Long tome no hear...

Sorry it's been a while, lots has happened since the last post. I'm not trying to come up with excuses, but... Well first of all I was away for a few days at the end of June, beginning of July. Had to take the car to Germany for an MOT. Good news it has passed, bad news it wasn't cheap. I'd rather do wothout motorised transport, but can't quite do without it.

Well then as soon as I had returned we were struck by lightning, which melted my computer monitor and the old modem. I managed to get an old monitor off someone for nothing, but it wasn't worth replacing the modem as we were waiting for a new telephone line from Fastweb with a proper broadband connection at last! Yes we have turned our backs on Telecom, despite warnings from people that you'll never know what service you will be getting with these people. Well I reckoned it couldn't get any worse, and so far so good.

So today a premier for this blog: A moving picture with sound! Last night was the annual Musicalmangiando event in our village, a festa with, as the name suggests, there's food and music, but also art and general merryment. The music was supposed to be supplied by our neighbour Mauro and his band Tandarandan, but for some reason this was changed by the organisers. Instead we had fire jugglers and our friend Silvio with some mates playing Rennaissance music. That's what you can hear and see a sample of above if you have a fast enough internet connection.

The food was as usual the Cusina d'Sa' Steu', the cuisine of Santo Stefano, although Remo, the brains behind promoting the local specialities is getting on a bit and semi-retired, so I felt that the standards were slipping a wee bit. For a start quantities weren't as gut-splitting as usual. Mind you when I mentioned that after the desserts, someone found me another plate of roast rabbit. The other good thing was of course that the man pouring the grappa afterwards gave Susan and me an extra helping calling us the number one and two supporters of the Cusina d'Sa' Steu'. Besides he said, anyone as mad as us riding our bikes up and down our hill is probably in need of an extra helping of strong liquor...

Below you see the antipasti being served on the way up from the main piazza:

And then under the last rays of sunshine we settled down for the main courses on the little piazza in fron of our house. In the centre of the picture with her purple back to us and the bare arms is Susan and opposite her our lovely neighbours Susannah and Marco.

Other updates as to what happened on the land etc. coming up in the next few days.

of computer problems and climatic anomalies

Well, again some technical problems forced me into a short break from posting on this blog. This time it was a virus on my computer. A pop-up claiming I needed to update my Google tool box turned up on my screen and couldn’t be clicked away. Alarm bells should have been ringing then, but foolishly I clicked ok, the only option that seemed to work and bang! there it was. I couldn’t access the internet for a bit. Our extremely helpful and friendly neighbour Marco came up with a solution though and everything is running smoothly again without any permanent damage. Thank Marco for that!

Talking about technical problems, my printer, a Canon Pixma IP 2000, was also playing up. A message told me that it’s ‘ink absorber’ was full and that I would have to take it to an authorised Canon service department. Marco did a quick internet search and also found a solution to this problem. All I had to do was press a few buttons in a specific sequence and, hey bingo, the printer works again. Is this some sort of scam by Canon to get their service departments some work? You take your machine to one, they tut and hah: “ooh, that’ll cost you mate…”, give it back to you the next day and charge you €30 for a 2 minute job. Sort of an inbuilt, pre-designed fault to make you spent some more money with their company? Sounds ridiculous to me.

Anyway, what else has been happening in the meantime I hear you ask. Well It has rained a lot. A hell of a lot! Shortly after the last post it started. Some villages along the rivers Magra and Vara were cut off from the outside world due to flooding. Below you see a photo of the Magra on one of the few days on which we had a break in the weather and judging by the rubbish stuck in the trees (which normally stand on dry land!) the river was up to about 2 ½ metres above it’s normal level.
This weather is being blamed by a wind called the Scirocco. It’s a south-westerly originating in the Sahara desert in Africa. Now you’d think a wind coming from the desert brings nice warm and dry weather to your shore, but unfortunately it crosses a fair bit of the Mediterranean on it’s way here, where it can pick up plenty of water. Once it arrives up here with us it meets up with a cold air sitting on top of the alps and northern Appenines and simply dumps half of the Mediterranean Sea over our heads.

And talking of climatic anomalies, our car appears to have developed it’s own micro-climate. Somewhere it has sprung a leak and with all that rain there are some serious puddles, if not to say ponds inside the car. This means, even when the sun is shining outside, it’s raining inside the car. It’s like a tropical rainforest. I need wipers more urgently for the insides of the windows than for the outsides! And with us transporting a lot of freshly cut wood in the car, we have introduced quite a varied wildlife to the car as well. In one of the ponds I believe the first signs of some primeval life form have started to evolve.

Enough of all that. Since about Wednesday the weather has finally improved again and the sun is back. We built a small poly tunnel as you can see above and will sow some early lettuces out in there this weekend. Today I sowed the first indoor seeds, namely various tomatoes, various peppers, aubergines, melons, cucumbers, chillies, basil, savoury, chervil, dill. And the best news of all, Mickey the kitten is finally over her period of being on heat and doesn’t miaow at us all night, nor do the toms outside.

Born Under A Bad Sign

In the words of Albert King and other Blues greats, I must have been ‘born under a bad sign’, ‘for it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all’. Or maybe it’s the arrival in our house of those cats (‘My baby’s got a black cat bone’) or punishment for some other sin.

Things started going wrong on my birthday, 17 November. Incidentally many thanks for the various birthday greetings. The weather had been good around my birthday and we decided to get the olive harvest in. We picked a total of some 30 kg of healthy olives. It’s a bit of an awkward quantity, not really enough take to the mill to turn to oil, but a bit too much for simply eating. However we did pickle them all in brine, so shouldn’t have a shortage of eating olives in the house for a bit.


As we got home, I tried as usual to go onto my computer to check my e-mails and maybe post something on the blog, but no can do. I couldn’t go on-line. After trying various things with the help of Marco from next door, changing the modem twice, I only just now managed to get back on-line now. So sorry for any un-answered e-mails etc, and hence the long gap between postings here.

Two days after this mishap our baking oven gave up it’s ghost. I use it a lot, not least for making bread every other day. When we arrived here we bought the cheapest stove we could find and it seemed fine. The oven however can only be switched on with a timer, and the spring inside the timer had given way. I located a shop where I could order a replacement, but at a whopping €50 and a waiting time of 10 days. The whole bl***y thing cost only about €250, how can such a small part cost that much? Just as we are short on funds anyway. Well we had to bite the bullet and the machine is back in operation.

Next thing that went wrong was the chainsaw. I was trying to prune back an overgrown plum tree and the chain jumped off and bent slightly. The costs of that I have not yet assessed. I’m hoping I might be able to fix it myself. Finally today the second of our two mobile phones seems be on it’s last leg and I cannot afford to replace it. I don’t use it much, mostly for time keeping and emergencies, but it was handy for that. And I thought bad things happen in 3s not 4s.

Anyway it hasn’t all been bad. As for the cats mentioned earlier, you may remember me talking about Garfield. Roundabout my birthday he had decided to move in permanently, so we started buying a wee bit of food for him. He never seemed terribly hungry though and, for a stray cat, he looked remarkably well fed. One evening, after Garfield had settled on our bed, another cat poked it’s head through the door, a very skinny, even emaciated, black & white female. She did not look well at all, loosing hair off her hind legs, having a bright red bottom and looking very weak. So we fed her some too. We called her Dot, because of the black dot on her nose. She and Garfield seemed to get on fine with each other too as you can see.




Dot, to begin with, would never stay for very long either. A bite to eat, ½ hour’s rest and off she went again. After a few days of this, she had turned up again in the evening, had something to eat and a cuddle with Susan, and off she went again… only to reappear after 5 minutes with a little grey & white kitten in tow. Kitten, having been born in the wild and not seen many humans, went straight into hiding in my pyjama drawer and wouldn’t come out for 2 days. Now, 2 weeks later, he (or possibly she, we haven’t been able to assess that yet) has become a little braver, but is still shy. We called it Mickey (which could be short for Michael or Michaela after the patron saint of Ponzano Superiore). He stays 24/7 in the house now, Mummy Dot herself sees to it. It’s far too dangerous out there for little kittens.

Garfield in the meantime has been evicted. I saw how the lady next door specially cooked liver for him, shooing away other cats, so he clearly has understood the principal of survival of the fittest, the fittest being the cat that charms humans into feeding him well. He is doing well for himself, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to keep an intact tom cat with an intact female in our house, unless we wanted to breed them. So now we have been chosen to become cat owners. I actually wanted a dog really.

Other than that winter has arrived earlier than last year. The end of November, the beginning of December have been atrocious. Snow in the mountains, rain, hail, gale force winds and cold temperatures for days on end. We’ve been sitting around the fireplace, baking Christmas biscuits and trying to coax the kitten into trusting us. In the breaks of the weather I’ve pruned over half of the trees on our land in Arcola, planted garlic and did a general tidy up. Yesterday and today were fine and sunny again. We’ve only done one more walk for the guide (Aulla – Sarzana) because the weather didn’t allow for much more.