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.