Time for a break

With the windows finally in place, the time has come to start preparing the house for moving in. You would think that after all these weeks it would be a simple matter of a quick shuffling of the furniture from down to upstairs and Bob’s your uncle. As though it would ever be as simple as that.

Before we could start on making the upstairs living area habitable there was the question of the room downstairs that, now it is resplendent with new window, doors and shutters, needs to be converted into my office-cum-classroom-cum-workroom. The first stage in this is putting down a decent floor, which is why Marco the muratore was at the house yesterday morning delivering the tiles that he had previously appeared with and helpfully suggested we use and we’d okayed. As ever the job became more convoluted when the existing lino-like flooring was peeled back to reveal a fissure across the middle of the room so large we are thinking about renaming the house San Andreas.

Undaunted by such minor details, Marco and his assistant whipped out some device, set it in the middle of the room and shone a red line around the walls. This revealed, not surprisingly, that the floor was so bowed we could make a tidy income hiring it out as a skateboard park. Consequently, rather than a couple of days laying levelling and then the tiles, the floor will need to be reinforced with metal rods and concrete, so another protracted (and expensive) operation is about to commence. Just in case any of you were worrying, yes this will raise the floor by several centimetres but no I won’t have to walk around the room in a bowed, Uriah Heep manner as Stephen and the builders made me balance on a broken brick in the middle of the room to check the clearance. There will, though, be no low hanging light fittings making an appearance.

Stephen also took the opportunity to phone Sabina at Folusci to order the two shutters missed from the original order – and she asked if he could send her some pictures of the windows as the fitters had told her how fabulous they looked. She wants them to show potential customers as it is the first time they have installed this colourway. What it is to be original – but, more importantly, does it earn us a discount on the new order? I think we know the answer to that one.

This morning we headed to Cuore Adriatico betimes, not for general shopping but to reconnoitre telephone and Internet access for the house with Computer Luca. First though, needing coffee and sustenance, we stopped at the bar in the centre of the complex for cappuccino and brioche at the bargain price of €4.40 (roughly £3.20). Considering the extortionate price that so-called coffee shops in Britain charge, I am still taken aback by the prices but also the quality of their Italian counterparts.

That is not the only difference, however, and people visiting Italy for the first time might wonder what is happening as coffee here bears very little resemblance to those used to the Costa way. Firstly, the coffee just about anywhere tastes infinitely better; secondly, cappuccino comes in one size only, just a little smaller then the standard cup in Britain; thirdly, no one drinks cappuccino anytime later than midmorning unless they want to be subject to ridicule and talked about for years to come; fourthly, should you visit someone and they ask if you would like a coffee, what you will be given is a strong shot of espresso so don’t expect to linger over a mug of Nescafe.

Having got that out of the way, to return to the more pressing matter of the phone: having dismissed Vodaphone because it was just too complicated with adding this and adding that, we settled for TIM, an Italian brand owned by Telecom Italia, who seemed to offer a decent package that suited our needs. What’s more, it only took forty-five minutes for the nice lady to complete filling in the forms and getting me to sign twenty times – not bad for Italy. The only hiccup, though, was sorting a smart phone for me to use the inclusive minutes, as you can only obtain one using an Italian credit card.

It would appear that having money in the bank is not enough in our modern world; our value depends on the credit we’ve run up on a little bit of plastic. So much for progress.