Summer Knights

It’s been a week of do-si-doing: a few steps forward, a few back and quite a bit of spinning around, and one that started and finished with a trip to Obi, the DIY store in Civitanova.

We went there on Monday afternoon as Stephen wanted some grey Hammerite-type paint, or rather its Italian equivalent, for the garage doors, which we bought along with some other bits and pieces for the house and garden. We returned today for some more paint and some more bits and pieces as we somehow managed not to buy enough on our first trip. Still, with the second lot purchased, Stephen was able to complete the painting this afternoon, and a very fine job he has made of it, too.

In pursuance of the garden, if not indeed, the house beautiful, on Wednesday we called in at Giordano the Ferramenta’s on the way back from an abortive visit to the bank in Montegranaro, to buy a souped up petrol strimmer for the garden. We set of in high hopes for the bank in order, at last, to change our address with them to LCDDB now that we have official evidence from the Comune. What we had not taken into account was that Simona, our account manager, would be on holiday. Obviously, no one else was able to manage the change for us, though a very pleasant jumper-clad man behind the desk (the temperatures are only in the mid-20s after all) took a photocopy of our sheets and said he would pass them on to Simona on her return. And then?

As for the strimmer, we’d been working on the ‘no wash’ theory, that if we left the garden round the house for long enough it would miraculously transform into a naturally picturesque meadow garden. Not so. Whilst we do have an abundance of lovely wild plants growing, it is becoming so that when Bella and Harry are having their playtime chasing balls, without the sound of Bella chewing at hardened plastic we’d be hard pressed to locate them in the dense undergrowth. Stephen’s solution is the strimmer, which he will use to gradually clear the grasses and plants, maybe leaving an area near the well for our own mini beyond the pale.

He made a good start on an area at the front of the house in the afternoon after donning his protective helmet and gloves (which I really do believe are not part of the attraction). During his second session on Thursday, however, he decided that the plastic cord was not really robust enough and he should change it for the blade – only he couldn’t work out how to get it off. Another trip to Giordano the Ferramenta was called for, but not only for help with the strimmer. We also needed to buy a new hose, one long enough to reach the lotto from the tap at the back of the house, as the one Stephen had bought from a certain well-known online retailer proved to have a design fault when he came to try it out on Wednesday evening.

He had placed me strategically at the outside tape while he stood ready, hose in hand, to drench the lotto when he gave me the command to turn on the water. However, on the first attempt, things didn’t quite go to plan as no water came gushing out. The reason: the end of the hose was sealed. While we thought this a trifle strange for a hosepipe, we just accepted this oddity without pursuing why it was so and, as a solution, Stephen cut off the end. I turned the tap on a second time, and started to wonder why there was so much water leaking from the tap – and indeed leaking all the way along the pipe, so much so that Stephen was unable to manage even a trickle from the severed end. And then realisation dawned; he’d bought an irrigation hose. Well that should teach him to read the small print before committing his money, especially if the price, as he claims, was very reasonable. At least should the time arrive when our wilderness garden becomes an homage to Gertrude Jekyll, we have the means to keep it well moist.

Thursday also saw us, before getting to Giordano’s, paying an afternoon visit to the Comune to see if we could get any joy regarding the reduced VAT question that Stephen had tried to sort out last week. Besides, a week without a visit to the Comune is like a holiday without sunshine: dull and pointless. We had better luck this time as the man who knows about these things was actually in the building and was able to point us in the direction of the correct form, which the charming and efficient Jessica promised to, and indeed did, email to Stephen. All we need now is to figure out how to fill it in.

Being on a roll, we also mentioned about the Comune sending someone to cut back all the growth by the side of the road leading down to LCDDB and beyond, which is encroaching significantly on the already limited width. In doing so, we were supporting Luigi, who has been on more than one occasion to berate anyone in the vicinity of the Ufficio Tecnico (Italy being the land of shout first and ask questions later) as he and Mario are concerned that when they’re due to start harvesting their bean crop in a few weeks time, they won’t be able to get the tractor down the road.

Despite having been let down over his hosepipe, Stephen took yet another delivery from his online supplier on Friday, this time a set of snail traps. Looking a bit like miniature pagodas, he is planning to set them at tactically advantageous points in the lotto and entice the unwary gastropods, both shelled and un, to their beer-sozzled doom. There were some life-enhancing parts to the day, however, when I kept Stephen company on a trip to collect elastic from a firm on the way to Porto San Giorgio, and then carried on to the PSG itself hunting down worming tablets for Bella and Harry. As we were too early for the pet shop’s evening opening hours, we killed time enhancing my summer wardrobe with some new polo shirts and canvas shoes at Globo, an Italian clothing and footwear company, sort of like TK Maxx without the pretensions.

And so to the weekend.

After kicking off festa fever last week at MSP’s Erbe Spontanee shindig, we headed yesterday evening, with Marco and Maddalena, to Cerreto Medievale. Cerreto is a small hamlet comprising an old church and half a dozen houses, about ten minutes away from MSP. As it is situated in the bottom of a small valley, with one road in and the same road out, we had to park on the main road but eschewed the courtesy mini-bus in favour of walking (much quicker both going and coming back than waiting in the long queue).

Once in the village, the whole of the area had been taken over by the festa, with mediaeval signage and appropriately clad helpers and servers as well as a variety of entertainments. These, from axe wielding combat reenactments to sword swallowing to stand up comedy, fitted the feudal theme both in looks and content (well, maybe not the comedy). The whole event was extremely well organized, though the amount of people pouring into the limited space meant a bit of a wait for food as well as some strategic jockeying to get a spot at one of the trestle tables to eat it. However, with the promise of summer in the air as twilight turned to nightfall, the genial atmosphere and much to see and do, it has to be one of the best nights of our time so far in Italy – and definitely the best plate of polenta.