Nor any drop to drink

Working on the basis that the current trend in modern culture is that of the sequel, and after all what’s good enough for Johnny Depp is good enough for us, we come this week to Pirates of the Wheat Field Part 3: The Return of Loris.

It is a while now since any mention was made of the erratic water supply to LCDDB so you may be forgiven for thinking that all has been well on that front. Not so, as for some months now the amount of H2O squeezing its way out of our various conduits has been somewhat lacking in gusto. So much so that we have only been able to operate one function at a time. Need a shower? Better not put the washing machine on. Watering the garden, well the washing up will have to wait. This has been, as you can imagine, a tad frustrating, but as with all life’s little inconveniences one comes to learn to live with it and adapt accordingly.

Now that harvesting is over and Mario and Luigi’s field has been cleared of not only the wheat but also the hay bales that were menacing Harry, it was time to investigate the problem. Accordingly, Stephen appeared midway through Monday morning – when I believed he was seeing to business at the factory – with Andrea the plumber. After a spot of toing and froing between the meter at the top by M&L’s house and the pump in our garden, the consensus appeared to be that both these parts of the system were in full working order, therefore the problem lay in the pipes, and probably the section in the part of the field that, since the earthquakes, has decided to take on the shape of a ski jump. This accords with what we have thought all along and so we picked up the bat phone and called for Loris. As ever, he responded even quicker than if we had flashed a silhouette of a digger on the night sky, and he arrived late Monday evening for a recce of the land, saying that he would try to be back the next afternoon as he had a job to finish off in the morning.

This all meant that Stephen spent a jolly few hours on Tuesday pm in the heat and the sun ‘supervising’ Andrea and Loris as they sorted our problem. Both were men of their words and arrived soon after lunch, whereupon Loris, who had carried out work on the pipe a few years ago, showed remarkable powers of memory by excavating a hole in the lower part of the field where there was a joint – although he was helped in this by the presence of a large piece of scrap metal sticking up marking the spot. Andrea was then able, by judging the water flow, to tell that the problem lay before this point. The three agreed that it was probably in the area where the land had slipped after the third and more significant tremor, which had caused several of Mario and Luigi’s vines to glide down the newly created slope and sink into a hole in the ground.

Loris excavated another hole at the top of the said slope and, more by luck than judgement this time, uncovered another joint, where, on investigation, it was found that water was flowing freely. This, by dint of Holmesian deduction, showed the bothersome area was between the two exposed joints. Elementary, my dear Loris. On working backwards from here with the digger, within a few metres the resulting trench showed the pipe having become squashed flat by the shifting earth and hence why the water was having such a hard job getting to the house. The solution, as agreed by the triumvirate, was to continue forming the trench (though at one point Loris was less than happy about it when the ground started moving beneath him) while Andrea went to source 50m of super pipe, which it was hoped would be resistant to changing fault lines.

The upshot of all this was that by late afternoon the pipe had been replaced, Loris had started backfilling the trench, Andrea had gone home for his tea and LCDDB had more water than it knew what to do with – though we resisted the urge to turn on all the taps, run copious washing cycles and jig about in the shower. As they say, you never know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

After such excitement the rest of the week settled down into a series of repeats of current favourites. Thursday we paid a return visit to the market in Fermo, but this time in the company of Marco and Maddalena, and we did manage to purchase – a couple of bargain bracelets and a bag of taralli artigianali, so just the basics then – after eating pizza at Chalet Girfalco, near the cathedral. This meant us walking up from Piazza di Popolo to the higher square, which caused Marco not a small degree of discomfort as his thigh muscles were having great difficulty in coping with an angle. Before you start feeling too sorry for him, this was because he’d been playing five-a-side football and obviously had not bothered to either warm up or cool down correctly. I suppose this is what you get when you think you’re still 19 and can throw yourself around a pitch, as if you were Totti playing for your beloved Roma. For some reason, Maddalena didn’t appear to be oozing sympathy.

This weekend has seen some cooler weather as we had one of those occasional summer squalls just after lunch on Friday, when the wind whipped up alarmingly bringing first hail and then heavy rain. As is the nature of these things, an hour later the sun reappeared and it was as if nothing had ever happened, apart from the odd damp patch where the ground was shaded. It did, though, leave the air fresher and temperatures have hovered around the mid-20s, which is much more conducive to getting things done while still being more than hot enough for some quality us time. Consequently, we took another trip to Porto San Giorgio this morning for another walk up and down the beach (six miles in total) then this evening it was aperitivo time at Forneria Totò, which if anything was even more satisfying than the previous visit and not just because we were served our spritz in a Kilner jar.

And we aren’t the only ones who have had to make concessions regarding the weather. Mario and Luigi, now their crops have been harvested and our water problem dealt with, have turned their attention to prepping the ground for its next stage, bringing their Lamborghini tractorette with its caterpillar tracks into play. As this, in the best tradition of Italian dolce vita, is open topped they have come up with their own solution to keep cool when criss-crossing their fields, which is to tie a beach umbrella, of questionable vintage, to the seat with a length of baling twine. So remember, when you see it as one of the looks for summer ’18 in a future edition of Wallpaper, you saw it here first.