Perhaps rashly

Perhaps rashly, I took advantage of a special offer in my ethical food group and bought them — the 5 kilos of organic lemons. They were an early breath of spring in the recent rainy weeks, both bright and perfumy. But 5 kilos is a lot of lemons. So after pasta with lemon, lemon potatoes, the odd glass of citron pressé, and lemon slices with everything, I launched into making limoncello and lemon curd. The curd was delicious and the two jars lasted about a week. The limoncello involves macerating the peel in alcohol (95º proof alcohol is available at the supermarket in Italy, so embedded is the custom of making your own flavoured liquor) for 10 days, then mixing with an equal quantity of sugar syrup, then filtering, decanting and letting the cloudy yellow liquid mature for a minimum of a month — but the longer the better. It will be perfect by summer, when I'll keep it in the freezer and bring it out on long hot evenings, the nectar of the gods.

And I've still got another couple of kilos of lemons to get through.
 

Rain and fog

Rain and fog. February is the grimmest month. Yet feeling my way through the soupy air on my dog-walk this morning I could hear lots of birdsong; and underfoot I nearly trampled a lone primrose. Signs of spring, far too early, and with no sense that the real spring could be near. The countryside is waterlogged and spongy, and water comes out when you press down with your foot on the saturated earth. 

Our sinkhole-mudslide has got slightly larger — a metre of earth including another piece of our lavender hedge has broken off and tumbled into the abyss of gloopy mud.

When I was a kid

When I was a kid, my mother had a cookbook called "The I Hate to Cook Book". (I shall heroically refrain from commenting on that as pertains to her cooking. Suffice to say that she did, indeed, hate to cook.) And for years, on and off, I have been thought about a chocolate cake recipe in that book that I used to make when I was aged around 11 or 12. It was a really simple recipe, with several curiosity factors, including that you mix it all up straight in the baking dish and that it contains vinegar. So, on this cold grim winter  Saturday with my heating broken down, feeling an urgent desire for the comfort of chocolate cake, I harnessed the power of the World Wide Web to track down that recipe. 

And it turns out to be a cake that lots and lots of people are baking — nearly 9 million people, in fact, according to Google. (0.35 seconds to find 8,820,000 results for "chocolate cake with vinegar". I call that magic.) It dates back to the 1920s and is known in some parts as Depression cake, not because it makes you depressed but because its ingredients are cheap and — get this — don't include eggs. I'd forgotten that bit. It was also popular during the war, for the same reasons. Other names for it are wacky cake or magic cake, if you call those names.

So it goes like this: you mix flour, sugar, salt, cocoa powder and bicarbonate of soda together, add vegetable oil and vinegar, admire interesting bubbling effect (bicarb plus vinegar: this recipe does science too), add cold water, mix together, and bake for half an hour. I sprinkled chopped-up chocolate over the top just before slamming it into the oven, because I'm decadent like that. The whole assembly process took about eight minutes. 

The result is a dark-brown, moist, dense chocolate cake exactly like I remember it. With something just a little bit weird about it. That would be the vinegar and the lack of eggs, I guess. It also manages to achieve the paradoxical double-act of being both stodgy and insubstantial at the same time. It melts in the mouth yet sticks to your teeth. It is definitely not the best cake in the world, as some of the nearly 9 million asserted. Yet it is hugely comforting, being, as it is, a dark-brown, moist, dense chocolate cake. It is pretty much exactly what you need if it's a cold, grim winter Saturday and your heating's broken down. And it also has that little touch of retro chic.

We have had a month

We have had a month of unseasonably warm, dry weather. Now we have heavy rain, with snow and freezing temperatures forecast for the next two weeks. So it was inevitable that it would be at exactly this moment that the boiler ceased to function. 

Actually, it's the chimney flue that vents the boiler, but the effect is the same. (It's a solid-fuel boiler.) Clouds of smoke from the blocked flue billowing into our room mean that we can't use it. Which means no central heating and no hot water. John spent a morning taking it all apart and cleaning it and brushing out the chimney, but there seems to be a blockage further up than he could reach. Naturally, the chimney sweep isn't available straight away, and by the time he's able to come I fear the road will be blocked by snow.

We're keeping the kitchen and living room warm with the woodburning stove, and heating water on it. So we're warm enough. But I sure would like a hot shower.

Once again a chicken

Once again a chicken has gone rogue. After weeks with no eggs in the nesting box or in any of the usual hiding places, I tracked her one morning to find out what was going on. She snuck round the back of Mario's barn and nipped in behind some big round haybales. Half an hour later she strolled out again, innocent as anything and clearly not broody. I sent the Boy over to investigate and once he'd climbed over the baler and scaled two storeys of bales he reported that he could see a nest and that it had 10 eggs in it. He was all for abseiling down the north face of the bales, but it turned out to be a whole lot easier just to shift some stuff and squeeze round the back, no ropes or crampons needed. The hen had cunningly made her nest with a viciously toothed farm implement to guard it, but I scooped them all up safely. The next day she was back there again. What's wrong with the hen house?!

This year's Christmas tree

This year's Christmas tree is an in-memoriam branch from the fallen oak. Pretty much as soon as we brought it in, leaves started falling off it en masse, so that the living-room floor now looks like autumn. By Christmas Day itself the tree was nearly naked, apart of course from the tasteful decorations, some of which go back to when Alessio was an infant and we made decorations out of paper and swirls of glitter. Looking at them, we decided these are actually a whole lot prettier than much of the crap you buy in the shops. And we have no angel on the top, but we do have a slightly sinister hanging corn dolly that Alessio once made on a school trip to somewhere. Happy Christmas, faithful readers. 

Jupiter and the moon

Jupiter and the moon staged a gorgeous extravaganza in the eastern sky the other night. With my astro-binocs I saw two of Jupiter's moons very brightly and got my usual thrill from that; and swinging round to the west, with much peering about I managed to see comet Lovejoy again. Low in the sky, smaller and smudgier in the orangey haze over town, but still enthralling as it beats its lonely path through the universe (sigh).

Jupiter a tiny dot at the top.

 In other news: we have a temporary road again so are now mobile, though it's not easily transitable in the ordinary car and as soon as it rains we're going to have to use the 4WD as a shuttle, but at least we don't have to walk through the mud to the top of the road any more. Thank you Mario. The downside is that there won't be any of the promised big diggers, or not for a while anyway, as Mario is shunning the book-learning of geologists and reckons he can fix the whole thing all by himself come next spring once it's dried out. He doesn't want to hear the idea that putting in drainage channels right now would help it dry out. Some discussions ahead, methinks.

The original road went straight on where now the new road veers right
(coming from the house).

Not much to say

Not much to say about the landslides at the moment, apart from that there is no progress (but also they're not getting worse) (unless you count the new cracks in the road above the collapsed section). The Comune has refused to help us, though we're submitting another request to the Regione for disaster aid. A geologist has come round and given us some advice on how to deal with remaking the road and filling in the sinkhole (as I now think of it) outside the house, but nothing can really be done until the land dries out (so we're talking next summer). Still, as we have beautiful weather at the moment and the forecast is good, we're going to try to get drainage channels installed to carry off water from under the road landslide to help it dry out. This is major work and will involve a very large digger, so rest assured I'll bring you photos of that. 

In the meantime, here's a video of a chicken.

Yesterday it was the most

Yesterday it was the most fantastic clear night with what we astronomers call "good seeing". A sort of clear darkness. I took my astronomy binoculars out just before midnight and spotted with incredible clarity: two moons of Jupiter, the Orion nebula, and the Andromeda galaxy, as well as a few other interesting space objects. There's a comet around at the moment, Comet Lovejoy, visible in the early morning near the handle of the Plough. Putting my habitual early-hours insomnia to good use I got up at 5.00am and went outside to see what I could find. As well as all the above-mentioned items again (but in different places), I eventually managed to see Comet Lovejoy. It's a beautiful comet with a classic tail. Thrilling to see and worth getting up for. I love to think of it up there speeding across the sky. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to photograph it (requires some kit and a certain amount of know-how, patience and dedication that I probably don't have) but I might try one day.

Other than that it's been a quiet weekend. I finished knitting my wrap, shown in the picture — a gorgeous thick merino wool shawl to keep me warm on winter evenings.

In the midst of events

In the midst of events that are truly calamitous, you'd have thought that the tiny irritations of everyday life might be somehow less irritating. But it doesn't work like that. Let's talk about socks, for instance. That way they have of slipping down inside your wellies and bunching up under the soles of your feet? Really irritating. 

So this year I bought some special welly socks, and I tried them out today on what was our first really frosty morning of the year. And they were everything cold-weather socks should be: warm, soft, thick and a litle bit scrunchy-feeling. Stomping round the yard at 7.30 in the ice I could practically feel my toes smiling to their little selves. But — and it's a serious but — the socks slipped down. The socks slipped down! The single defining characteristic of welly socks, surely, must be that they don't slip down. I pulled them up, I tried them over my trousers and under my trousers, I rolled them and unrolled them, and nothing helped. I even tried them folded over the tops of my wellies, which stopped them slipping down, obviously, but let in cold air and felt weird. And even when I was standing staring at the broken land with my heart racing in horror, a little part of me was being seriously irritated by the falling-downness of my welly socks.

 Still, just so as not to lose track of the calamities, here's a picture of the view from my bedroom window now.

And two landslides visible across the valley in the other direction. The one to the far right is directly under our friends' house, the other (the big one) is on the edge of a private road like ours, but doesn't seem to have attacked the road.

I've been trying to think

I've been trying to think of something else to post about, because if this were a film everyone would probably have left the cinema by now. Not another landslide, pleeeze; how many landslides can a plot decently deal with? So today the photos of the tree. 

The tree came down in the night, the heaviness of the snow weighing down on it past bearing. A huge, century-old, beautiful oak that framed the lane going down to the fields and partially shielded Mario's monstruous corrugated-iron and breeze-block barn from our delicate vision. It did all the things oaks are meant to do — gave shade, gave acorns, gave shelter to small creatures, gave us kindling for the fire, and gave a touch of majesty to the setting. The tangled filigree of its branches in winter was a work of art. Of course it was only a tree, but seeing it lying sprawled across the lane and field (I'm not going to write 'like a felled giant', but you know I want to) is breathtakingly sad. 

It's been raining torrentially for 24 hours and I do have some more news about landslides, actually, but that can wait till tomorrow.

Because sometimes life is just not hard enough

Because sometimes life is just not hard enough, what you really need in the middle of an ongoing emergency situation where your access road has been crumpled up and tipped into a field and your garden is being eaten away chunk by chunk before your eyes, is a really heavy snowfall. The kind of too-early-in-the-year wet snow that bows down the trees with its weight, adheres to fences and walls with its stickiness and gives a unique and lethal slipperiness to the roads. That white snow-light coming through the curtain when I woke up nearly made me cry.

Mid-morning, soon after the Internet went down (that was a given, right?), the electricity also cut out. I went to check the fusebox and then looked outside. My eye was caught by a flash of orange. At the top of a pole. It was the Man From ENEL. I bundled up and went out to talk to him — or rather shout to him, up his pole. He waved at me. "Tira aria!" he shouted. Yes, it sure was windy.

So the dangerous wires across the road are now gone, and at least we can cross mains electrocution off our list of safety in the home issues — though the pole's still leaning, so I'm not ruling out some kind of one-in-a-thousand accident involving that.

Meanwhile the landslip near the house seems to be coming closer, or rather getting wider, but it's hard to tell in the snow as everything looks altered.Tomorrow the schools are closed because of the conditions, so the Boy, at least, is happy.

Yesterday the loss adjuster

Misty valley, muddy fields

Yesterday the loss adjuster from the house insurance came round to look at the so-called damage caused by the leaking roof and windows. When he phoned to make the appointment I had to think hard to remember what he was talking about, as that rain-leaking event has now been so comprehensively superseded by the landslides and the damage has paled into insignificance. It's funny to think that two weeks ago today none of this had happened, the rain was just beginning, and the worst that I thought could happen in my life was to have to strew a few buckets around the living room to catch the drips. No, not so funny, really.

This is the view of the top of the landslide shown in my previous post.
The hole is about 5m deep. The edge of the road
is just on the other side of the red-and-white tape.

The gaping chasm near the house is still creeping towards the road. I think of those houses built on clifftops that are eroding and one by one the houses fall into the sea. It's a horrible feeling, watching this kind of damage occurring in slow motion and being utterly powerless to stop it. I'm living with a constant sense of fear, the kind where you lie awake at night with your heart pounding and your head spinning and nothing makes sense. My dreams are filled with tiny events of everyday anxiety: a huge spider in the bathroom, my glasses getting broken, my wellies developing leaks as I walk through puddles.

The first landslide, the one that took away our road, is sinking further every day. Filippo's crew made us a bypass by cutting back the bank, but the edge of the new road is on the unstable ground and itself is sinking, so we still can't drive the car up to the house. At least we have a fairly firm path to walk on though, rather than having to wade through mud. (My god, that's a feat of brightside-looking-on.) The roadside electricity pole is careening at an alarming angle and ENEL assure me they have a cunning plan to fix it, but meanwhile above the path are stretched the wires that take the current up to Mario's house — stretched very close to breaking point. If they break they'll fall across the path. When that happens, the ENEL guy told me, don't even attempt to step over them or go round them: call the emergency number and wait and someone will be round in half an hour to sort it out. I wanted to know why they couldn't move the wires pre-emptively — you know, so that actually they don't fall on top of our path and potentially electrocute me and my family — but obviously that's a cunning plan too far.

In amongst the dread and stress it's hard to find pleasure in normal life. Everything feels slightly deadened because of the constant backbeat of worry and the awareness that this is not going to end anytime soon. I've never known anything like this before. Early in the morning the mist over the valley was pretty, yet in the photo I see more the ocean of mud than the beauty of the view.

The land just keeps falling

The land just keeps falling away. This is the new landslip around dawn today. This landslide started on Sunday morning (happy birthday to me!) and has been encroaching back towards the road by about 2 metres a day — huge chunks of land just breaking off and crashing into the field. The field itself has taken on an entirely different shape. There's no means of stopping the landslide, so we just have to wait for it to come to a natural halt, whenever and wherever that might be. Not much more to say right now.

At 7.30 on Wednesday

At 7.30 on Wednesday morning I walked up from feeding the animals and noticed that the road looked strange. It looked as if someone had piled gravel over it in a line in the middle of the night. As I walked closer, I realized that nothing so simple or wacky had happened but that, in fact, the entire road had collapsed over about a 15-metre length. A sense of slow shock set in as I got nearer and went to look. The field below the road had suffered a huge landslip and just dragged the road down with it. The photos say it better than words really.

Water pipe rescued. Note tilting electricity pole.

Miraculously our water pipe, which was in the bit of land that shifted, was undamaged. Our Digger Man and all-round saviour, Filippo, and his crew have now dug it out and re-routed it above ground, so at least we now can stop worrying that our water will be cut off as the land slips more. 

Things always improve when the men in orange reflective vests take over.

Four days after the initial landslip, the area of damage is deeper, wider and longer. We have been told the road can't be repaired till the ground has dried out and settled, which pretty much means next summer. Unthinkable that our house be inaccessible by car for nine months, so Filippo has hatched a plan to cut us a new, temporary road bypassing the landslip on its top edge. Meantime we don wellies and trudge over the mud of the ex-road and slog up the hill to reach the car parked at the top, where we change back into normal clothes and try to re-enter the rest of the world, where people just walk out of their front doors, get in their cars, and go.

Herbie tests the metal duckboards.

After a balmy weekend

After a balmy weekend, Sunday night it started to rain. And it hasn't really stopped since. This is the heaviest rain I've known since living here. Not the most prolonged, but the absolute hugest quantity in so short a time. There are floods everywhere, the fields have streams running across them and there are pools in the bottom of the valley. We have leaks all over the house, water coming in through the roof and through the windows (useless window fittings). Yesterday was spent in damage limitation, lugging buckets and pots around to catch the drips, and then emptying them every few hours, they filled up so fast. 

No way out...

This morning I drove Alessio to school and a 10-minute trip took 45 minutes. Our way into town was (and still is) blocked by a large landslide across the road, so I had to go round the long way, which was also blocked by a landslide, so I had to go round the even longer way — which was just having its landslides cleared by a digger... The countryside is awash in water, landslips and mud everywhere, it's crazy. And still it rains.

... and no way home

So here I am

So here I am after a year of not getting round to writing about anything that happens. Not that much happens, but, you know, some things do, sometimes. This is probably the last-chance saloon for my blog though. Little and often is my latest mantra. And, hell, I'll reformat it — let's run with a bigger photo. We'll see how it goes.

We got our winter log supply delivered the other day and stacked it on the apartment veranda, where it now sits looking pretty in the sun. A lot of sun. Right now it's insanely hot for November — it was 30 degrees on the sunny side of the house yesterday. I'm writing this at 8.30am and it's already nearly 20 degrees on the shady side. Walking the dog earlier the air felt balmy and soft, not at all autumnal. I like warm weather and I dread the winter, but at this time of year this kind of heat feels profoundly wrong, like something is badly off-kilter. Luckily the weather forecast is terrible, the temperature's meant to drop with big storms sweeping in, and although I can't say I'm looking forward to that, at least it will be more normal.

And that's the end of the weather report.

At a fair recently

At a fair recently I was given some saffron crocuses. Mauve flowers, growing in a pot. They're lovely, but even better, each crocus contains three strands of saffron. You pick the crocus in the morning and pinch out the red saffron strands (which are not the same as the pollen-covered pistils) in a haze of gorgeous scent, and then let them dry for two or three days. I harvested about 12 strands and while they were drying, the kitchen was full of wafts of the smell — sweet and pungent at the same time. Now my saffron is in a tiny jar and the pot of crocus bulbs is set outside to overwinter. Next summer I'll unearth and re-pot the bulbs — they may even have multiplied, like other bulbs do — and in the autumn I should have new flowers and new saffron.

At three strands per person in a dish, right now I have about enough to make a saffron risotto (risotto alla milanese). Watch this space.

At the end of the big heat

At the end of the big heat we harvested a basket full of wild fennel flowerheads, and these have been drying in my room ever since, giving off a scent of sweet curry. What you do then is rub them between your fingers and thumb to detach the tiny flowers with their load of fragrant pollen from the stalks, and it's the resulting powder that we're after — a flavoursome spice that weight for weight is (allegedly) more expensive than gold. It smells of curry but tastes a bit like aniseed, a bit like fennel itself. Delicious sprinkled into an omelette or onto roasted tomatoes or a fried egg.

In other veg-patch news: We have now harvested all the winter squash (butternut, buttercup and a huge crop of self-seeded jack-be-littles) and the remains of most of the summer veg. A few tomatoes are hanging on so if we get any sunshine they may ripen, otherwise I guess we'll make green tomato jam again. That seems to be highly trendy at the moment as we saw it at several market stalls over the summer, though I didn't like it very much. Weird flavour. I spent this morning picking the last of the green beans and then pulling up the rows and rows of green and borlotti beans in ever more frantic haste as the Rotovator Man got closer and closer. The veg patch is now nicely dug over so it's time to plant up for winter. In fact a bit late, as usual.

I noticed out on my ride afterwards a lot of mushrooms in the woods which I'm pretty sure are edible, but didn't pick any because, well, I was on a horse... Plus, "pretty sure" isn't quite "dead cert". A few years ago I went on a mushroom course, which is technically a requirement now if you want to gather wild mushrooms — you have to attend a course in mushroom recognition and then apply for a patentino (licence). It's not a bad idea in that its aim is to avoid fatalities; but naturally I remember virtually nothing of what I learnt,  mainly  that most of the real nasties look practically identical to innocuous or edible ones, which is enough to put you off mushroom hunting for ever.

I solved the mystery

I solved the mystery of where the rogue hen was holing up overnight by wriggling on my stomach underneath Mario's trailer in the haybarn and squinting between the big round bales. We'd found several eggs in the vicinity so I figured she must be in there somewhere. Sure enough, I could just make out a chicken-shape at the end of a narrow dark tunnel between two bales, too far away for me to reach. But not exactly fox-proof. Plus — all those eggs? Waste of time being broody, chicken, with no cockerel around.

Well I just left her there, but later John chased her out with a broom handle, and later still Alessio managed to retrieve the eggs by pulling them out one by one using an ingenious tool he made by banging two nails into the end of a long stick. Completely ridiculous idea, we scoffed, but he got them all out and only broke two. And the chicken  had been sitting on a stash of 18 eggs!

Most of them were off, but we had an omelette for supper. The chicken seems untraumatized and doesn't show any signs of trying to re-make her nest. At least not in the bales. We're still getting only one or two eggs a day from three hens, so who knows whether one of them is making a hoard somewhere else?