy!

La campagna toscana è la piu' sfruttata come simbolo del paesaggio in Italia e all'estero, che in ben nove casi su dieci non hanno però nulla a che fare con la realtà produttiva territoriale che rischia invece di scomparire per l'assenza di una politica agricola regionale adeguata a difendere e valorizzare le eccellenze presenti: dal vino all'olio, dalla carne per la fiorentina ai fiori, dagli allevamenti fino all'agriturismo.

In pericolo c'è un patrimonio imprenditoriale, gastronomico, ambientale e paesaggistico unico costruito nei secoli, che non ha nulla da invidiare alle bellezze artistiche storiche, senza il quale la Toscana e l'Italia non saranno piu' le stesse con un impatto incalcolabile sull'economia generale.

Per tutelare il vero Made in Tuscany ed evitare che la regione si trasformi in location cinematografica, senza alcun legame con l'agricoltura locale, migliaia di imprenditori agricoli della Coldiretti con centinaia di trattori scenderanno in piazza giovedì 27 novembre 2008 a Firenze con un corteo che partirà alle ore 9,30 dalla Fortezza da Basso e dopo aver sfilato per le strade del centro si concluderà a Piazza Santa Croce.

Si tratta della piu' grande manifestazione di agricoltori mai avvenuta nella storia della città e della Regione durante la quale sono previsti presidi di trattori in punti strategici della città, ma anche carri allegorici e la prima esposizioni di falsi prodotti che fanno della campagna toscana la piu' taroccata in Italia e nel mondo.

I'm sure you can all understand that. The exploitation of the centuries- old, constructed beauties of the Tuscan landscape by all and sundry must yield something to those of us who maintain and cherish it; oil, wine and other agricultural produce famed throughout the world is being falsified by inferior produce from elsewhere, and there must be a control on this; (I expect Prada isn't too keen on the fake handbags either, but that's for another day). While the festive floats and pairs of oxen parade through the historic centre, the tractors will take control of the choke points of the city (that'll be quite a sight on the city ringroads).

The march ends in piazza Santa Croce, so it's Cibreo for a late lunch.

Ambivalence: or Avanti Popolo alla Primavera di Bellezza

The Coldiretti (direct cultivators, effectively small farmers) called today. There are to be major demonstrations in regional capitals in favour of increased provision from the European Union and the Italian government for support to agriculture.

ABSOLUTELY!

We are to march through the centre of Florence, banners waving, drums beating like the Rites of Spring, for more money for the olive-picking classes. I do not know if we will be emptying tractor loads of agricultural waste on the steps of the Comune di Firenze in the piazza della Signoria, or lading the square with a kind of harvest festival. Or whether that should be the seat of regional government; indeed, I don't know where the seat of regional government is, but I'm sure my fellow marchers will take me there.

Nor am I sure what we will be singing as many of the independent yeomanry are well to the right of centre . Best if I brush up on Giovinezza as well as Bella Ciao this evening.

Now, what shall I wear?

Florence centre = tailleur, tights, heels and gloves (and that's just the men). Labourer in the fields and vineyards of Tuscany = boots, trousers and windproof jacket.

I wonder where I could get some tailored wellingtons.

Update

We're to take the tractors. Mine's a red Lamborghini. And the animals - lovely white chianini, in pairs, with their plaited manes and tails in red ribbons, tiny delicate feet hoofing it along the Calzaiuoli. Flocks of woolly sheep on the Lungarni.

Now I know what we shall sing:

'di doman non c’ è certezza. '

So we'd better have some money now.

Going to London for a Haircut

Dinner time, safely home. Mr HG had roasted peppers on the hot coals and dressed them in the new oil, and evil quantities of garlic; toasted some bread and rubbed it with salt and drenched it in same oil, and waved a pair of marinaded slices of best chianina at the fire.

£20 billion, I opened with, hopeful for my country.

Northern Rock, de-mutualised building society, close on £60 billion, he enunciated with admirable clarity considering what he was chewing at the time. Probably more, he swallowed.

VAT rates lowered, I offered.

Who pays IVA? (that's VAT in Italian).

We do?

Lots. But if we were offered a rate reduction can you see us fondling kittens and smiling at little ducklings and giving it to anyone else?

Taxing the rich!

Not again!

If you were advising the Minister of Finance..?

Always fun.

What would you do then?

Quadruple it. Make everyone else in the universe do it pro rata. Also, lots of what they say they'll do is outside the Union limits. Although that would be good, if all those limits were lifted. I gave a talk on that once at Munich. Perhaps I should shout. Remember? You went for a walk in the Englischer Garten with the man with a tombstone in his suitcase? You were quite upset.

So were you. So were the other guests. It was midnightish and he came from the Carpathians!

Anyway, how much DID you spend then?

Well, they kept saying there weren't any more as the factory had closed, the specialist shop was closed, the stock would be in next week, they didn't quite have the design I was looking for but something very close and it would be cheaper...

Nice hair .

Update

Mr HG vindicated. Munich talk finally bears fruit. Growth and Stability Pact suspended. Hah.

Branding

Finished! On this most beautiful of blue days the last olives were plucked and the containers are stacked, ready for the mill. Nets are combed of twigs and bits of bramble, holes mended, folded, and tied away till next Autumn.

It's all a bit boring actually. The idea they've all been at it since 1629 (in our case) says a lot for strength of mind. Our PR man has offered to design us labels (after all these years) and we are suggesting what our oil should have as its brand. I would like a lion with 'out of the strong came forth sweetness' but there might be a bit of a problem with the treacle sellers, it seems. So I've retired hurt. Well, it is golden and syrupy and comes in a tin.

Exchange Is No Robbery

Best in the world oil is going for eight euros fifty a litre. Which is less than the production costs. How did I get caught up in baby economics? We've got lots of oil but so has everyone else. Honestly - I can do much harder economics than this.

So if you want some glorious oil you will have to come and drink it here - for free - then at least I can put you all under an obligation. Anthropology strikes again.

Very Quiet In A Cloud

It is still astonishing to live surrounded by mountains - low mountains, almost high hills, but they are called mountains. They curve in a huge arc round the Arno valley, rising slowly from the river and its flood plain into the sand peaks and spikes, the cliffs and outcrops of former islands when all of the plain was an inland sea, then start being serious just after Monculi and all the other cities, towns and villages standing on the tallest of the islands.

As they climb the vegetation changes through tender, to temperate to tough, like a toytown version of a serious mountain region. The settlements do that too; go from the grandeur of Florence, the beauties of the hilltop cities with their churches and their palaces, and into pocket versions with only half a dozen stony streets and a couple of serious houses surrounded by former castle walls.

Only right now I am sitting inside a cloud and can't see a thing, not even the garden, and if I go onto the terrace will be wringing wet in seconds. Light the fire and read a book just like in London; even the light is that solid whitish grey. Oh well.

Finished

Not the harvesting - me. Monday 8am sharp the horny-handed sons of toil move in and get the crop down to t'mill by Wednesday evening. (The negotiated share-cropping rate this year is 6 kilos of oil for every 100k of olives picked.) Or else.

Or else it can stay on the trees.

Aching All Over

Last afternoon we loaded up the vehicles (nothing like a Landy Defender for swallowing a whale, but even the littlies did their part and turned round) and took the crop picked by the English squad to the mill. They are all back at their day jobs now but after the first shock of the sheer pain induced by agricultural labour, left still pausing to pick the odd olive off the trees lining the road. We cleared the home fields, the main road (which was christened Olive Drove), and down as far as the water-cooling system, covered for the winter.

Eating the various dishes of game the hunters donate the conversation turned to why some things are regarded as inedible. I couldn't cope with the tiny birds, skewered whole, roasted on a spit in front of the fire, and crunched down, heads, beaks, bones and all followed by spitting out the bits, so beloved of rustic Tuscan life. But the worst offering was from our PR man (who had displayed a remarkable fully-trained childhood working on farms and got the hang of olive picking in a trice, including the vacuous trance needed to keep at it for hours). He had a friend who specialised in cooking the bits of everything the rest of us don't feel happy about eating. Nervously dipping his spoon into a large pot of unnameable stew, he drew out an udder. "You've had those in your mouth before" remarked another exhausted worker, "Often. Did you eat it?"

The oil is simply magnificent. A bright, translucent, well - olive - green, very slightly peppery, as new oil should be. At a stroke the remnants of last year's pathetic crop (struck down by The Fly) has become cooking oil; overnight first cold pressing super virgin... is for chips.

The lower fields towards the village, and the top field that was once the vineyard alla francese but was converted to olives on the abandonment of trying to make a fine French wine from a pig's ear, await the fresh assault on Monday. A third down, two to go. It's usual to mill everything in one go, but olives cannot hang about; once picked they like to be crushed to give of their best. And stakhanovite work inputs were not enough in this year of plenty. Also, we couldn't resist finding out how it would be.

Next year there will have to be some serious investment in lorries and other machinery but for 2008 we returned, just once, to the 17th century.

Handcrafted

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

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

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

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

Perhaps It Will Rain

After walking the fields today (that's what it's called, according to the Archers, when you go and look at how things are getting on all over the farm, isn't it?) I am afraid.

All those trees, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, covered in green and black olives, ridiculously tall, and growing out of ploughed fields that are really hard to move about in, even in wellies, or hanging dangerously over terracing and rocky outcrops. Apart from that there has been a deliberate starting of the day an hour earlier. First light is now too early. And all these people set to tear fruit from branch for hours and hours and days and days. GULP.

Let Down Reveals Undiscovered Leadership Qualities

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

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

Slave driver is my middle name.

Gloved Up

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

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

The wild boar is marinading nicely.

Getting Ready for the Harvest

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

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

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

Burying Tortoises

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

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

Rien Ne Va Plus

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

Update

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

Pig Ignorant

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

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

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

When I Grow Up

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

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

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

Failing to Save the Panda

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

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

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

Cash On The Nail

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

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

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

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

A Leap In The Dark. Be Very Afraid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could you run an economy like that?

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

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

Bankruptcy

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

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

Magic and its Effects

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

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

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

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

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

A Word to the Wise

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

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

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

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

Cash Out

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

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

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

Lament

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

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

I wonder if parrots like early tomatoes?

Even in Tuscany the Australians Hold their Own

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

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

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

We Only Have One Life

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

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

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

Beds'R'Us

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

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

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

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

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

Our Lady's Bicycle Race

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

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

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

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

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

Crunch Time in Monculi

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

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

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

Rescuing the Money After Lunch

'What should we do?'

'I'll pop down to the bank after I've finished writing this and put things into government bonds'.

'Is that like Italian National Savings?'

'More or less. There are different bonds. I'll have a think and do it in a moment. Let me finish this reference or it won't get there in time. Italy's not much exposed to all this; mixture of backwardness and extremely conservative banking.'

Main door bangs. Sigh of relief, the world isn't going to collapse in Monculi.

Later

'What lovely flowers, I always like green flowers'
'Still your birthday for a few more days.'

'What did the bank say?'

'Ah. Knew there was something else to do. I'll go after lunch.'

Obviously the world as we know it is collapsing slowly. ND said it would. It can wait till after lunch.

Art Dies in Monculi

Champagne with breakfast, a deep blue windless day, and a 350 page picture book on Giacomo Balla to marvel through. He generated a long and remarkably informed discussion yesterday on whether artistic creativity had died in the last 30 years - nothing like a birthday to fuel sweeping statements and the revelation of secret but long-held opinions.

So who, in any artistic field, (Chomsky no, as philosophy was ruled as not being an art in the senses intended) has produced work that changed the way we understand and savour art and our world? And did any such person generate a genre?

No-one, was my argument. No writer, no poet, no painter, no sculptor. Film-making was set aside for later consideration as our best film knowers were not there. Lots of names were named, but all their major work fell outside (before) the 30-year cut off.

Any offers?

ps Even composers fell outside the cut off; performers were ruled interpreters and not creators.

Avanti Popolo

The Festa del paese in honour of Our Lady is celebrated for two days in October. There is mass, and a procession with Our Lady carried shoulder high under a golden canopy (the 1960s practice of roping her onto the back of a Lambretta has, sadly, fallen into abeyance), and the massed clarinets and drums of the village band bray through the streets. There is free pasta, free wine, free goodness knows what after hours, and this year there is a particular frisson.

Thanks to the generous donation of the use of one of the house empty cantinas the Democratic Party will be offering free membership cards. I have no particular liking for the Democratic Party but the delegation that came to ask for the use of the cantina was wholly made up of the comrades: members from time immemorial of the Communist Party of Italy.
It would have been like refusing room to the Beefeaters. And I much prefer the Communist Party of Italy to their modern day successors anyway.

Tomatoes

The tide is not receding. While I was in Russia the guests and younger HGs stepped into the breach and boiled, skinned, cooked in oil and garlic, bottled and froze until their fingers were red raw.

Still they come. And with every panful comes glasses and glasses of fresh tomato juice. How lucky it was Russia; I have just the thing for too much tomato juice. It is quite reasonable, too, to start drinking it down first thing in the morning. So strengthening for a day's stakhanovite struggle with the riches of the Earth. Particularly as the apricots failed this year after hail knocked off all the blossom. It isn't good to keep opening the freezer,so every time I put tomatoes in, I take the vodka out. Energy saving.

A Visit From the Gods

Left alone quite by chance yesterday evening, I finished my dinner, cleared up, and took a comfy chair (with a cushion) to enjoy the sweep of woods bathed in the silver of an enormous moon.

I was gazing at the stars and treetops when struck down by Panic. Whatever the brain does when it loses it, mine lost it. Even the cicadas were singing still (if they had done one of their unaccountable pauses it would have been a rout). Beginning with the faintest apprehension, the sensation that large forces were watching me swept across the terrace. Rationality hung on as German and other folk wood stuff waved. But the desire to get up, unlock the nearest door to the house and never, no never, look over my shoulder, prevailed.

So I did (open the door and go in quietly, I mean). Instantly the sensation ended - though I did shut all the shutters carefully. Funny things brains. And feelings. How accurate is our view that we have a commonality of interpretation of the world around us? Had there not been the support of so many accounts of Panic from the earliest times to the present day (as you say) I would wonder if a minor madness had seized me.

Birthday Boy

I cooked the venison fo Mr HG's birthday. What is the difference between that and boiling a bunny? It is supposed to be eaten with lentils. So I have had lentils for lunch. Never have I cooked anything accompanied by so powerful a desire to run away from the object of my ministrations.

In an attempt to take my mind off it all I read anything on the desk in the study: trade liberalisation, elimination of subsidies, privatisation, capital account convertibility and (especially) dis-inflation - I give up.

Visitor

Opening the bathroom door, I found the bathroom was occupied already. Usually such a faux pas is answered by an immediate retreat, and 'Sorry, sorry'. But I could not take my eyes off the person in the shower. Long legs, enormous eyes, vigorous multi flex body, and had there been wings who knows what might have happened as I gazed at the extra-terrestrial visitor. The only problem was the wearing of the skeleton on the outside.

So I was as taken aback as my disturbed guest. We agreed that the shower was one area of occupation, and the rest of the bathroom another.

The bathroom was empty the next morning and the plumber (hastily summoned) denies any experience of such a creature, nor that the 'sifoni' (?) would allow entrance to something from the underworld. But I know what I saw, and I hope never to see it again.

Penalty

It is so pleasing to see the roses have reflowered after their severe pruning by the deer. Commenting on this to Mr HG he remarked, "The irises planted along the wall are doing well too. By the way, there are a couple of haunches of venison in the freezer."

Gulp.

Fire, Fire!

The neighbour's woods have been fired. Fortunately the fire brigade was there promptly and closed off the area, called in the helicopters and had it out in next to no time. They stayed on for a further 8 hours though, to ensure it was well and truly out.

There are two questions being discussed in Monculi: who did it, and what should be done to him when he is caught. Invariably it is a he; indeed it is almost always a young, or very young, man. The land belongs to the Church, and we had noticed roughly woven crosses of twigs and small branches, dotted along the road and on the verges. In ancient times pilgrims walked the route above the marshes from tiny monastery to tiny monastery, and there is a long tradition of reverence for these woods. Might some boy have become distressed by the sale of plots of land, and dachas going up on property given to the Church in perpetuity? Was it just attention-seeking or the thrill of watching all the resources against an ecological disaster being mobilised instead of fainting with boredom in the long, still, hot afternoons?

Fire setting around here is unusual; the criminal associations of the reforestation grants and building permissions have never been able to assert themselves under local, watchful eyes. But as the absolute ban on any building continues, perhaps the line will not be held. There is a need for more understanding of family need for land for housing, and less ecological pretension to untouched woodlands and forest.

The firemen say this was a classic, lone fire setter with personal problems who will doubtless be given up by his relatives and acquaintance if they fail to control him and he does it again (this was the third fire). What is to be done with him ranged from execution through exile, institutionalisation, a beating, to cognitive therapy.

Exile appeals. He could have burnt the village to the ground.

Red and Juicy and Too Much of a Good Thing

Tomatoes are overtaking courgettes in the glut stakes, lettuce having been tamed by Grump Granny's soup recipe. Basil shivers in its pots as yet another tomato and something salad hits the table.

More attention, research, and investment needs to be devoted to (domestic)conservation and storage of foodstuffs. You can't just pile it up in mountains you know, despite EU mythology. And tinning them is outside my technology envelope.

Mrs Robinson

'I have bought myself a present.'

Presents are lovely always, even if not for me; I look eagerly inside large bag.

'Snorkel? Flippers? where are we going?'

'They are for the pool. It's painful to lift my face out of the water; and they are small, go-fast flippers.'

A Graduate figure flippers through the garden and out of sight.

Chop Chop

Chopping boards have become unbearably heavy to scrub and rinse and put up to drain. As I brush away at them and the little iron rings at one end suddenly pull out of the wood and cause multiple splash injury or threaten my feet, I think of all those health and safety warnings about using wooden boards.

These have seen long sevice, they are scarred and grooved in the culinary wars of goodness knows how long. Contemplating their lives in a kitchen that has been overrun by Germans, English, Americans, Partisans, then the same lot in a different order all over again, it is worrying that people ate anything and everything in those times.

So on Saturday there will be pristine, approved boards as used in the cleanest of environments. This lot can be hung up to dry, retired with honour above the kitchen dressers.

Those plastic boards weigh next to nothing too.

Slugfest

Radicchio - hard to spell but worse to prepare. Which is why it's every man's favourite salad. When it comes from the greengrocer it's tied neatly in bundles, stalks all at the same end and, with care, it can be washed without losing order, and is clean enough to suggest it has been washed quite a lot all ready. So it is just about bearable to spend ages slicing it finely, finely, dark green swirls falling into the bowl, mint and garlic crushed and added, touch of salt, olive oil, shake of wine vinegar and sit back to enjoy the complimenti.

When it arrives freshly torn from the bosom of the kitchen garden it is unbearable. By the time the mud is washed off the entire mess looks as if it has been knitted into a diabolic green mat. Soaked in mud splashes and with gloveless hands the stalk ends have to be lined up together like a bunch of flowers (short intermission while we all sing a little Carly Simon, ha, that'll get a tune on your brains).

Only then can the finely, finely chopping bit start but food preparation patience has long run out, so it's a bit rough and ready, and doesn't do the dark green swirly thing in the bowl, or soak up the oil, etc. Then there is the slug difficulty.

Chopping away, mud-splattered, fingers at risk, good will spent, the eye catches a foreign body already only half its original length; the other half, finely sliced, has joined the greenery in the bowl. This requires an executive decision; what is done is done, the whole half (so to speak) goes in the bin, the other cannot be discerned, hearts don't grieve.

This must be fresh from the garden diners cry, you can always tell; it just tastes so much better, completely different. And it is the best of salads. Are you not having any?

I don't like radicchio.

Found!

They were rewarded with half an apricot each; I could have hugged them had they not been tortoises of the Revolution. Just blinked at me with their back legs stretched out in the sun - typical revolutionaries.

Worried of Monculi

The tortoises, Lenin and Rosa, may have escaped. The double gates to the garden were found open at 4pm having been checked as closed when lunch was ready. Hosing the entire garden may have done wonders for the plants, but no furious tortoises dripped out of the undergrowth.

A close inspection of the piazza, under all the cars, and the nearest open garden yielded no trace of the Revolution. While I do not fear for their safety, I do fear for their souls. They will be Benedict and Maria in the blink of an eye. We must find them.

Sunny Upside

The water in the cooling (swimming) pool is registering 29 degrees. Soon we shall have to cover the solar panels for part of the day. Why would anyone other than a European Union tax farmer want to build windmills? There isn't any wind, I wish there were, but the Sun could power anything and everything. Why don't we hear about technological research and installation investment in solar energy?

Until a clear case for wind power is made over the ease and relatively unintrusive, silent gathering of power from the sun, it should be assumed that the proposal is dishonest, profiteering and tax-grubbing.

So we all know who is backing massive investment in wind power don't we.

Eco Victory in the Face of $150 a Barrel

Never had I expected the ecohouse to come into its own in the heat of summer. Fuel expenditure sits in the February part of our minds, fired by lots of electric light and gas-fired boilers heating the radiators, cooking our dinners and keeping us clean.

Wrong, wrong, wrong when the cost of oil hits $150. All showers are taken now up the hill. Meals are cooked on tiny piles of glowing oak ash rather than lazily compiled on the gas stove in the big kitchen in the village house. Greens of all varieties are used from the kitchen garden but if it doesn't grow there, then only potatoes and cherries are making it through the greengrocer barrier. People who have swum sun-warmed lengths all day crawl up to the terrace, eat anything put in front of them (and then the table cloth, followed by the table), courteously help with the washing up (using the free, boiling hot water) and stagger off to bed. No lights, nothing - the days are longer than their energy, the nights end before their dreams. Then it's back into the showers to ease the pressure on the system, and head first into the pool, with breaks on the terrace reading bad novels and sinking litres of local, ice cold, white, child-bottled in the cellars - shadowed coolness -one tipsy afternoon.

The village house is shut, too much gas and electricity required. Florence slumbers shuttered against the midsummer heat and desperate visitors sizzling on the stones. Acqua minerale quality water seeps into the new garden planted, too successfully, to attract fauna (I didn't mean wild boars to come and dig up the irises, nor bambis to dead-head the roses before they even emerged from bud).

So the entire external energy input comes from me cooking the meals and everyone helping, and the anti-mosquito fornellini burning the beasts in their tiny, well-deserved, mosquito hell.

It's a bit quiet on the rest of the world's news front.

Subsidiarity at Work

School over 10 days ago, many left at once for the seaside, battling through rain and braving windswept beaches. But they have their reward now as every evening the main news shows them all lounging and eating, and paddling in blue seas. Still, the village is deliciously deserted of small boys kicking footballs in stone canyons while we tell one another they're only playing, and our houses boom like Lambeg drums.

The hills are alive with courting couples and their attendant guardoni so we really have the place to ourselves in the evening. Whatever change the election of Mr Berlusconi may have brought, it hasn't reached here yet.

Softer

Hot, bitey, fighting off vicious new mosquitoes that make no sound, driving for two, bad cough from insisting the swimming pool could be inaugurated despite earlier grey, cold rain.

Why is Italy so cruel? So exaggerated in its being? After all, they invented sfumatura.

Weed

The garden jungled about in the first sunshine for absolutely ages. Lenin and Rosa (tortoises with doubts about their gender but none on their political affiliations) quick-stepped into the patch of sunlight that had escaped from the forest canopy. We turned to our Leader, who had received a swift gardening lesson from Mr HG in the last patch of sunlight some days ago. Mr HG being hors de combat after fighting the stairs with both hands tied behind his back needs gardening help. As the idea of anyone laying into the garden without his all-seeing eye makes him jumpy we were a quiet party.

But not for long: 'Is this a weed?' Two linguistic philosophers paused to consider the nature of weediness. ' That's a special kind of mint you're pulling out'. 'But it's in the little edging hedge. It's become a weed.'

Right. Everything in the wrong place should get it. We set to. It was not enough. Should nettles (soup, poultices) in neutral ground come out? It was ruled no because no-one was wearing gloves and these nettles must have glowed in the dark with frills on in their virulence.

As confidence grew, and does confidence grow quickly in the confident, plans were laid for lopping trees, training climbers over arches, swinging hammocks, planting favourite fruit and veg.

"What are you doing?" said a voice from the limonaia. We froze. "Bring me what you have weeded." We left Mr HG sorting his uprooted friends from his uprooted enemies to put on the lunch.

Bring Back Council Tax!

I did not vote for Berlusconi, Fini and Bossi. A combination of criminal, fascist and racist was unappealing. Most of the Italians did, though, and one of the first, noticeable changes is the abolition of ICI (council tax) on the main residence.

So we pay nothing in the village and nothing in the city (separate residence, and if Mr HG goes on needing his dinner cut up for him it will be effective as well as formal).

Surprisingly, this doesn't feel good, or right. It feels retrograde and unfair. A tax difficult to avoid even by Italians, masters of avoidance, that was more rather than less progressive - at least it reflected the square metres - has been dumped onto general taxation and, in the process, removed the diversion of berating the Comune and reduced the importance of electing its council.

Off Games for a Month

Carrying a number of bottles, some papers and my bag Mr HG missed his footing at the top of the last flight of stairs. So he arrived at the main door faster than usually and cracked his ribs, broke his collarbone and hurt his shoulder - stone stairs are unkinder than the carpeted ones.

"Ha" said the doctor as he was arranging him to go through the scanner at the local hospital, 'You're obviously from round here from your accent, so why aren't you a whiner?"

Pride.

Pool and Ping Pong

There's no contest, of course. Pool is much more 'us' than ping pong, more brain and sagacious decision-taking with g and t in hand, than all that instantaneous hand and eye and leaping about. Ping pong is not as weighty as pool of course; the pool table can't be taken up the hill for the summer, whereas a ping pong table....

Or badminton? That needs just the net and shuttlecocks light as feathers. But are we light as feathers, in the heat? Croquet is impossible, no lawn; lawns belong in another culture, another world with the rhododendrons and the rain. Water polo? That sounds just as vigorous as ping pong but cooler and the Australians could coach us all. Backgammon always leads to tears (and poverty, compound interest and backgammon have some essential but obscure identity). Ditto poker.

An obsessive, if short-lived, interest can make the vacation; something must be found. Perhaps we can all fall inappropriately in love.

Nipping Out for Some Mint

Is there any mint up here?

No, don't think so. I'll get it.

I'll go, says lovely visitor, where in the garden?

Upper garden, behind Our Lady (the church has a kitsch grotto containing the BVM of Lourdes looking onto the church square whose rear provides a sunny wall for everyday herbs in the garden).

Guest sets out. New potatoes finish cooking, still no mint. Pause lengthens and a search party begins to be organised, when doors are heard opening and closing far away.

Got lost, says guest. I could see the garden then I found myself in a pretty painted room with half a dozen doors that opened into other rooms; so I tried them all but then lost the direction. Still I think I've closed all the shutters and doors and things again. I got out onto a little balcony with steps down in the end. Hands over bunch of catnip; it's quite pleasant with new potatoes, if a little bitter.

Saving Lives

The pool is being filled, water palest turquoise on the sand coloured liner. Going to look this morning there was the frilliest frog ever neatly breast stroking lengths but clearly approaching exhaustion, unable to climb the smooth sides and the water getting ever too deep for resting and breathing.

Fortunately there are still bits and pieces from the rebuilding stacked at the edge of a field so I lowered a plank of wood into the water. Froggie hid from my attentions, underneath the plank. Hanging head first into the pool I slipped the plank underneath him and he was too tired to swim away. In what must have been a terrifying arc he swapped water for air and then for grass. At first he just lay there and I thought he had given up but looking closely, his frilly neck was beating in and out.

So the plank was dragged into the long grass and wild flowers and he rolled off the end and disappeared, being coloured perfectly to match. Now I'll have to check each morning to make sure everyone who went in for a dip can get out, at least until they put the chlorine in. Only humans swim in it after that.

Enclosure

A feeling that this is the 18th or even 17th century is reinforced strongly by the landscape. The Giottoesque hillocks crowned with woodland, the Arno winding through the valley, poplars on either side, the Pratomagno and the Alpe della Luna (depending which way you look) far away lining the horizon. And the farm land still in strips and isolated sectors as a result of inheritance practices and subsistence farming.

So enclosure becomes a live issue, oh how my economic history teacher would have revelled in it all. It's the whole hog, as well: enclosure to repel borders and their rights, common lot; enclosure to change the use of the land; enclosure to consolidate the landholding; enclosure of all kinds and every wave except for parliamentary enclosure as, I trust, the government hasn't horned in on the act yet.

What was needed was a swap of interlocking fields so that the neighbours could divert a road from beneath their windows and we could enclose an arrow of woodland pointing at the house, and the far end of a stream so that it could be used to water a piece of cultivated ground. Both properties would then be surrounded by their own land with no rights of way across either, and water secured to its rightful destination on its owners' crops.

Interests never before thought of sprang, armed to the teeth - in the case of the hunters quite literally - out of the ground we trod on. Mushroom hunters, wood gatherers (of bits that had fallen from the trees, not cut wood) walkers, riders, wolves (well, their environmental representatives in sheep's clothing), assorted insects and toads, anti-fencers, and the tax man with a vast overestimate of the gain from 21st century adjustments undertaken by 1600s neighours' descendants.

At the end of next week we go to the notary to sign and swear. Monies will change hands, calculated by arcane procedures and determined by Google Earth. We have fought our way up and down precipitous gorges and through impenetrable undergrowth to sink markers and stakes. I suspect promises and less virtual sweeteners have been distributed widely.

There remain the water meadows by the river, beyond another land owner and his dreams. In the times of mezzadria and autarky, these were the wheatfields. Perhaps we will wait on oil and commodity prices before opening the bidding on those. But my economic history teacher simply had no idea what enclosures, from the earliest times to the present day, were all about.

Electing Racialist Governments Is Ill-mannered Stupidity

Discussing what is to be done with the mimosa, (having planted a tiny pretty sapling I have discovered it is in an ideal environment as it sets off past the second floor in scented, golden, fluffy glory), the gardener commented on its immigration status.

As an extra-communitare it could just be uprooted and thrown out. He went on to remark that he has a lovely house, surrounded by lemon groves and overlooking the sea, and that leaving might be to his advantage. The children are receiving a good education and there is plenty of work, certainly. It's convenient always to hold some wealth in another country, for insurance, as well, and he could rent out his lovely house here readily for a steady income that would more than compensate for lower wage levels at home.

Horrified contemplation of losing his competence, honesty, friendship, and his family's contribution in the village followed. He went on in his beautiful, classical Italian to say that he and his wife were wondering what all the peasants who voted to remove the incomers a fortnight ago are going to do when their children refuse to leave their offices and return to the fields where they belong.

Potatoes and Porcupines

Attempts to persuade the men to plant some potatoes are failing. The arrangement is that they run the kitchen garden and we can take anything the household requires. The only discussion is about what should be grown. They want tomato crops in near industrial quantities, leafy green vegetables, lettuces, courgettes, peppers, aubergines, and beans of various shapes and sizes. So do I, but I want potatoes too.

Plumbers couldn't suck their teeth more menacingly over a frozen boiler dripping icicles than the men over the problems and costs of growing potatoes. The soil is wrong - too thin, (thin? soil?); the garden is at the wrong height (above sea level?), it is unprotected (from what?). Unprotected, they tell me, leaning on the enclosing fences that stretch for acres, from porcupines.

I can see it in my mind's eye: dawn, the porcupines in family groups, spines quivering in the early morning air, making their way from drinking in the stream, to feast on the potato patch as we watch, guests rousted from their beds at the crack-of the better to fully appreciate rustic scenes of past time. Oh yes. Nearly as good as watching the sun rise, (another, by definition, dawn activity), and sitting in the pitch dark being bitten by insects listening to tales we have loved and going ooooh at the stars.

Plant potatoes, and don't fence them, I insist. Life must be lived to the full.

Outsiders

We immigrants in Monculi are doing quite well. We own our own houses, are employed, and make a stab at speaking the local language (and it is very local) as well as classical Italian, though the Albanians are much better at it than the rest of us as they benefit still from their excellent classical education back home under Mr Hoxa's regime.

Of course we all know our place. An example, from an in-law, in my kitchen, "Here, we don't chop onions like that, let me show you." That time, I had a knife in my hand. No-one could fault them for foolhardy risk-taking.

The intra- and infra-familial murders that go on in Italy are at such levels that I assumed that while personal it was merely a particular aim being taken at a foreign in-marrier, rather than a serious expression of cultural aggression; had I been Italian no doubt the aggressing would have taken a different form.

But when the Italians as a people and country are feeling threatened, it is clear that they will have not the slightest concern in expressing their fear and distress in a racialism that will both shake people from more politically correct environments, and provide an unwelcome model for those who have been restrained by social and legal constraints.

The immigrants in Monculi are accepted because we pay our way and try our best to cope with not being Italian. The poor, the weak, the excluded are going to have a bad time.

Fascism is Yet to be Defeated

Everyone has a nickname - at least the real Monculi all have nicknames, I don't know about the people in Monculi di Sotto.

Testa Gloriosa, who is 82, was quite desperate when he ran into Mr HG in the grocer's. "I have given my life to the Party (the Communist Party of Italy, Ed.), and we haven't a single representative in the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate. I used to be asked to call on people after dark, so others would not know who were Party supporters. I fought with the partisans. We are wholly unrepresented in our own country's Parliament." His whole face was anguished, jaw trembling as he clutched Mr HG's arm and appealed to him to Do Something.

There is nothing to be done. And for the brave and decent people who literally risked their lives to overthrow Fascism, I weep.

Incoming

The swallows have arrived at last. No sign of summer though. We've burned all the wood, eaten all the winter vegetables, the price of greenery in the shops will cause an outbreak of scurvy soon which will add to the seasonal affective disorder being displayed by the entire country. Or perhaps that is due to having Berlusconi back and dodging his various indictments.

Jumpers

Buying basil plants, though lacking the heads necessary for the pots he was advised to keep them in until warmer weather, Mr HG asked the nurseryman when the lemons might go out (they're still in and quite desperate for air and more light).

'When you take off your jumper, then they can go out; and if you feel the need to put it back on, then bring them in again'. Mr HG developed a very English sweater habit in his English years; Italians wear only thin cashmere under a sports coat, not the fancy knitwear that determines lemons-out season.

From Monday

HG, we are drinking too much wine.

Right, shall we stop from, say, now?

The Pope says there will be no more pedophile priests from next Monday, according to La Repubblica. Let's start from then too.

We drank to that.

No Swallows

There are small holes dotted under the length of the eaves where the swallows nest. Conveniently, inside the rooms on the other side of the east-facing walls are little doors to open and grab a swallow or two for dinner.

If they don't turn up soon I shall have to go out and slaughter some other innocent creature nesting, or trotting, or otherwise gambolling through the landscape.

(Actually I had the plasterers seal up the little doors; it's not that I'm vegetarian or soft-hearted, I just didn't want to put my handy in and get pecked.)

Monculi Does It Again!

The Monculi voted en masse for Veltroni and the Democratic Party. The rest of Italy gave Berlusconi and the Northern Leagues a five year mandate.

Oranges and Lemons

Chap: 'It's winter still.'
Mr HG: 'I'd thought to put out the lemons.'
Chap: 'Put them out and they'll be ruined.'

Mr HG repaired to the lemon expert of Monculi. And he said:

'Candelora dall'inverno semo fora ' - by Candlemass we are out of winter - used to be the case. Not any more. 'Sole solicello, torna l'inverno'. - which means, more or less, - 'weak sun, winter returns'.

The last old sage delivery finished him off: 'the weather of 3 April lasts always for 40 days.'

Some global warming when the whole of Monculi is discussing the collapse of the lemon's year in the bar. It is getting colder.

Where are the sunny uplands of our youth?

Vote Berlusconi in Monculi di Sopra

Monculi is contrary. This makes it a bellwether voting district. Whenever Monculi votes for something you can be sure the whole of the rest of Italy has voted the other way.

In the Red Belt, Monculi has a right of centre administration (it is actually a Christian Democrat administration in full bloom, so it is also something of an anachronism); Berlusconi is thought a bit 'ruvido', a bit rough and untutored in all respects for the Monculi, who lean towards the Andreottian ways of right wing politics, rather than the criminally obvious.

When Italy voted for unity and sang Va Pensiero at the top of its considerable operatic lungs, Monculi voted for 'il regno separato' and the maintenance of campanilismo. When Italy voted for the end of monarchy and instituted the post War Republic, Monculi voted for the May King and the Savoia.

Worryingly, the word is out that Monculi is not voting for Berlusconi. The word is always out early in Monculi, there are the Families, and they vote predictably, according to their allegiances and their wont. I was down as being a Family vote for the Left, foreign or not wives vote with their husbands - till I took residence in Florence to get a car-pass to drive into the city centre. But the rest of our Family remains counted as Left. When I am very old I shall retake my residence here and vote Fascist - that will throw them.

In the meantime, just this once, it would be wonderful if Monculi could choose Berlusconi.

Out, Out, Out!

Lenin and Rosa are covered in mud but blinking dark eyes again at their garden. Rosa has managed a stroll through the acanthus, taking a bite here and a bite there, so is looking cleaner but, as usual, meaner. Lenin ate a fresh dandelion and leaf bouquet I offered then edged out from under the stone bench in the grotto formed by the church apse and the garden wall.

The garden in Monculi is tortoise paradise: stone-walled, protected from winds, sunny but with trees to shade, paths of beaten earth and gravel where dandelions are allowed to grow - the tortoises keep them neatly trimmed, obstacle courses of trimmed hedges for them to play through for no tortoise ever deviates from a straight line, that I have ever seen, as they munch down herbs, salad, and Mr HG looks on indulgently while they eat our rocket.

At the end of the garden is a pretty little sort of wilderness with violets and cyclamens under the trees (there are bluebells and daffodils and all the other plants harmful to tortoises, but they're not stupid, they don't touch those); they eat the wild strawberries until they are dizzy and Lenin has been seen trampling down the raspberry canes from the base to reach his favourite of all; and then the falling fruit, greengages, apricots, giuggiole, peaches, cherries, persimmons.

Imagine no rushing, no enemies, great intelligence, a long rest in the cold and dark months every year, the perfect diet,long life, and being so beautiful in their fashion.

In my next incarnation I am aiming for tortoisehood.

We Need a Shilling in the Meter

The covered skies are not giving the panels a fair go. Usually staying in the city until Easter is a sensible thing to do as nothing is worse than gloomy countryside. But this year we were misled by enthusiasm and the earliest Easter for absolutely ages into expecting March and early April to be like late April and early May.

So it's back to proper pavements, and something to do when it pours with rain, and tights.

In Monculi the death bells ring day after day - people who thought that if they could make it to Easter they might have one more summer have been defeated too.

Someone put some money in.

Lost

Well-upholstered, well-dressed, well made-up woman speaking into her mobile:

"Listen; I've no idea where I am. It's an enormous piazza with some buildings."

Brunelleschi's dome swelled over her shoulder, Giotto's pink and blue dream reached upwards, the Gates of Paradise gleamed golden on the Baptistry.

Cooling Pond

Solar panels produce so much heat that the excess hot water has to be cooled again before running off back to the stream. There are two ways to do this:pass it between special stones that take the heat, or pass it through a body of water.

The body of water (otherwise known as a heated swimming pool) was chosen by acclaim. In the last few days I have learned about water and colour and light. If you want a pool in palest turquoise green, and who does not?, then the inside of the pool should be the colour of white sand. Light, reflection and water do the rest. The effect is added to by paving round the edge with pale gold stone, which is the local stone colour anyway, rather than the grey pietra serena, because the blue water and the yellow stone trick you into seeing green, don't they, which is very restful for the view from further away as well because there is no violent, blue shape screaming out of the ground,

The paved area is only 60 cms wide around the pool (I mean cooling body of water) and then the garden which is being planted up in the micro climate the warm water will create starts. Isn't that lovely? Gin and tonics and sprawling about on slatted furniture are up at the house; this is a serious body of water for swimming up and down very fast and doing those somersault turns at each end.

Crumbs

In the east-facing wall of the big kitchen is a low, reinforced, heavily barred door which, when opened, gives a view of the road from the provincial capital so that Florentines could see insurgents coming.

It's handy too for shaking-out the cloth and letting out the cat (sob) for a last constitutional across the rooftops and terraces. These were deserted by all birds - even the swallows swept over in Star Wars formations, without pause, while paws beneath them slashed and leapt.

A pair of ring tail doves have set up home out there now, strutting in beauty and cooing their little heads off.

Nutwood

There is a poor-terrain field quite close to the farm house which has failed over the centuries to be anything but a nuisance: poorly drained, poor soil, rejecting of whatever is planted there, but with a good south west exposure.

Driving to buy sheets today in the best linen shop in the whole world (oh yes it is), I was struck by how beautiful the newly greened woods are looking and, particularly, by the nut tree plantations. Nut wood is highly prized for furniture making; noce nostrale is one of the most lustrous yet discreet surfaces.

So the campo cattivo is to be planted up into a nutwood; both beautiful and, eventually, profitable. There might even be grants.

Whether Rupert will take up residence is not known.

Health by Numbers

The farm foreman has told us he will make appropriate arrangements for the continued pruning of the olive trees while he is in hospital. Naturally we were concerned for him but he hastened to reassure us.

"I'm having my knees done. My name's come up."

"What needs doing?", we winced.

"I'm over sixty."

During the 1950s, when healthcare first became available widely, people would present one another with operations, as gifts. Having your appendix out was a popular and acceptable present. As state provision rather than insurance provision advanced, the practice faded, to be replaced by a consumer view of, particularly, hospital treatment.

If your name is put down, at the appropriate age, for an operation, when it comes up in you go. The number of heart bypass procedures, shunts, hips, and knees closely matches the population in the appropriate age bracket.

Who is to say it isn't more efficient to do a steady flow of non-emergency surgery before a part conks out, rather than have people in pain, or under threat of death, in a queue to get a bed?

Hot Food

Some foods are hot. Those cooked with lashings of tomato? hot; anything egg-laden? - certainly hot (though not stracciatella, chicken broth with raw egg and parmesan cooking in the heat) which is for invalids so cannot be hot by definition; elaborated dishes costing time devoted to their individual creation? hot (unlike what I would regard as pretty elaborate like home made pasta with sauces made of the innards of animals, various, which are daily bread, more or less, therefore not hot), food containing bought ingredients, particularly cream, sugar, vanilla (though not nutmeg - that is a naturally occurring substance in the Tuscan world) and cinnamon? hot.

There is a constant theme revealing itself to my foreign eyes: are these ingredients readily available from home production or local exchange? Not hot. Does this dish use inordinate amounts of a staple? Hot. Does it require cash expenditures? Vindaloo.

Guglielmo

Dusk is the time to look at the magnolia stellata. And in the light just before dawn. Those were his favourite times in the garden; when all the prey was at its most vulnerable a glowing cream shape would materialise from the gloaming and rake a deadly claw through dinner or breakfast.

I look down from my window at dawn and at dusk at his present manifestation, a lesser form of being on the wheel of existence than he enjoyed, to pay no doubt for all those little birds and voles consumed.

And yet, still he is the Angel of the Burning Bush, who came with me out of the land of taxation and oppression, and into the land of CAP subsidies and grants for solar panels.

Keeping Face

Living frugally is competitive in Monculi. Paradoxically cutting a fine figure (la bella presenza) is just as important.

At the butchers it is as possible to be caught behind a woman buying the shop for a family lunch - family is upwards of twenty people from nought to ninety - and making sure the queue knows what they will all be missing on Sunday after eleven o'clock mass, as it is to be consulted on the possibility that a boned, trimmed and flattened chicken thigh (just the one) will be too much for three people.

'You see, Signora, there's tagliatelle with hare sauce (my family are hunters, as you know, and my mother-in-law made the pasta sfoglia this morning), stuffed artichokes - if yours are finished I can let you have some - and then crema with savoiardi (this last is home made custard, bright yellow from the free range eggs, with sugary biscuits). But the Doctor told us all we need to keep our triglycerides down - how are Mr HG's blood counts? Now my husband has...... Anyway, I thought a little chicken thigh couldn't raise anyone's blood pressure.'

I contemplate the little chicken thigh, imagine it sliced paper thin, rolled into saltimbocca with prosciutto, giant sage leaves, dripping in melted parmesan and garlicked olive oil.

Two fillet steaks? I ask the butcher. Heads toss, eyes flicker with contempt - it's only Thursday, after all. Show off spendthrift.

Lifestyle Choices for Girls

' They're laying waste to the olive groves!'

'Merely pruning.'

"PRUNING? Sticks are all that's left. Lines of lovely leaves and branches lying there that the trees have spent all winter growing.'

'Cruel to be kind.', (tucks pruning shears into trousers' pocket (specially sewn) and exits to cold, windy hillsides.

Is this a metaphor for the global financial crisis I wonder, settling back with my Kaldor's Kollected, in front of the fire, dinner already simmering and teatime's late afternoon bliss to enjoy.

Fences not Hedges

Fence posts must be cut when the moon is waning; cut under a waxing moon, they will rot as soon as they are sunk into the ground. I know this because a number of posts on new fencing, and some supporting the new olive plantings, have had to be replaced after rotting at the base within the year.

'Which shows, Signora, that they were cut under the wrong moon'.

'But how do you know the state of the moon when they were cut?'

'Because they are rotting.'

Right. So it's not just bottling wine that is excited by the pale moon.

Another earthquake

The grocer has announced he's going to vote for the Democratic Party. He 'isn't happy' with a government coalition 'led by Mr Berlusconi'.

That'll be a 7 on the Richter scale.

In the Teeth of History

The suggestion by a United Kingdom Home Office Minister that identity cards in the UK should be regarded as internal passports has the same chilling effect as the dentist's remark to Mr HG, whose teeth were undergoing their annual inspection:

"Ah", said Dr Deutschbein, "Not yet time for the final solution."

Earthquakes

London unable to pall (or I should be tired of life) it is Spring that brings me back. And I am greeted by another earthquake. Florence shook more than Bloomsbury but that was not really the reason why the civil protection forces and drills operated here - there aren't any civil protection forces and drills in Bloomsbury.

Geologists have defined the area bounded by Santa Maria Novella, via della Scala, the river, and the Cascine as most at risk in the city. Moral - always live in the eastern parts of the loveliest parts of a city; it tends to be cheaper and avoids the worst depredations of the state and of nature.

Still, bits of the painted ceilings floated down; it feels dreadful sweeping them up.

Monculi di Sopra suffered no damage, the denizens would be claiming for everything if it had.

The news that Labour members of parliament from Westminster are moving into Sinalunga was met with a stoical response from Mr HG.

What is there at Sinalunga?

Long Pause.

There's a railway station where you can change for Siena, otherwise it's as ugly as sin.

London Shops in Deep Recession

Nothing happens here in February (an agricultural cycle dominates the calendar despite the gold factories), so I go to London, where the cold doesn't matter.

It would be inappropriate to detail the ins and outs of the Bloomsbury corridor, the replacing of Russell Square in its proper urban context in relation to the other Bloomsbury Squares, and give the latest on our school south of the Euston Road campaign, but it's not that there has been lazing about.

Accounts of primavera will arrive after the weekend, when I have finished unloading some poorly pounds into the empty shops. In John Lewis' kitchen department an assistant actually offered to help me with choosing work surfaces - not a lot of people about, but I hadn't realised the recession is so deep.

The General Election

A caretaker government leaves Monculi undisturbed. It is a lesson in what the European Union means. Subsidiarity has lowered all everyday life decisions to the lowest effective level, so there is far greater interest in town, province, and regional decision-taking.

Gold trading and manufacturing ties the Monculi into a high level of sophistication and interest in financial movements - local women's group outings to Dubai aren't just about the shopping; there's business transacted in gold products.

But mostly people would like a clean-up of the grosser corruption in banking, which has long been underway since the disgracing of Bank of Italy Governor Fazio, with his nasty links into the underbelly of the Church, and the bracing review of sub prime exposure of silly, former communist regional financial authorities that was carried out by Bank Governor Draghi early last year. (Why is it that always, former socialist and communists administrations fall for financial scams and get rich quick? The Federal German Government has had to do similar discreet bailing-out operations on former communist east German banks and financial entities; not to speak of rubbish Northern Rock and its farce of a Foundation).

The Monculi are keen on any party that gets the tax rate down and provides lots of jobs for newly-qualified arts graduate offspring too; but aren't we all? Deep in our hearts we know that is not a good way to go. So what is wanted from central government is discreet backing for major industry, and investment in tertiary level education in hard line subjects. Interestingly all of the faculties of non arts are imposing extra entrance examinations and limiting their entry numbers.

The Right is unhappy about Berlusconi as leader. They would prefer someone younger, more of this century, less criminal, less oriented to an ad hominem agenda. But there isn't time to organize that. Berlusconi, very like his Labour counterpart in England, cannot see his kind of politics is bent and repellent, much like his diehard electorate but not the more decent, less tribal voters.

Fini, the man who should have led the centre right, cannot lose his fascist label, though he is far less of a fascist, authoritarian statist than any New Labour politician. So the Right is splintered and the centre left, organised by Prodi, but now led by Veltroni, is up for the fight.

Prodi is a Conservative in English terms, leading an ex communist and socialist rabble that is at last pulling itself together into the 21st century. And Prodi is an incredibly competent and honest political economist with the highest quality advisorial group of politicians and financiers But then, Prodi is returning to European politics.

The Democratic Party has asked if one of the ground floor rooms in the village house can be used as their headquarters. In return for their provision of the manpower to shift the boxes of books into another room, which has been readied and freshly painted, with wall to wall empty bookshelves, and a proper contract listing all expenditures in cash and in kind, I have said Yes.

The very thought of a Monculi Electoral Commission sends bureaucratic shudders down the spine.

Education, Education, Education.

Monculi's school is new, surrounded by open space, sports fields, and equipped with a primary and secondary department. The Nursery and Infants is run by the nuns in the former primary school and needs separate consideration.

The pupils are not from other villages; neighbouring villages have schools of their own, and the schools are much of a muchness. Which is no criticism because the muchness extends across Italy. From the ages of 6 to 11 pupils study reading, writing - both hand and style, mathematics, science, Italian grammar, language and literature, Italian history, geography (in the wider sense of physical and economic and social geography) and English language (that is International English, not the high English no longer offered in UK schools). This programme runs in 3 year cycles; once the children can read and write etc., they begin the first study of the rest of the material when they are 8. Completing what can best be thought of as a road map of what they will study again in more complexity after 11, the examination to proceed into the secondary school is a serious business; the examination to be allowed up into the next class with all your friends at the end of each year is a serious business too. Muck about enough and you stay down until you learn.

Secondary school repeats the subjects in detail and with heightened analysis; this is an excellent way to work as the students know where they are going and what is involved.

After the obligatory school end examination, all who pass may enroll in their specialised school of choice. Those who have had enough can take work within their extended families and connections in the local community; those whose parents might never have thought have the chance to see their offspring studying the sciences, the classics, or the feeder courses for surveying, teaching, agricultural management and best practice, etc., (to mention the more popular specialisms in a Monculi ethos).

And yes, the teaching could be better, and yes there is violence in some schools, particularly in the large, mixed population centres, and yes, there are problems of favouritism and class clusters around very good schools.

But most children go to their local school, most children are taught (and some are hauled) through to where they wanted to go, some of them discovering their destination on the way, and best of all, none of them are in any doubt that they are Italians with a staggering cultural heritage (if some very iffy bits), and identity; whatever their country of origin, or their parents' class.

They also wear navy blue overalls over their normal clothes so there's none of that appalling school uniform in viscose and plastic, with ties, rubbish either.