The Canadair flew over

The Canadair flew over four times yesterday afternoon, four times the day before, carrying the huge tanks of water that it would empty out above Fiuminata, in the hills to the west of us, to try to quench the wildfire started by an arsonist. The helicopter was getting the water from the lake at Fiastra, where on Sunday we whiled away the afternoon in the hottest of hot sun; fire and panic far from our minds. On each run it flew low over our house, so low that you looked up and wanted to wave to the pilot, before realizing how stupid an impulse that was, and, squinting against the sun, watched it clatter into the distance leaving behind the renewed silence of the day and a feeling of unfocused agitation. 

I haven't written my blog for ages, so a summary (summery?) will have to do to bring us up to date. The summer was up and down until July, downright cold with rain for ten days or so then, and since has been hot. Heatwave hot. Two months with temperatures in the 30s and no rain have left the countryside crisped-up and gasping. We managed to keep the veg patch watered with a drip-feed system, and some of the harvest has been good – tomatoes, beans of various types, cucumbers; but the courgettes and autumn squashes were destroyed right at the beginning of the summer by marauding porcupines, and what remained was severely damaged by an enormous hailstorm in July. So this has been our first summer without being courgetted to death, which is actually a bit sad. Two big butternut squashes sit down there now, ripening, and will be ready to pick in just a few days...terrifying to think what destruction a porcupine or a baby wild boar can wreak in just one hour overnight...I don't know how long I can hold out in the battle of nerves and may end up picking them tomorrow. 

The indian summer has been gorgeous despite the parching. Extra days at the beach and the lake are like a gift. And at this time of year the nights are cool and you can sleep. The mornings are cool to cold and going out at 7am to feed the critters I shiver a little, but I'm still only in a t-shirt and that's pretty amazing for the middle of September. On Monday the forecast is for the weather to break definitively and drop 10 degrees, which will be the start of autumn and, however correct for the time of year, will send me into an immediate slough of despond. All of the winter stretches ahead, and the fact that autumn precedes it, with its mists and mellow fruitfulness, is no consolation.

After a few balmy weeks

After several balmy weeks that were so blissfully springlike for there to be no question that it was a cosmic trick, we were reliably plunged into subzero temps and had quite a bit of snow dumped on us on Saturday. Luckily the 4x4 Panda came into its own so that we were not marooned. All gone now, and we're just festering in an English kind of cold, damp, grim fogginess and longing for summer. 

Maxim is living chained up again after his homicidal rampage through the village a few weeks ago during which he and Mario's horrid terrier indulged in at least one known rabbit-massacre and maybe more. Walking him yesterday evening it was late and dark, and although I took a torch with me I kept it switched off to see how dark-adapted my sight would get, and also as a test of character to see how long I could remain without light in the scary nighttime countryside. Because the countryside at night is scary, full of monsters and potential axe-murderers lurking in the shadows. I walked up through the grass field where the spring is, which sounds nice but actually at the place where the spring comes out Mario has built a sort of brick and cement construction, marked with some sticking-up poles. I could just make out the tractor tracks in the grass so I followed these ("Keep to the path!!"), which led directly towards the spring. In the near-dark this looked like the mouth of a hell devised for Harry Potter and I tensed myself for an enormous raging batwinged creature with evil red eyes to leap out, fang-laden mouth dripping with gore from its last unfinished meal of sheep, dog or human... I was prepared to sacrifice Maxim to the vile creature and in fact that would have solved quite a number of problems for us, but in fact the well of hideous darkness remained resoundingly silent as we slunk past, so I guess I'll have to think of some other way to sort out the dog.

I made it all the way home without switching on the torch.

Someone introduced me

Someone introduced me the other day as his English friend who writes a "blog bellissimo" (thanks, Sandro!) which was very nice but also made me realize how I haven't been keeping up with writing it recently. No excuse other than being busy, but I must try harder.

So a brief catch-up. After my last post about the horse fair we had a couple of weeks of truly miserable weather: cold and foggy, with constant rain alternating between downpour and drizzle. We had our final lot of guests in the apartment, a German family, who were here for ten days and really got the worst of the weather. Of course the day they left the sun came out and the fog lifted. Now we need to be getting on with the veg patch — this weekend is Ognissanti (all saints day) which is traditionally the date for sowing broad beans. We have to weed and rotavate or hoe before we start the planting so that's a lot of work and I don't know that we'll manage it. Last year we planted garlic and onions in the autumn as well, which I want to do again. The garlic was a spectacular success and we're still eating our own; the onions less so but we still have a few left.

The sheep that come on to the opposite field every autumn were here last week and the shepherd not only failed to fence them off but failed to stay and watch them, with the result that the sheep marauded all over the veg patch and ate all the cicoria, swiss chard, broccoli and sorrel. They left the turnip tops, cabbage and fennel, but what they didn't eat they trampled. I was incredibly angry and upset and phoned the shepherd, who came hurtling down and stood looking at the damage almost as sorrowful as I was. He offered me some money (which I accepted, though just a token) but I said what I'd really like as compensation, rather than money, was some of the pecorino cheese that he makes. He promised he'd bring me some, though so far there's no sign of it turning up. We'll see. I think the trampled stuff will grow up again and maybe some of the nibbled plants too, so maybe the damage won't be as bad as I at first thought. I haven't felt like going back to look as it was too distressing, but I'll grit my teeth and go down there today.

We had a good crop of grapes this year — uva fragola, the amazing strawberry-flavoured grape. I made five jars of intense grape jelly and we're eating the rest as dessert grapes. I helped Mario with the vendemmia as usual, though this year in between showers of rain rather than the normal soft autumn sunshine. The harvest was poor, with a lot of spoilt grapes because of the poor summer and cold autumn; I'm not sure how that'll affect the commercial wineries. Managed to get out of the workers' lunch by saying I had to work for a deadline (which was true). 

The farmers have been busy ploughing and this year they've ploughed up a whole load of fields that have previously been fallow. It's amazing how that changes the look of the landscape. It has also substantially affected where we can walk, as we used to walk on paths through various pretty fields that are now ploughed over. Things change.

I'm finally starting to

I'm finally starting to get a bit more energy after my long and (for me) unusual bout of illness and ailment. Today was sunny but cold, but in any case I was inside chained to my computer, looking somewhat longingly out at the fields. At 4.30 I went out to take Maxim for his walk before the sun disappeared behind the hills. First time I've been out for ages without my woolly hat! That felt good.

We went along above the vineyard and up the track, where we came upon a small wizened contadino halfway up a tree at the edge of the field. He was pruning, on a ladder in fact, not actually in the tree. I greeted him cautiously because he couldn't see me coming and I didn't want to make him fall off. He answered without mishap and we had a chat about dog-walking and dogs running away and dogs being chained, most of which I followed despite the thick dialect. No idea who this guy is, but he knew me. 

Walking on, it was nice to see the signs of spring — primroses, daffodils, one huge purple crocus, and several other small wizened contadini doing their stuff up trees, in veg patches or with chainsaws. The air rings with the sound of flirting birds and diesel motors. And it still doesn't feel exactly warm, there's still snow in places, reminding us that we're only in the middle of March and it's early to count our chickens, springwise...

Talking of which, the ducks are laying three eggs a day now. Time to make lemon curd.

When I walk

When I walk Maxim in the mornings I've been seeing, as well as the usual wild boar diggings, a lot of deer tracks. This morning there were three little deer down in the field below Cassie, and Alessio said he sees a little group of them every morning from the school bus. A male and several females, he said, and informed me that he's waiting for the mating season.

The weather's mild now but wet. The first signs of spring are tentatively appearing. Primroses in the woods, and those strange green bell-like flowers, the name of which I can't remember. There's noticeably more birdsong in the mornings too, along with the wonderful feeling of the evenings getting lighter and the even more wonderful feeling of the morning not being absolutely pitch dark when I get up.

On Saturday night

On Saturday night we took part in Earth Hour, WWF’s turn-your-lights-off-for-the-planet worldwide symbolic gesture, at 8.30, eating supper by candle-light and playing Scrabble in the dark (candle-light is dark!). Watching Alessio light the tealights was terrifying. Who’d have thought it could be so hard to get the hang of matches?

That was also the night the clocks changed, and the evenings are now light till about 7.30, which is great. (The adverse effect of course is that it’s now back to being almost dark when we get up at 6.30a.m., which is not so nice.) With all the blossom and the wildflowers there’s a proper sense of spring now – or there was till a couple of days ago, when a cold depression blew in, and a cloud has been sitting on top of us ever since, and we're back to mist, rain and mud. We’ve turned most of the radiators off but I’m still wearing two pairs of socks.

Not so many cuckoos here, but we’ve spotted the First Hoopoe of Spring. Hoopoes migrate here for the summer and are stunning pink birds with black-and-white striped wings and a crest. They tend to return each year to nest in the same place, like swallows; no sign of them yet, but our resident pigeons are nesting in their holes in the outside walls of the house, and there's a great deal of small-bird activity, blue tits and finches flying about with twigs and moss in their beaks. The sun has to come out soon. . .

This is the season

This is the season of Really Big Machinery. The farmers are getting in the second-crop hay with the tractor/mowers, and the corn and barley harvest is in full swing. For this they bring out the big guns – the combine harvesters.

Before I lived here I didn’t, for perhaps obvious reasons, think about combine harvesters much. In fact I still don’t think about them very much, but this is their season and it’s hard to avoid them. And they are incredible, amazing, really very, very large beasts indeed. They are itinerant and travel from farm to farm for the harvest, and meeting them on the tiny, narrow country roads is a scary business. They dwarf everything around them. They even dwarf the big tractors pulling the big trailers carrying various other big bits of combine-harvester supplementary equipment. They are wide and long and tall and bulky, an inelegant, awkward, asymmetrical shape, with a cab high up near the treetops, and surprisingly small wheels. Their sheer size inspires awe, especially in someone driving a Fiat Panda. You see them on the roads moving in a slow convoy, a tractor/trailer first and then the combi and then the lorry that the harvested grain is spewed into, the whole preceded by a jeep with someone waving a red flag to let oncoming traffic know there’s something to be taken seriously on the road ahead.

And yet in the fields they are almost nimble and so perfectly fit-for-purpose. They pass up and down the rows of corn with unrelenting straightness. On these steep cultivated hillsides, they are balanced in such a way that they can drive laterally along the slope, one set of wheels higher than the other, and yet the cab remains horizontal. This is amazing to someone like me with absolutely no concept of how such a feat could be achieved.

They are little worlds in themselves: some of the new ones have air conditioning, fridges and sound systems.

Round here we see two or three regulars every year: a slightly elderly, rickety red one, a grasshopper-green one, and a huge new, swanky, dark-green one. You can see them working in a field from miles off, by the cloud of dust that is raised around it as they work. Tractors, lorries and heavy-duty off-roaders wait in attendance by the side of the road. I read on the internet that it costs about £700 at the moment to fill up a combi with red diesel (the subsidized diesel that farmers use), and that this is enough for a single day’s work.

A rather fabulous thing about them is that they work at night, too. In the ferocious summer heat the farmers often save their tractor work till evening when it’s cooler and continue into the night, working by the light of their headlamps. Looking out over the valley you’ll see little sharp pools of light beetling their way across the slopes under the stars. They look lonely, but purposeful and industrious. Driving late at night I stop at the sight of a combine harvester working like this in a dark field, all lit up like some alien craft just touched down out of the sky. I watch the slow power of its progress for a while, and then drive home.