Jam today

Not the most exciting of weekends but one that has been productive in its own way and on diverse fronts.

Yesterday saw the return of Lorella, my student who is improving her English for the pure love of it, after her summer break. She was as enthusiastic as ever, which is, I think, partly due to enjoying time for herself away from work and family commitments. You may think it is a bit of a tough call, having to work on a Saturday morning, but it is a joy with someone like Lorella – besides, as Stephen was down at the house cleaning up the ceiling beams I think I drew the long straw.

In the afternoon we went shopping – again. Firstly we returned to Smal, the lighting shop at Cassette D’Ete, where we ordered lights for the snug (which is what we have started calling our sitting room), the small vestibule leading to the bedroom and bathroom and for outside. After this we headed to downtown Civitanova Marche: no mean feat on a normal Saturday but even more of a challenge when half the roads in the centre were closed because of some festa or other.

We did, though, with some artful weaving through backstreets by Stephen (it has always been a puzzle to me how he knows his way so intimately round the entrails of a city) eventually arrive at the Kartell shop. This is the nearest, I think, to Heaven on Earth for Stephen, being small but elegantly formed and full of past, present and future design classics. Our mission: to order, with the money Mum and Dad kindly gave us as a wedding/leaving present, one of their clear Stone stools – a prosaic name for something of such beauty. We intend to use it as a small table in our dressing room, setting it in the corner where it will catch the afternoon and evening light. Well, that’s the plan.

Satisfyingly, not only did the shop contain lots of things we would dearly love to own (who doesn’t need a table in the shape of a garden gnome?) but was womanned by a quite mad assistant who smiled almost as much as she talked. She did eventually take our details for the order and move on to the next customer who’d been waiting very patiently.

Today has seen Stephen back at the beams while I have been making plum jam for Flavia. Never one to miss a bargain, she had decided that the price of plums was too good to miss and asked me if I could make jam. Yes, I said, not thinking that I would be spending Sunday morning stoning 4 kilos of them - and that wasn’t all all of them but it was all that would fit in the pan.

I was a little trepidatious about the business, partly because it is always unsettling cooking in someone else’s kitchen and partly because Italian jam is not at all like its British counterpart. Where ours is a translucent jelly like consistency theirs is much more opaque and grainy, sort of what you would expect from a fruit cheese. This is, I think, due to extended cooking as Flavia was expecting the concoction to bubble away for a couple of hours with no mention of a sugar thermometer or a setting point. Undaunted, after a good twenty minutes I cooled a plate, dolloped on a spoonful and as it wrinkled nicely we bottled it. Let’s just hope the taste and consistency is as fabulous as the colour, and that the British way of making jam gets the Stefoni seal of approval.