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.