Market forces

Well, last week I promised to do better and I think I might just have managed it. It’s been a close call, though, as the start of the week offered little in the way of excitement, other than calling in at the Comune on Wednesday to get another reduced VAT form signed, this time for the nascent railings.

Mind you, Tuesday turned into a busy day, lesson-wise, with no less than three. At this rate it’ll start to feel like I’m actually working. I had my usual Tuesday afternoon lesson with Giordano, which was followed by an hour with his teenage daughters as their mother is keen for them to have some conversation with a native speaker – and also, I think, to make sure that they do something useful during their summer holidays. In the morning, I had my first lesson with the two young sons of Alessandra, one of my Saturday afternoon ladies; again, to give them some experience of speaking English and some idea of basics. I’m finding that a lot of parents, and some children, are concerned that the standard of language teaching in Italian schools is not all it should be, relying heavily on text books with little explanation or interaction between pupils and teacher.

Things got a bit more interesting on Thursday morning, though not necessarily in a good way, when we managed to lock ourselves out of the house. For reasons too complicated to go into and being in a bit of a hurry, I managed to confuse my upstairs key with the downstairs keys, which I realised in that split second after I’d pulled the door closed. ‘Have you got your key?’ I called down to Stephen waiting by the car, knowing as I spoke what the answer would be; remembering his keys is an optional extra as far as he is concerned. This time he was keyless because, he said, he hadn’t swapped them over from the pair of shorts he’d been wearing earlier.

There was no point panicking, besides we couldn’t do anything about it right then as Stephen was due at the factory while I had a ten o’clock lesson over in Rapagnano with Alessandra’s sons. On our return, it was obvious after a quick recce of the upstairs terrazzo that there was no way we could gain entry from there. So, before taking the drastic step of smashing the kitchen window, Stephen tried one last plan involving ladders and zanzare screens. The interests of home security forbid me from divulging how he managed to enter LCDDB, suffice to say he was successful - though it is quite scary how easily he got in and how ineffective Bella and Harry are as guard dogs. Wagging tails and licking legs are not a deterrent. As for his keys, when he checked his other shorts later they weren’t there after all. Yes, he’d had them in his bag all along. Need I say more?

In the evening, after my lesson with Irene, we headed over to Fermo to take a look at the market held on Thursday evenings during the summer. July it may be, but as we left home clouds were gathering in the sky and a little bit of freshness in the air had brought the temperature down a few degrees. Not enough, however, to prise us out of our shorts and, as we expected, in the sheltered centre of Fermo it was still an agreeably warm evening for strolling through the stalls. Before this, though, we tested the pizze at Chalet Girfalco, which had been recommended to us as a good place to eat. Indeed it was, not only because the food was good but also because of its situation, tucked away in a peaceful setting next to a grassed and tree-lined piazza fronting the duomo.

We had a very pleasant wander, afterwards, and considered various potential purchases but only came away with a large jar of honey and two friendship bracelets. There were, though, one or two things that we might go back for later in the summer as the market runs till the first week of September. Hopefully on our next visit there might be more opportunity to buy some comestibles, for while there definitely seemed to be more stalls than last year, ones selling meat and cheese were in short supply. We only spotted one and we weren’t convinced by the look of his produce. Bring back that nice man where we bought some aged pecorino and a wild boar salame last year.

The gathering clouds of Thursday evening lived up to their promise when Friday turned into a bit of an aberration, being a day of persistent rain and plummeting temperatures – sort of like an average British summer’s day, really. In some ways it was a bit of a relief, as the heat and the humidity had been gradually building, with the inside of our house holding at just shy of 30c all day and all night. At least we knew that the rechanneling of the road was working, as no deluge ran down our driveway. However, it seemed to have an adverse effect on our Internet service, which gave up the ghost just after lunchtime and, despite brief rallies, stayed off for the rest of the day. When Alessandro, my student, came for his lesson in the afternoon he said it was because the phone box in the village gets soaked, which seems perfectly reasonable to me given our past experiences with both Italian technology and Italian telephone systems. Next time you bemoan your broadband speed, just remember, it could be worse…much worse.

Anyway, to cheer us up, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner at Arco, an osteria in Magliano di Tenna, housed in the run of buildings that enclose the old town square. Ordinarily in summer you can eat on the terrace, which has a panoramic view over the surrounding countryside, but nothing like that was going to happen on this visit. In fact, we were lucky to get a table at all, even though I had asked Stephen earlier in the week if we needed to book. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘it won’t be that busy, besides it’s not August so there won’t be lots of tourists.’ Right. Fortunately, as the patron knows Stephen from previous visits with Leaping Luca entertaining clients, he was good enough to do a bit of a shuffle with a couple of tables and wangle us a spot. I’m very glad he did, as the food was fabulous – not the place to go if you want culinary pyrotechnics but if you appreciate fine ingredients cooked simply but expertly, then it is a place to visit. As I said after a particularly fine bowl of rigatoni with onion, guanciale and tomatoes, if we were at home we could have picked up the plate and licked it. There are some downsides to eating out.

It’s just as well we filled up at Arco because yesterday, as the Internet spluttered back into action and the skies gradually started to clear, the oven decided to take a sabbatical. ‘Fail’ read the display, with the helpful code ‘F7’. The user’s manual offered no explanation what that meant, only saying that for any F code you had to phone up the service centre and not try to do anything yourself. Well, who ever heeds that sort of advice, especially when the centre is closed until Monday? Not Stephen, who followed the usual procedure these days for any sort of electrical device malfunction, which was to switch it off for a few seconds then switch it back on. And it worked… for about 30 seconds, when it stubbornly went back to Fail mode and refused to budge from there. This put a bit of a kibosh on my plans to take advantage of the lower temperatures and make a lemon cake, with some of the eggs that Nazareno’s wife had given Stephen the other day, without turning the kitchen into a sauna.

This latter seems a likely outcome should I be able to get round to a spot of baking next week as normal service has resumed today as far as the weather is concerned. Now that the air was warm and dry again, we were able bring up the second piece of furniture that Stephen has finished for the dressing room, a wardrobe this time. Of course, as is the nature with these things, it was a little more complicated than that, for not only did we move the wardrobe but we also cleared out a great swathe of clothing from the upstairs room and stored it away downstairs. It’s on occasions like this that you wonder for a moment why you have so many clothes and whether you really should have another cull. But sanity returns and you realise that where clothes are concerned, there is no such thing as too many. Just as well, then, that Stephen still has two more wardrobes to upcycle; goodness knows, we need them.