Now I see

Those of you concerned for our welfare will be relieved to know that the bottle of chocolate liqueur, mentioned at the end of the last blog, remains unopened. We resisted the temptation down it in one, deciding, rather, to lay it aside and await a suitably celebratory – or desperate – time for its opening. Neither of these presented themselves during the past seven days, which were profoundly run-of-the-mill – but that is not going to prevent me from sharing them with you.

L’estate di San Martino continued into Monday with the weather holding fine and much activity in the fields around LCDDB. Fortunately, whilst one or two large machines lit up the fields like some sort of UFO stopping by to offer ET a lift, these activities were over by bedtime and neither Mario nor Luigi managed to rally enough enthusiasm for an early morning onslaught. They still managed, however, to get next year’s wheat harvest into the soil before the weather decided that it had humoured us long enough, turning duller, damper, colder and altogether more autumnal by the weekend.

Whilst Stephen continued to keep a weather eye on proceedings at the factory, my week started with a trip to the dentist (more fillings replaced – only another two or three to go, promised Claudia) then a return trip on Wednesday to the optician to collect my new spectacles. I am, now I can see them properly, immensely pleased with them, especially the way they make me look like some Italian university professor. This is quite apt as it was also on Wednesday that I received a WhatsApp message from the sister of a former pupil asking if I was interested in taking a conversation lesson at a language school in Montegranaro. Being the obliging sort I said that of course I was and after a bit of toing and froing it was agreed that I would call in at the school for a chat on Friday afternoon.

Before we get to that, however, there are some more riveting domestic details to get through.

By Thursday, the fine weather was starting to transition and the furious scurrying of the many geckos around the estate had almost become a thing of the past. I had assumed that this was because they were finding places to hibernate, but I was still a little surprised to find one nestled into the corner of the rubber seal when I opened the window in the snug to clean the outside. I’m not sure if he was settling down for the winter, or just fancied a spot of shut-eye, but seemed not to understand my encouragements to find a place in the great outdoors, preferring to drop inside. Once again, we had the delight of chasing a small reptile round the house, but fortunately the chillier weather had sapped some of the speed from this one and I was able to cover it with a cleaning cloth, scoop him up and deposit him outside.

Thursday was also the day I decided to check up on our order from Amazon.It for two new duvet sets, ones in warmer winter tones. The coordinating sheets we had ordered at the same time had arrived with a couple of days, so two weeks on I was wondering what was keeping the rest of the bedding. The answer to this was found when I opted to track my order on the Amazon site, for in these days of technological sophistication you can discover, at the touch of a button, the bizarre location of your expected goods. Poste Italiane – for yes, that was the courier service responsible – had, for some reason best known to themselves, tried to deliver our duvet covers to some unsuspecting householder in France. Unsurprisingly, these had been refused on 5th November, but since then nothing more was known about them. We awaited developments with interest.

You may have been wondering, at least those of you with a heart, how Bella’s eye was progressing. Unfortunately, not very well, and it looked like another visit to the vet’s was in the offing. That was until, in one of those serendipitous coincidences that make you think a force greater than we can comprehend is governing our lives, we bumped into Chiara in Pina when we went in for breakfast on Friday morning. Chiara, as you may remember, is Maddalena’s sister and nurse at the veterinary practice, though that is selling her input and her knowledge somewhat short. We explained our concern to her and she said she would stop by after lunch to have a look. When she came, complete with her medical bag, she agreed that the eye was not looking as good as it should and prescribed further treatment: an antiseptic wash to clean the area and a two-week course of eye drops, twice a day. We have great hopes that these will affect a change as there already seems to be some improvement, though Bella is less than impressed with having all the messing around.

I picked up the medication on my way back from my visit to the language school in Montegranaro, discovering that Farmacia Svegliati is the place to be of an evening in downtown MSP as it was humming with both trade and gossip. The language school, on the other hand, was much more calm, it being between lessons, but still a colourful and friendly place none-the-less. The upshot of my discussions with the manager, Melissa, and her assistant, Alice, was that we have agreed I will take both adult conversation classes and some with youngsters preparing for Cambridge junior certification, starting in November. How many lessons there will be depends on how many students sign up and their level of proficiency, but it should be between one and five. Time will tell.

Returning to the mystery of the missing bedding, we didn’t have to wait long for a solution of sorts as yesterday I received two emails from Amazon.it informing me that I would shortly receive a refund for the goods in question, which had been returned to them by the courier. It was obviously beyond the capability of someone in Poste Italiane actually to read the address and reroute it to the correct recipient. Being nothing if not optimistic, I reordered the same items and was told that we can expect delivery on Monday.

To celebrate this – or commiserate, you can choose which – we took a long overdue trip to Porto San Giorgio for tea and cake at La Petite, our go-to patisserie, which was particularly busy on a dull and damp Saturday afternoon. We met up with our friend Marco, whom we had not seen since the summer as he has been busy travelling and selling shoes and who, despite living just down the road in Porto Sant’Elpidio, had not only never been to La Petite but had never heard of it. We felt it our duty, as English missionaries in a heathen land, to put him on the straight and narrow. Unsurprisingly Marco – the owner and cake maker of LP– didn’t let us down and Marco – our friend and shoe seller, remember there are only four Christian names in Italy – was duly impressed and vowed never to go anywhere else. That was, we thought, a trifle excessive but we appreciated the sentiment.

And we thought that was it for the week, but we had figured without an old issue raising its head as if to punish us for being so cocky last week when Mario and Luigi cut the telephone wire. Once again we lost our Internet connection, though how is something of a puzzle. Everything was as normal until our power switched off when Stephen was boiling the pasta water for lunch (this happens not infrequently, especially at that crucial time of day, our electricity supply being on the low side). A flick of the breaker switch in the mains box soon had everything working again apart from the Internet, whose light on the router has continued to flash all day while dogmatically refusing to make a connection.

We have tried unplugging and plugging to see if that makes a difference, an action EOLO’s website also advises, but with no joy. The said website (which we accessed via smartphone) cautioned against pressing the reset button – which we may have been tempted to do out of desperation if the router actually possessed one. We strongly feel this is where the fault lies as the phone has a dialling tone so we are obviously connecting with the transmitter. There was one option left, to call Sauro, whose relish for a mission is second only to his dogged determination to find a solution. We await what developments tomorrow brings when he gets on the case properly. As for us, with no Netflix we were left with having to spend the evening in the company of Italian television; I suppose it could be worse, but not much.