Sure and steady

The three days since our lunch at the beach have been ones of new students, house stuff and the amazing disappearing tortoise.

Before we get to all that however, I am pleased to report that the new car made its first trip to the house and coped admirable with the road. All the benefits of a four-wheel drive became evident when we left and were able to climb up the stony incline at a decorous pace rather than setting off full pelt in first gear, fingers crossed that the momentum will hold out till the crest is breached. All this bodes well for when the ice comes in the winter, though it will deprive us of an excuse for hibernating should there be a heavy snowfall.

So what of my new students, Andrea and Irene? Both are recent graduates fresh to the job market who have realised that in Italy, to make yourself attractive to employers, you need a good standard of English. Italian may be the language of romantic operas but for all its beauty it is not the language of international business – English is, and is so at an increasing rate. Both studied the language to a reasonable level at school and have a good basic standard but wish to brush up their skills and become more fluent.

Andrea came in something of a panic, as he is due to start work sometime in September and will have to communicate in English with his colleagues and contacts in other parts of Europe. Irene appears calmer about the whole business and has, I think, quite a good knowledge but is quite shy. She likes to take her time to make sure that she doesn’t make mistakes. This is the great dilemma when speaking a foreign language: to speak fluently with lots of errors or to speak haltingly but more accurately. Which, of course, is where I come in, getting them to be both fluent and accurate.

The need to be able to speak English was in evidence when we went on Monday afternoon to order our kitchen at IKEA in Ancona. We have settled on IKEA because it has the kitchen that we like the most (if you discount the ones that would cost the equivalent of a terraced house back in Bury), though I was a bit tentative about how much of a help they would be. I had visions of having to pick units from a catalogue and hope they were the right ones. I needn’t have worried. We were placed in the hands of Elena, a wonderful young lady who, like her colleague who first approached us, spoke almost perfect English and who then proceeded to spend two hours with us at a computer as we picked the units and appliances and manoeuvred them to get the optimum use of the space we had available. Everything was itemised, delivery was organised and fitting arranged before we left – altogether a slick and professional service and all carried out in English.

We can only hope that sorting the bathroom will be as painless, though that is going to be a bigger job. Initially we thought we could live with it for a while if it had a good clean, then we thought we would leave the tiles and replace the fittings (which became more necessary when we discovered the sink had a crack and leaked) but have now decided to go the whole proverbial hog. We are going to completely gut the room, removing everything including floor and wall tiles, and start from scratch. We carried out a bit of a recce yesterday afternoon with Maddalena and checked out a couple of bathroom places but really it would make life much easier for us if we could find somewhere that carried out the full service rather than having to project manage it ourselves. (Of course, by ‘ourselves’ means Stephen.)

Talking of Stephen, he has had a couple of busy days at the house. Yesterday he had Loris and his amazing machine levelling out the land around the back of the house so that we can fix up a fence. This is much needed if we are to keep Bella and Harry from roaming the local countryside and engaging in banter with the porcupines and occasional wild boar. Loris has done a fabulous job, and it is amazing how much difference just flattening out the back garden can make!

Today it has been the turn of the plumber, who was checking out for fitting a new boiler. The present one has seen much better days, and knowing how cold it can be in January, we want to know we have a heating system we can rely on. All being well, he should be installing our state of the art replacement next week.

Which brings us to the disappearing tortoise and one of the surreal twists that life in the Stefoni household takes from time to time when I walked into the downstairs cloakroom to find it, along with lettuce and a piece of tomato, in the bidet. For all I know it may be quite common in certain quarters to keep reptiles in various items of sanitary ware, but Flavia had resorted to this measure because the animal in question kept disappearing from its home at the bottom of the kitchen steps.

When we first arrived, it was thought that Marzia, Elsa’s daughter and Flavia’s granddaughter, had been playing with it and had forgotten to put it back. However, it was happening when she had not been around and so it was believed that it was squeezing out somehow through the planks arranged to fence it in. Stephen took matters in hand, bought some wire and supports and replaced the planks with a more comprehensive barrier, making sure that all possible exits were securely barred to the Houdini with a half-shell.

Not so; the tortoise kept vanishing, sometimes for days on end and I think fears for its reptilian soul were beating fiercely in Flavia’s breast. I found it on several occasions when alerted by Bella’s and Harry’s barking (fortunately they yelp but keep their distance) and once when I heard it walking on the desiccated needles from the pine trees. Hence its confinement to the bidet as a means of ensuring it does not go AWOL before Stephen has had the chance to increase the fortifications.

And how is he going to manage this? By raising the height and taking the top inwards at a marked incline, as Teresa, who is still visiting, was the one to discover the means by which the tortoise was getting out. Why, it was climbing up the fence of course.