What's the hurry?

The good news is that the fine weather continued all week, with days starting crisp then gradually warming towards noon in the morning sunshine. It is still a little too early in the year for the sun to rise high enough to top the trees and flood the terrazzo from the get go, but by ten o’clock Bella and Harry are able to settle to a good period of uninterrupted toasting.

As for the human inhabitants of LCDDB, it has been full week. Stephen made his second trip to Milan, this time for Linea Pelle, setting off on Tuesday morning by his usual 08.07 train from Civitanova. This meant that for me most of the week seemed to be spent either teaching or walking the dogs while holding the fort in his absence.

I had the second of the PET lessons on Wednesday, again without any resources despite being told the week before that they had been ordered. This was because when I went for my lesson with Silvia on Tuesday there was only the newly-recruited young assistant there, the manager still being on maternity leave and her second-in-command being on holiday. When I asked about the books, the assistant didn’t really know anything about them so I left empty-handed. I had more luck the next day. When I arrived the nice young assistant handed me the books, which had been there the day before, she just hadn’t been made aware of this. Although it was a little late for that day’s lesson, needless to say I squirreled the books away in my bag, before anyone could snatch them from me, to take home and peruse at my leisure – or what little leisure I had.

Stephen was an innocent bystander to my hectic schedule (all right, maybe not that hectic by some standards, but hectic enough for me) when he had to wait for me to finish my four lessons of the day before I could pick him up at the station on Friday evening. It was not, perhaps, the number of lessons that was the problem, but the way they were dispersed through the day, and having to make sure Harry and Bella were seen to and exercised in the gaps.

Starting with Mr Mancini at 7.30 was no problem, but Silvia switching her lesson from Thursdays to Fridays because of work commitments meant eating a packed lunch in the car park at Montegranaro between my 12 o’clock at Prosilas in Civitanova and my 2 o’clock with her. That gave me a bit of a breather before my evening lesson at 5.30, which together with making sure H & B were toileted and stopping off at Pizzeria Mascalzone to order our pizze for collection on the way home, resulted in Stephen having to while away half-an-hour trundling his case up and down the streets of Civitanova before I was able to get there, not that he minded.

I fared better on Saturday, for while I again had four hours of teaching it was all packed into the morning and I was finished by 12.30. This gave us time in the afternoon to catch up with a spot of shopping before shutting the door on the world for the rest of the weekend. I’m sorry if both my devoted readers feel a little short changed by this, and think that after a week of work, some rest and no play I should have found something more interesting to fill this scant update. Sometimes that’s just how things are but I will try harder in future, promise.