Don't bank on it

The good news is that I’m not going to make very many demands on your time with this blog entry; the bad news is that you are going to have to put up with me trying to make a series of really quite run-of-the-mill events seem exciting and interesting. Here goes.

Although the weather has continued to be mainly equable, Stephen started the week by acknowledging that the time for lounging on the terrazzo is past when he put away the sunbeds for this year. The other furniture is remaining for the time being, to provide set decoration and because most days it is still pleasant enough to sit out at some point during the day. Elsewhere, Stephen has carried out the great wardrobe change over, starting with consigning all the shorts to their winter quarters on Tuesday followed by other lightweight wear over the weekend. He has, bless him, left me with the odd transitional piece such as a polo shirt or two, so I don’t need to go around swathed in winter wear should there be a sudden Indian summer.

As well as thoughts about winter clothes, our minds also turned to thoughts of other ways to keep warm – namely, where our firewood was. We were, if you recall, expecting the man to deliver it three or so weeks ago, but there has been neither sight nor sound of him since Stephen spoke with him on the telephone. To make sure that we had not been forgotten and would not need to go gathering sticks, Stephen called again on Tuesday to be assured that we were still slated for a delivery as soon as the man got his truck back, as it is currently away being repaired. At least whatever is wrong with it happened before he made the journey to LCDDB and not afterwards, or he might have held our road responsible.

In anticipation of a maybe imminent arrival of logs, Stephen took the advantage of a fine afternoon on Wednesday to move the little stock left over from last winter from the room downstairs at the back of the house to the garage, which (unsurprisingly) opens at the front of the house. He had previously reorganised the garage, as there were a couple of reasons why he thought that would be a better storage place. Firstly, being next to the area where the wood is deposited, it will be a much quicker job – we hope – to stack it all up ready for use, and secondly, it is not only a shorter trip from there to the front door but also part of it is covered by the terrazzo, which is an important consideration should we need to replenish our woodpile during particularly inclement wintery weather.

While this will be the fourth time we will (hopefully) take delivery of a truckload of firewood, (yes, we have been here that long) conversely this past week we have been having fun with a first time delivery of a replacement bank card. You would have thought that this should have been a relative painless process, but being Italy it wasn’t – though we have, this time, to take a portion of the blame upon ourselves. Our current card is due to expire at the end of the month but we were a little concerned that the new one had not arrived, given the generous lead-in time we experienced for such things back in the UK. This is why we took a quick trip to our bank in Montegranaro on Tuesday afternoon, where to our relief the wonderful Simona was on the counter. She checked the computer and said first of all that one had been sent out on the 24th September, before changing that to the 29th and said it should be with us over the next few days.

And so this proved, appearing in our post box two days later on Thursday, but whereas Simona had said that we would have the same PIN and be able to use the card, the accompanying letter said that we had to activate the card online, which would then allow us to reveal the new PIN. When we went onto the site, which is not the most user friendly I’ve ever visited, it was to find that the activate button was greyed out and a notice said a card was in transit – who’d have thought that the Italian postal system would work faster than the World Wide Web.

The next morning, we received a text from the bank asking us to respond with the given code, which would then trigger another message with the new PIN. Stephen did this, and made me write it down somewhere safe. Taking this as a sign that the system now believed we were in possession of the card, I went onto the site again and was able to activate the card. This, however, is where our troubles began for it then took me to a screen asking me to input our password to complete the activation. This would have been all very well if not for the fact that for the online banking I use the automatic log in and with it being three years or more since we entered the password given by the bank I had no idea what it was.

Stephen looked through our documentation but there was no sign of it there, but as he seemed to think that I would have changed it he got me to try various other possible passwords, none of which worked but which did result in us being blocked by the site. Worse things happen at sea, but we are left with having to visit Simona again in order to get ourselves unblocked and find out what the password is or contact Customer Services, and given our past experience of telephone conversations with Italian call centre operatives, the former option seems eminently more preferable. I will just say in my defence that Stephen did casually slip into conversation today that when he got the SMS with the new PIN it said that the card would be automatically activated the first time it was used. Maybe it would have been an idea if he had thought to share this with me on Friday morning…

After this mini-drama, of interest and importance to no one other than us, the end of the week was a breeze. We made one of our sporadic trips to Lidl on Thursday to stock up on some basics (tins of chickpeas, bottled water) and to see what random items they had in at a bargain price (alas no premium gin as there was last time). As ever with Lidl, we had to join a snaking queue at the check out, where Stephen made the lady in front of us join the neighbouring queue as it was shorter and she could put the items she was juggling onto the conveyor belt. I’m sure this was him being his habitual helpful self, and not a devious tactic on his part even though she was still waiting to be served while we were wheeling our bags out of the supermarket.

Yesterday morning was Claudia the dentist’s first lesson, and she proved, despite her assertion that her English was not very good, as chatty as she is in Italian. We also had another reptilian asylum seeker in the shape of a very small gecko, which I had to deal with on my own, as Stephen was elsewhere on the estate, by the now tried and tested method of dropping a tea towel over it and carefully bundling it up and releasing it onto the terrazzo, well away from Bella and Harry who were blissfully unaware, lounging on their day bed.

Maybe the gecko was hanging around because it had got wind that baking was in the offing this weekend as I tried out a new plumcake recipe, this time a coffee and chocolate one whose ingredients included two small tubs of coffee yogurt. That is, it should have included two tubs, but a word of advice for anyone wanting to try the recipe for themselves: when unpacking your shopping, place your cake yogurts on a different shelf in your fridge to the others, thereby avoiding eating one by mistake at breakfast and having to substitute a fruits of the forest flavour instead.

P.S. There will now be a short interval while I take a short trip to the UK for an important event. Ci vediamo tra due settimane.