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We have to consider ourselves lucky, as the intense heat that seems to have swept over Spain and Portugal has passed us by. Stephen says this is because the wind from Africa took a sharp left when leaving Algeria. It was just as well we had to put up with floundering in the low 30s, as the end of the week turned into something of an unexpected social whirl - for whilst a slight glow on such occasions is permissible, perspiring is a definite faux pas.

The heat did affect us indirectly, as usual at this time of year, when Mario and Luigi took to ploughing their fields around LCDDB early in the morning and late at night to avoid the intense daytime sun. Though the churning drone of a tractor is not overly intrusive while watching a spot of pre-bedtime TV (and no real competition for the piercing screams of the contestants on Project Runway: Junior), and Mario did apologise, when we saw him, for working the land till 11pm, it’s a slightly different matter when two engines start up at 5.30am and the brothers form a tilling tag team. Not that we mind; it is, after all, only for a couple of days and I’m sure that people in cities are woken up by much less wholesome sounds.

Porto San Giorgio continued to supply us with good things this past week, and not just my two lessons with Michele, who seemed to be much more relaxed during the second one. Maybe he accepted that spending an hour with me and the English language wasn’t the dreadful punishment that he might have feared. Stephen accompanied me on both the trips, which were fruitful in more ways than one. On Monday we added yet another café to our growing list when we took refreshment at Nova Cento on the main square. We had been here once before, for a somewhat indifferent hot chocolate the Christmas before last. Since then, it has had a drastic make over, losing half the café space to a fashionable clothes salon, visible through the glass partition wall, and redefining the rest in a sparse, urban chic style, which with the air conditioning offered respite from the morning sun. We have to say that their caffè freddo (shaken not stirred) is the best so far – and, more importantly, the toilets can be recommended too.

All this was as nothing, however, to the joy unbounded that filled Stephen’s heart after spending Thursday’s lesson time touring PSG’s market, a veritable treasure trove of some things you forgot you needed in your life and a whole lot more that you never realised you did. He carried out a thorough recce and has stored away several items that he has promised me we can go and look at again as we didn’t really have time on. This was partly due to us having to hit the Intimissimi sale for some more new swim shorts – ones that I had seen previously in Bologna and dithered over but which were now hot buys being half-price – and partly to that day’s emergency call for help from the Carellis that Stephen had to respond to, necessitating an earlier than anticipated return to MSP. We are thinking of renaming LCDDB, Tracy Island.

Not that it is all one way traffic with the factory, as it does supply a convenient dropping off point when we want to order something online – not an infrequent event. The latest parcel that they took delivery of on Friday on our behalf was our new vacuum cleaner. This was to replace the Gtech we’d brought with us from the UK, but which had given up the ghost on Wednesday morning. A quick trip to Unieuro at Girasole identified a Samsung model that seemed to fit our needs and it was on offer. A quick check on the smartphone (see, they do have their uses) showed that Amazon.it stocked the same model and at two-thirds the cost of the reduced one in the shop. Needless to say, we left Girasole empty handed (if you discount the bag of salad and the bottle of frizzante we bought at the supermarket – teatime essentials), and went home to order it online where there was additional proof that it pays to shop around. On checking the available colours, we were able to get a further €10 off if we bought a yellow one – so of course we did.

A new household appliance was not the only cause of bringing an unusual colour into our lives. In case you were wondering, the tomatoes are still flourishing, though Stephen’s almost daily cropping had an addition at the start of the week when the white aubergines were ready for harvesting. I hesitate to use the word ‘ripen’, as that may be slightly misleading for something of a monochrome hue, but they were, in their own small way, quite startling. Not only were they a sleek, glossy fior di latte colour, but the taste was just as fine as Claudio’s wife told us they would be when she recommended them all those weeks ago when we called in at her daughter’s plant and pet store in Monte San Giusto where she was giving a helping hand. Who said provincial life was simple?

This is all very interesting, I hear you saying, but what about the promised social whirl? That all began on Thursday with the first night of five of the Festival Beer Park, an event that has definitely become MSP’s biggest and most successful. Being somewhat ambivalent about the opening act of the festival – a Jovanotti tribute act called, in a moment of inspiration, Jovanotte – we went early doors by Italian standards, arriving just after 8pm and leaving 90 minutes later after pizza, chips, olive ascolane and beer and a bit of a chat with a couple of friends. It was a different story the next night when we met up with Marco and Maddalena after dinner and went with them for our second visit, arriving at about the same time as we had left the night before.

And what a difference a day makes as the park was heaving. Granted, it was Friday night, but in addition the group performing, Bandabardò, is a renowned live band of some 25 years experience with a couple of top ten albums under its belt who brought in a cohort of their fans, some of whom had travelled considerable distance to see them. It was just as well we chose the previous night to eat there, as the two food only queues at the cash desks far outstripped the drinks only one. Speaking afterwards to Giulia, my conversation partner who was serving at the beer counter, it seems there were some problems with getting the food out as they were completely unprepared for the number of orders from so many people. The upside, though, was that the atmosphere was fantastic and, hopefully, the evening would have made lots of money for the parents’ group that organise the event and who plough any profits into the local schools.

Being the beginning of August meant that, besides the Festival Beer Park, it was also time for our now annual visit to Campofilone for the Sagra dei Maccheroncini, which we did yesterday. I won’t go into great detail about it, as it has been covered in extensively elsewhere in these pages, but will just say that it was a good as ever, the pasta and ragù tasted even better, if that is possible, and we bought two salami from one of the stalls for the bargain price of €5. There was, though, an elegant variation at the Spinosi food station where we ate. In the past, the maccheroncini and sauce have been mixed the traditional way, on a large board on a table and by women. This year, whilst the board was still there, the mixing was being done by men as well. Talk about breaking the durum ceiling.

Nor were they the only men to break new ground for Stephen proved that he, too, could don the mantle of machismo should the situation require it. We always get to Campofilone for the start of the evening’s proceedings to be well ahead in the queue for food, but also because it is so much easier to park. This year we were directed by the usual cohort of parking stewards to a field below our habitual spot under the trees, where a handful of cars had already been sent. Little did the men on duty there know, when they directed Stephen to reverse into his allotted place in order to maximise the space available, that they were dealing with someone who is known to have circumnavigated Manchester in order to avoid just such a manoeuvre.

I do think, in the circumstances, it was a bit unreasonable of the steward to start huffing and looking annoyed with my beloved, as it only took him four attempts and he did manage to park reasonably close to the adjacent car and almost parallel with it. We are in Italy, after all, where parking in general has all the flamboyancy of an automotive Quentin Crisp.

We thought that was going to be the sum of our junketing for the week, but we had reckoned without Computer Luca. On Saturday morning, after he had seen our pictures of the beer festival on Facebook, he suggested that we go together tonight; for some reason the idea of standing around, drinking beer amidst a crowd of burly men seemed to interest him. I can’t think why. In the event, there was a rather drastic change of plan after Luca went last night, with a work colleague, to the opera in Macerata, making use of a spare ticket for The Magic Flute.

You may have gathered by now that Luca is not a person to enter into anything half-heartedly. He is the sort of person for whom boxed sets and binge watching were made, and he has obviously decided to apply the same principle to his new-found passion: the opera. It was all fabulous, he told Stephen this morning, and said we would love it just as much as he did and did we want to go this evening with him. We agreed, thinking that it might be a bit short notice to get tickets, but to Luca’s delight there were a few left at what passes for a reasonable price for such a cultural spectacle and so he booked us three tickets. Which is why, at 8.30, we were in Piazza Mazzini meeting with Luca, the print out of our tickets in our hands, and heading to the opera building for that evening’s performance of L’Elisir d’Amore by Gaetano Donizetti, a comic opera about the path of true love not running smoothly.

The opera house in Macerata is a truly lovely building, though you can see why the performances are in July and August as the stage and main seating area are open to the elements. The stage itself is of considerable size, running almost the entire length of the back wall with entrances along walkways and up steps from the sides. The stalls fan out from the stage on a large, slightly raked grassy area, access to which is through the crescent shaped arcade linking one end of the stage to the other. This part of the building also houses two tiers of box seating, no doubt for the great and the good and the corporate entertainers of Le Marche.

In our ignorance, L’Elisir d’Amore is not a work that has ever brushed our consciences, even though it is in the top fifteen of most performed operas. This may be because, to people schooled on Classic FM and bread adverts, there was no readily recognisable aria. That’s not to say that the music wasn’t engaging, which it was, and together with the production drew you into the world of the opera. Someone had had the brilliant idea of not only modernising it, but also setting it al mare where our hero, Nemorino, a put-upon beach attendant, was trying his best to win the heart of Adina, the owner of a chic chalet, thus allowing lots of comic interplay featuring drenching with water, gyrating scantily clad bodies of both sexes and a fabulous inflatable wedding cake. I’m not sure what Donizetti would have made if it all, but we loved it. We could see why Luca was so eager to return, as we are next season.

There was one thing that bothered Stephen before we went to Macerata, however, which was what does one wear for a night at the opera? For him, it was his black vintage Tommy Hilfiger shirt with the Chinese dragon across the front, tight black trousers rolled to the calf (which looked like peddle pushers that Doris Day might have worn in her hey-day) and his best cocktail Gucci glasses. To these he added his gold lame and iridescent Velcro sneakers, which he had not worn for quiet some time, and this is where he made a most serendipitous discovery. When he roused them from their hibernation in one of the boxes downstairs and started to clean them, he found, tucked into the toe of one of them, his wedding ring, the ring that he lost some eighteen months ago and had failed to find no matter how hard he looked. Consequently, he now has two, as a replacement ring was my main gift to him last Christmas. By my reckoning that means we are now married twice over, and you could consider it bigamy on his part. I like to think, however, that buying him a second ring after he lost the first was actually big of me.

Thank you, I’m here all week…