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.

Cash Crops

‘”It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,” he said. “Have you thought of going into teaching?”’ Quote attributed to Mr. Liona Keeble, employment agent of Ankh-Morpork on trying to find a new career for Death. Terry Pratchett.

I thought I’ll start with a literary quote this time, more about it in a minute. As this is also meant to serve as a diary for myself (so next year when we have the arguments like: ‘last year December was really warm’ – ‘no way we had snow!’ we can just look back on the blog), some of the more mundane details first. The last couple of days I was busy pruning olives and chopping the larger bits into firewood. Susan in the meantime dug over a new bed for planting veg and lit a fire to burn the smaller prunings. Yesterday we had the first real frost, something we didn’t have at all last winter. Even at lunchtime the lower terraces were still covered in white. Hopefully this means the mosquitoes and other insect pests are not going to as plentiful next year. Today it’s grey and damp, so I have a bit of time to write again.

Now to the quote above. According to John Seymour’s Guide to Self-Sufficiency, every self-supporter needs a cash crop of sorts. It may be one in the literal sense of the word, i.e. something you grow more of than you can consume and sell the excess at a profit. However, everyone knows there isn’t a lot of money to be made in farming, unless you have a top vineyard site where you can charge a premium. The other way is usually, that one or both of the partners do some sort of work to earn some cash, because completely without cash it is not really possible to survive in modern times. In John Seymour’s case it is him writing his books and teaching other people to become self-sufficient on his farm in Ireland. I should think he does quite well with this. In our case this was supposed to be the wine business. However, this is proving to be difficult, firstly because of the economic difficulties in Europe at the moment and secondly, during the times where I have most work on the land, spring and autumn, I am always away traveling to see clients.

So looking at other options we came up with, you guessed it, teaching English. The first qualification they ask for is that you have to be a native speaker, which excludes me. Now Susan has all the right qualifications: a degree in French and one in English, she is a native English speaker and she has taught English and French before. Unfortunately this is Italy and things are never that simple. To apply for a job she has to produce, among other things, documentary proof of her degree, an Italian VAT number, a work permit and preferably references from previous employers, and all that translated into Italian and stamped by the magistrate courts to verify that they are true translations. Not only is the whole process time consuming and expensive, it is also in Susan’s case not possible. In almost 30 years no one in the UK or France has ever actually asked her to show her degree and hence she has no idea where it might be. She asked at Edinburgh University, where she studied, whether it was possible to get a copy, but they do not give out copies of degrees taken before 1989. The VAT registration would pose similar problems as they also demand proof of qualification and/or experience of your chosen field of business, also translated, verified and, in the case of employment references, a verification and verified translation of the existence of the company concerned. When I did all this for my VAT registration it took several weeks, a lot of shoe leather and several hundred euros.

Next plan is to maybe stick up a couple of adds in public places for private lessons, and I shall try and find something in the tourist business during the summer, like life guard on the beach or do tours or something. We have registered with a language translation web-site offering English, German and French, but haven’t had any work from there yet. We’ll just have to eat lots of lentils over New Year, as according to the Italians, each lentil represents money you will have in the coming year…