It was a gorgeous, starlit, warmish evening

It was a gorgeous, starlit, warmish evening, and I was out looking for the dogs when I had this really bizarre, Harry-Potter-like experience: my torch picked out a pair of bright green, glowing, apparently disembodied eyes gazing at me from the walnut tree. I had Maxim on the lead and he wasn’t bothered by it at all so I figured it couldn’t really be an evil witch from the land of the dead come to suck my blood . . . so I continued to stare into the branches of the tree and the eyes stared back, occasionally blinking. It wasn’t scary but it was totally, totally freaky. My first thought was that it was an owl; but an owl would have flown away pretty quickly. What was so odd was that I couldn’t see any form or body around the eyes at all, even when I moved the torch beam. Just the eyes and the tree branches.

I gradually circled down and closer to the tree and the eyes followed me . . . And of course it turned out to be a damn cat — not one of ours — when I got beyond its comfort zone it leapt down and ran away into the night. Ok, that doesn’t sound like much but it was a very weird experience.

Alessio did the illustration for me and it's pretty accurate.

It’s still quite warm

It’s still quite warm and we’ve been able to do some work outside. John has started digging out a space for the big tanks we bought to collect the rainwater from the roof to supplement the tank we already have. The new ones hold 1,000 litres each. We need to line all three tanks up in a row at the same level and connect them all together so that the water only needs to enter the first thank but all the tanks fill up. We should get Filippo with his digger to do it, but John seems to be quite enjoying the challenge. Alessio helped him when we got back on Saturday from what turned out to be an ill-fated chess tournament (his team came seventh out of nine), and he dissipated some of his chess rage via hard physical labour.

While all that was going on I raked the bottom half of Cassie’s paddock, which we’ve separated off, preparatory to sowing grass. It was a nice warm evening and felt quite springlike. Yesterday I sowed the grass seed while Cass looked on in astonishment from the other side of the fence (I had the seed in her feed bucket and she was incensed that I was apparently just chucking her feed away without even consulting her). Today it’s raining lightly which is just perfect.

Had two consecutive clear nights at the weekend without a moon, and I finally saw the comet I’ve been trying to locate for ages. It’s comet Lulin, recently discovered (2007), very faint but you can see it through binoculars. It’s a greyish greenish fuzzy smudge, powering along out there, heading past us and out of our solar system. It won’t come back, if at all, for another thousand years. On Friday night I located it just near the star called Regulus in the constellation of Leo, and the next night it had moved visibly 3cm or so up the sky (a long way in astronomical terms!). It’s an amazing thing and it blows my mind to see it. It’s moving really fast and away from Earth now, so it won’t be visible through binoculars for much longer, and the moon’s light will start to affect it shortly as well. So I might never see it again.

The constant sound

The constant sound of trickling water has been today’s acoustic effect as the snow finally melts away, sloooowly. Not only is it still light(ish) at 6.00pm but it’s also still above freezing, both facts that perk me up considerably. Especially if I pretend I haven’t seen the weather forecast for the rest of the week.

It was so nice and almost-balmy (well, ok, I was still wearing three pairs of socks and my attractive woolly hat) today that I let the ducks out for the first time since the fox catastrophe. The injured female is still bent over and hunched but she’s eating and definitely on the mend; the male is fine. But they’re both still incredibly nervous. They tiptoed out of the pen and wandered about looking somewhat dazed for a few minutes, then seemed to remember what a duck’s life is all about, and went off grubbing in the mud, the female hanging close to the male and making little chirrupping noises which sounded very much like duck joy. When I looked for them ten minutes later, out of the kitchen window, they’d voyaged down to the pond and were splashing about in it like crazy, having a brilliant time. The female spent ages washing and preening – ever since the attack she has been dirty and muddy and rather motheaten-looking because she hasn’t been able to keep herself properly clean. I could see that in the pond today she was just in duck heaven.

When I went to fetch them to put them away she was a different creature – clean and sparkly and white – and she stretched her wings out wide and flapped them (one still trailing somewhat) and then fluffed up all her feathers and shook them. Who can say if a duck’s happy or not, really, but this is an amazing recovery.

Gorgeous sunny crispy day

Gorgeous sunny crispy day yesterday, though with 10cm snow on the ground and –8º overnight. I took Cass out on the long rein into the big field to frolic and she frisked about like crazy, kicking up her heels and jumping about. Alessio went down on his hands and knees and started crawling along in the snow and Cass thought that was totally bizarre, stared at him with her eyes out on stalks and her nostrils flared, and then turned round and shot away, trampling on my foot in the process. I kept hold of her and got her calmed down, but I can see my spook-busting programme needs a teeny bit more work.

Latest disaster is our boiler has broken down, which we’re especially pleased about as not only is it a weekend, but it’s one of the coldest weekends of the winter so far. The Archimedes screw that delivers the fuel from the hopper to the firebed has broken in some way, so it’s a major problem. (Our boiler is a huge industrial-looking beast that lives in an external room, and runs on sansa, which is the dry, granular residue left over from crushing olives for oil – a waste-product eco-fuel.) John is trying to take apart the inner workings but it’s very heavy work and even once it’s all opened up I can’t imagine he’ll be able to fix it himself. It’ll need a fabbro (metalworker), I guess, and some bespoke steelwork with a hefty price-tag.

So we have no hot water or central heating and it’s very cold today (it’s 0º outside right now, midday). Luckily we planned for all eventualities when furnishing this house, so we have our fantastic woodburning stove now going full pelt. The living room, at least, is warm and toasty, and we have pans of water on it so that we have hot water whenever we need it for washing and so on. Later we’re going to try starting the boiler itself, as it’s meant to be able to run on wood, with a manual rather than automatic feed. We’ve never tried this but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work, and that would give us hot water for showers and radiators for as long as we could be bothered to keep the fire in the boiler stoked.

Life in the wilds sometimes feels harder than it should be.

Cass shows off this season’s

Cass shows off this season’s must-have accessory, a stylish coat of dried mud.

Yesterday I spent half an hour of very hard work brushing it off her, took her out for a walk and as soon as she hit the grass – down she went. She rolled five times during an hour’s wander, and by the end of it looked as muddy as she had before I brushed her. Only wetter. She frisked about like crazy on the grass too – you could see she hadn’t been out for such a long time. I took her out again today but didn’t bother brushing her first (I’m not stupid), and she was a lot calmer, I even got her trotting circles in the yard. Yay!

Duck is still sad, with her head down, though she's drinking and maybe eating and seems a lot stronger – she walks about (well, staggers really) and stretches her poor damaged wings. But we think she might never be able to lift her head properly, so this will pose a dilemma – she wouldn’t be able to preen and it can’t be very comfortable either – and I don't know if it would be right to keep her like that. She doesn’t seem to be in active pain any more so we’ll continue to see how she goes over the next few days. Maybe as she gets stronger she’ll lift her head. Maybe not.

Lovely dawn sky

Lovely dawn sky this morning, though by the time I’d run inside for my camera the most intense colours had faded. Almost makes it worth getting up before first light. (Almost.)

Yesterday evening I realized that the duck’s beak seemed to be pasted closed by gunk and dried blood, and I wondered if she was even able to drink, let alone eat. So we dipped it in warm salt water and cleaned it up, and that did seem to make a difference. When I gave her back the fresh water she took some sips, and then I put some food in front of her and she truffled into that in quite a starving manner. So that’s a good sign. Her head is still bowed right down though, in a really unnatural and disconcerting way. The male ate and drank yesterday and stretched his wings and tried to flap them, so you can see that although he’s still stiff and achey, he’s on the mend.

I went to the cinema last night (Revolutionary Road: a disappointment), and driving home late, I turned the radio on and caught a just-so-Italian discussion on how to make the perfect pesto.

You assemble your ingredients. Fresh basil. Two cheeses: Parmesan and seasoned pecorino, adjusting the relative quantities depending on how piccante you want your pesto to be. Garlic, which you mash slightly with the back of a spoon. Pine nuts. Oil (extra-virgin olive). Coarse sea salt. And a spoonful or two of the pasta cooking water, for starch.

Your mortar is of course made of marble, and your pestle of olive wood. And you simply mix everything together, crushing and mashing and pounding as required, until you have your pesto.

The two presenters spent a good ten minutes on this, talking with not only real enthusiasm but also deep-seated knowledge (where the best pine nuts come from, what kind of salt), even though I don’t think they were professional foodies. I couldn’t imagine such a discussion taking place on the radio in England, not without some degree of pretension.

Made me want to go and sow my basil seeds.

It’s 5.30 and I’ve just come in

It’s 5.30 and I’ve just come in from feeding the animals – and it's still light outside. What a great feeling that is. The day has been warm with lots of heavy rain showers and the ground is waterlogged, with all the trees dripping, but this evening the sky is somewhat clearer and maybe it’ll be nice tomorrow. The poor horse is soaking wet and covered in mud but she seems happy enough, apart from being bored because I haven’t taken her out for days.

The two remaining ducks are still hanging in there. The male will be fine, I think – he spent yesterday outside (in the run) and today going in and out of the duckhouse, and he’s been drinking and preening and trying to stretch his wings, all of which must be good signs, though he hasn’t eaten anything. The female is still alive but is just sitting in the duckhouse in not very good shape. Her neck droops over so that her beak is pointing downwards and almost touches the ground; I think the fox must have damaged some muscles or tendons in the neck, or maybe she’s just too tired to hold her head up. I think she’s drunk a little water. I’d have thought that if she were going to die, she’d have died by now; yesterday, I saw her keel over on to her side and just lie there, which is really bizarre for a duck and I was certain she was dying, but she didn’t and next time I checked on her she was upright again. So we just keep on waiting.