Three come along at once

We enter December with a return of finer weather, being drier and clearer. This meant that we were able to glimpse the Sibillini Mountains in the distance when driving along Porta del Sole on the way to Sigma to do the shopping, a view that also underlined that it was also a deal colder as they were covered in snow – good news for anyone wanting a spot of skiing over the upcoming holiday period.

Speaking of holidays, my vision of a quiet month lesson-wise as we wind down to Christmas had to be seriously revised when we hit the middle of the week and I received a WhatsApp from the mother of Arianna. She asked if I was available to start lessons with her other daughter, Elisa, which I am, and it was arranged that she would come for an hour on a Friday at 5pm, starting this Friday. Personally, I thought it would be better to wait till after Christmas rather than have a couple of lessons and then a break, but said nothing as the customer is always right. However, she must have had the same thought as the next day she sent another message saying just that.

Such doubts, however, didn’t feature later when the Helen Doron school in Montegranaro contacted me. They had been approached by a lady who wanted lessons to help improve her English, particularly because her husband has an olive oil business and they have a lot of foreign customers. There was a bit of messaging backwards and forwards, but the upshot was that starting next week, I will be taking the lady, Silvia, twice a week at 2pm on a Tuesday and a Thursday, making three new lessons, which is a reasonable increase to my current commitments.

That wasn’t the end of it, as I should have realised from past experience, as on Friday when we popped into the dry cleaner’s with my winter coat, the lady there asked about the possibility of a lesson with her daughter, Gloria. Gloria is 16 and hates English (a promising start) but her mother obviously is aware of how important a subject it is for the job market in Italy. The reason for her aversion will be familiar to you by now: she doesn’t understand the work and the teacher doesn’t explain anything to her, which we take to mean that they sit and do a lot of copying and written exercises but no actual transactional use of language. This time we said we would pop back next week when I had a clearer idea of how my week would pan out to arrange for an hour with Gloria to see if she can bear the idea of further lessons with me.

Changing the topic, at the beginning of the week we were a bit concerned regarding Bella’s eye, which didn’t seem to be making the progress we had hoped. After a quick call to Chiara, it was agreed we would take her on Thursday at 6pm, when she was in the clinic. This we did, though in the meantime Bella decided to make us seem like overanxious parents as her eye started to look much better. On examination, the vet did find that whilst the wound was significantly better, it still had a bit of a way to go to being completely healed. We have another week’s worth of drops (which Bella, bless her, is amazingly tolerant about having squeezed into her eye morning and evening) as well as some gel for lunchtime application, and we will return next Thursday for another check up.

And that was it, bar the shouting, which in this case meant a trip to Acqua e Sapone yesterday afternoon to stock up on various cleaning products for both house and personal use – which is about as far as I need to go with that one. Otherwise it has been a very quiet, domestic weekend. I have made a big batch of braised red cabbage for the freezer – and us, at some point – and ditto a ciambella. This latter caused us some confusion, as I followed my usual recipe exactly as before but the resulting cake was half the usual height. What is really puzzling, though, is that the texture is exactly as light and toothsome as ever, so it’s not as if we are having to eat something akin to a deck quoit.

I will leave you with a cautionary tale, which has nothing to do with baking and all to do with remembering what anti-mice measures you put in place to ensure that no untoward nibbling of your car’s electric cables takes place. Stephen, for some reason best known to himself, had placed a mouse trap on the driver’s seat of our Panda, something he remembered when he came to run the rubbish bin to the top of the road this afternoon and sat on it – but not for very long.