Father's Day

And so we find ourselves reconvening in the same place, though maybe not the same time, after my trip to the UK and with a fortnight to cover I better get on with it. I hope you’re sitting comfortably.

The week leading up to my departure started much as any other, apart from three or four missed calls to my mobile from an unrecognised number. As these, in the past, have usually been either wrong numbers or someone trying to get me to change energy providers I gave them scant attention. This one, though, proved somewhat more persistent, the reason becoming clear when the caller eventually got through on Tuesday evening. It was a young woman called Federica (and not Francesca, as Stephen, who handled the bulk of the call assured me it was) who was desperate for five lessons before the 19th October. This was a tight fit considering my imminent departure for Sheffield, but with three lessons at the end of that week and two at the end of this last one, we managed to squeeze them in.

When she came for the first lesson the next day, Wednesday, it transpired that she was in the throes of studying for an important exam which, should she pass (which I’m sure she will, being intelligent and obviously hardworking) will be highly beneficial to her career and she wanted to polish her language skills before taking it in early November. This is all putting her under a lot of pressure, for not only is she studying hard but she also works all day for a business consultant based in MSP as well as fitting in an hour’s commute each way from Pedaso. Not that you would suspect she was unduly overstretched given the enthusiasm and energy she brought to the lessons and the amount of questions she asked – most of which I think I got away with when answering.

Those of you not comatosed by last week’s story of the bank card might have a vague interest in knowing how it turned out, which I am pleased to say was highly successfully. This was largely – if not totally – due to the efficiency of Simona at the bank when we turfed up at her office on Thursday afternoon. Simona is one of those people (who, without being sexist, so often are women) who calmly and competently just get things done without making any fuss or making you feel stupid. She listened to our sorry tale then checked our account, only to find that despite the message we had received the card wasn’t blocked and we didn’t need a new PIN. We did, though, need the online account unblocking, which she sorted whilst conducting two other dialogues, one with a teammate and another with a waiting customer. She even supervised us logging on again and made sure that everything was working properly. After all this, it seemed somewhat churlish to feign ignorance when she went for a bit of upselling and asked us about our house insurance, the result being that we will be back in a couple of weeks to see what deal her English-speaking colleague can sort for us.

We had already decided, as we were out and about, to go on from the bank in Montegranaro down the hill to Il Castagno, the outlet village on the main road from Casette d’Ete. The purpose? To get a new pair of shoes for me to wear next week, Stephen having decided when he did the wardrobe changeover that my standby brogues might have to be downgraded to everyday wear. Having no preconceptions as to what I wanted turned out a blessing, as rather than searching for something specific I was able to have my head turned by a pair of indigo blue toe-capped Oxfords and a snakeskin belt in the same colour, which would enable for me to cut a dash at any semi-formal occasion.

We should then have been on countdown to my departure, had it not been for my nephew Jonathan arriving for a long-awaited visit on Saturday, together with Laure, his girlfriend. Jonathan has been promising to come to see us ever since his mum and dad’s (i.e. Susan and Douglas’) first visit. With stunning timing he and Laure decided to add it to the end of their holiday in Italy, rounding off two weeks travelling from Rome to Florence to Bologna with two days in MSP, though as they arrived mid-afternoon and I left the next morning, I managed less than 24 hours in their company.

Working on the adage that quality not quantity is what is important, we had a very pleasant time with them, showing them the house and going to Pomo d’Oro for dinner – their treat – while Stephen took them to Civitanova on Sunday. Here he took advantage of my absence and they went to Fish Bar for a plate of more or less identifiable marine crustaceans. As my granny would have said, Jonathan is cheaper to keep for a week than a fortnight. We could only envy his ability to pack away a quite amazing amount of food, which would account not only for a trip to our local pizzeria on Sunday night to satisfy his attack of the munchies but also his enthusiasm for ordering a cappuccino after dinner at Pomo d’Oro. Fortunately we managed on that occasion to steer him to a simple caffè; after all, we have to live here and can do without the shame of being talked of as condoning a warm milky drink after 10 o’clock in the morning.

Not that I was in a position to order any sort of milky drink the next morning as I was midway between Ancona and Munich on the first leg of my journey to my parents’ house. Originally, this was when I should have been making my way through passport control in Manchester, but a couple of weeks ago I received an email from Lufthansa telling me that I had been changed to a later flight. Presumably, this was because 6am on a Sunday morning in mid-October is not the most popular time for people to be taking off and the company, in its wisdom, had decided to consolidate two flights into one. The real bugbear about this was that with the early flight I would have had an hour to make the connecting flight to Manchester as opposed to five hours with the rescheduled itinerary.

Despite the alteration, both flights went smoothly, though it isn’t only on trains that Italians like to be creative with their seating. When I boarded the plane at Ancona it was to find my window seat already occupied by a lady of a certain age who gave me a wanly insouciant smile as I said it was ok and I would sit by the aisle, it really not being worth the fuss. Before I’d finished putting my coat in the overhead locker, however, a young man arrived who claimed the said aisle seat, whereupon the wraithlike lady simpered across the aisle to her correct seat next to the opposite window. One does wonder what sort of thought process, if any, goes through these ladies’ heads that brings on temporary dyscalculia.

Maybe it is the same affliction that attacked the lady who, when I was trying to find a quite spot by an empty gate at Munich airport to settle down and listen to the Saturday Review podcast, charged up to me and asked if it was all right to go through the closed doors marked Emergency Exit. Before I could reply, however, she shrugged her shoulders, motioned to her husband and set off round the children’s indoor play area to where she wanted to be. I’m not sure what her emergency was, for she didn’t appear particularly flustered, but I hope the ten seconds it took her to go the right way had no drastic impact.

If the changed flights weren’t enough to convince me that travelling on a Sunday is not a good idea, the TransPennine Express from Manchester airport certainly did. I found a seat easily on a not very busy train and had just settled down comfortably with another podcast (Kermode and Mayo's Film Review – my favourite one) when it stopped for several minutes outside Manchester Piccadilly station. This was followed once it restarted with an announcement that all passengers had to disembark at Manchester and board the ‘forwarding train’ on platform 9, which turned out to be, actually, on platform 8. It also turned out to be jam-packed with travellers, there being no seats available whatsoever, and precious little standing room either. I tried to read my book to pass the time, but soon hit a hitch when several more sardines shoehorned themselves into the carriage at Stockport and I was unable to raise my hand to turn the page.

I did, eventually, make it to Sheffield, where my brother, Bobby, and his wife met me to ferry me to my parents’ house and to settle down for a well-deserved g&t some fourteen hours after leaving LCDDB.

A quiet Monday of pottering brought us to Tuesday, and the reason for my trip – and no, it wasn’t a reunion with Jonathan and Laure who had travelled from Ancona the previous day having used Stephen’s taxi service to get to the airport. It was, in fact, my father’s 90th birthday, a cause for much celebration and a gathering of close family, first at The Sitwell Arms in Renishaw for lunch then afterwards at Bobby’s house – it being a stone’s through from my parents’. Dad had a wonderful day, spending most of it with a beatific smile on his face from opening his many cards at home in the morning, through cutting his cake to having copious pictures taken at my brother’s house where he was joined by his great-grandchildren after school finished to complete the family group.

As our present, Stephan and I supplied the cake for the event, something that had taken us some months of planning. Fortunately, we were helped tremendously by Philippa, the owner of Cakes by Cherrypie, who guided us through the process from our initial ideas to a most wonderful finished product that far exceeded our expectations. We wanted something that gave a flavour of his life, and used the idea of a series of plaques which alternated with thistles (both my parents being from Aberdeen) on the sides of the two-tier hexagonal cake. On the bottom were his name, the cricket club he played for as a young man and his army regiment. On top were the symbol of the steel works where he spent most of his working life, the St John’s Ambulance Brigade motif, for which he was a trained volunteer, and from his latter years, his golf club. I think he was as touched and as impressed with it as we were.

While all this was going on, Stephen was back home at LCDDB holding the fort and taking eventual delivery of our firewood, which the man decided to bring at 7pm on Tuesday. While we were relieved to have fuel for the months ahead, delivering it in the dark on a drizzly night was not really the time we would have opted for by choice. Obviously, Stephen wasn’t able to do very much with it there and then, but covered it as best he could with plastic sheeting then spent most of the next morning transferring it from a higgledy-piggledy pile to an orderly stack in the garage. If only he had waited I could have given him a hand, but being thousands of feet up in the air on my way home pre-empted that. When I reached LCDDB at 5pm on Wednesday evening, a somewhat shorter and incident free return journey, it was to find everything in its place and a place for everything. The boy done good.

It was then time to get back into what passes for normal life. Mario and Luigi were harvesting their olives on Thursday but when I asked if there would again be oil for us to buy I was told by Mario (speaking very clearly and slowly in proper Italian, or as near to it as he gets) that they were selling all their olives as they had had such a bumper crop, but that we could buy some of last year’s oil if we wanted. A quick discussion with Stephen showed we were both in the same mind about the offer: we would pass and buy this season’s oil from another reliable source. I’m sure that Mario’s is perfectly palatable, but we don’t want to miss the fruity, peppery punch that you only get with oil fresh from the press, which drizzled over bruschetta (with a hard ‘c’ remember) is one of life’s true gastronomic pleasures.

We do, though, have a potential benefit from some other of their trees, thanks to Giordano the notary and my erstwhile student, who caused us not a little consternation when he drove down our road yesterday afternoon and then onto the ploughed field behind the house. Fortunately, he stopped just near the edge and didn’t try driving halfway across as we later found out had been his intention. He was there to gather some of the mele cotogne (quince to you, me and Nigella Lawson) from the trees bordering the back of LCDDB that Mario had told him they were not interested in harvesting. He very kindly gave us a significant share of them, explaining how to make them into jam. Apparently, you need a good dollop of wine must, and he was all set to get some from his freezer for us till he saw that we still had plenty of bunches of grapes hanging from the vine at the front of the house, whereupon he declared that they would do instead if you mashed them up and went on his way. Stephen spent a happy hour later searching Google and has found, he says, a recipe that seems fairly straight forward and without resorting any form of pulverized grapes, so stand by for quince preserve à LCDDB.

It’s just as well Giordano came yesterday afternoon as if he had left it till today he really would have had trouble getting off the field as we experienced the first autumnal rain of the season. As opposed to the intense summer downpours, this set in just after lunch as we were driving to Corridomnia on a mission, appropriately enough to update my store of woolly jumpers, and just kept on going. Bella and Harry were less than impressed when I made them go out for a walk on our return, Bella starting to shiver the moment she put her muzzle through the open doorway, even though it wasn’t particularly cold. We only managed to get past the end of the driveway before we were thoroughly soaked, which wasn’t helped by Harry sitting down every few steps in silent protest. We cut our losses and headed home for a good towelling down, none the worse for the drenching – so I really don’t think there was any need for the accusatory looks they kept throwing my way for the rest of the evening.