Hogging the limelight

Another week and another series of missed lessons as Vanna tried to find time to fit me into her busy schedule. The good news was that we did manage to get together on Monday, as deferred from the week before. The bad news is that she didn’t have any other time the rest of the week. Her suggestion, which seems a good one, is that we have a lesson at the Helen Doran School in Montegranaro on a Thursday evening as she is there anyway with her son, a sacrosanct time in her week. However, as schools don’t start back till the middle of September, it will be next week before we can meet for our second lesson, ten days after our first.

There were other matters on our minds, though, on Monday, especially on Harry’s. From when he first went out in the morning and through the day he kept making a bee line, whenever possible, to the compost bins in the corner of the garden by Mario and Luigi’s barn and the field. Here, he kept whining and digging at the soil, at times becoming quite desperate in the way that only a single-minded terrier can be, and attempting to chew the wooden pallets on which the bins stand.

When he was still going there after his evening walk, Stephen shut him on the terrazzo upstairs and decided to investigate further. This is when he heard, or thought he heard noises coming from under the bins. Our first thoughts were that there might be something trapped there, or too frightened to come out given Harry’s mad antics; our second thoughts were to see if we could discover anything. Consequently, we upended (carefully) the left-hand bin, the one he had been worrying at, but couldn’t see anything. This wasn’t helped by the tangle of ivy that had spread from the side of the barn and over/through the fence. Stephen, with my help, attacked this, cutting away swathes of the stuff, to give a clearer view. While this cleared some of the mass of foliage, it didn’t reveal any cause for Harry’s behaviour in the area around the bin.

Using the light on my phone, Stephen next hunkered down by the pallet now he could get close to it and managed to spy, curled unobtrusively under it, a young hedgehog. It’s more than likely that the hedgehog was probably very happy where it was, but it didn’t seem fair to inflict Harry’s unwanted attentions on it, or put it in the position of being dragged out by a pair of slavering jaws (dramatic licence allowed), nor did we want to have to keep dragging Harry away and put up with his crying for who knows how many days longer. Consequently, Stephen managed to ease the youngster using a friendly garden tool and took it to the small copse of trees over the fence at the opposite corner of the garden.

When he returned, Stephen had another look under the pallet and found a second young hedgehog snuggled up, which he similarly removed to join its sibling before taking a third look because presumably where there are two babies there is going to be a mother. As indeed there was, which raised a slight problem: being of adult size, when rolled into a prickly ball she was too big to manoeuvre through the existing gap so Stephen had to cut away part of a couple of slats in order to ferry her over to join the others. This, as you can imagine, took some time and we also had some worries as to whether disturbing them would have a detrimental effect, but when last seen they mother was lying on her back suckling the two young hedgehogs, so no lasting harm has been done.

If we thought, however, that moving them would be the end of the business we reckoned without the dogmatic persistence of the terrier for whilst the family might be gone, they were not forgotten – and nor was the scent they left behind. For the next two or three days Harry kept returning to the corner, albeit it a slightly calmer manner, worrying at and disappearing under the ivy that had been piled up and despite Stephen’s best attempts at reinforcing the defences round the bin, Harry still managed to worm his way through, only to be hoiked out in a somewhat undignified manner. Eventually, however, he figured out that his erstwhile playmates had moved on and we returned, more or less, to normal.

It wasn’t only the hedgehogs that took their leave as Tuesday was Dave and Josie’s last day in the area before heading towards Rome for a two-night stopover on the outskirts and a trip to Villa D’Este before flying home. To celebrate their last night (no, not them leaving but the fact they had come to visit), we took them to Totò for aperitivo. Unfortunately, it was just a little too chilly to sit outside and admire the view, which was doubly a shame for after the weather being somewhat mixed during their stay, Wednesday saw a return to settled clear blue skies and temperatures in the high 20s.

We weren’t however, free to bask in the sunshine as the end of the week was a busy time for Stephen, it being the mad last minute dash to make sure that all was in place for MICAM, which started today. This is a bit odd, because, of course, unlike when he was working for the Stefonis, he doesn’t actually have a collection to show but being Mr Indispensible to the Carellis, including helping them on their stand, meant he had various things to keep his weathered eye on. He did, though, find time on Friday to pay in a cheque at our bank in Montegranaro, a first for us and something with which he needed a bit of help.

He first tried to do this in the morning but he got a bit of surprise when he walked into the branch as the service counter was no longer there. When our old friend Simona saw him she explained that it was now just a satellite to the main branches in the larger towns intended to deal with things such as insurance and not any actual banking transactions. However, whilst he couldn’t pay the cheque in over the counter (there not being one), he could do so using the cash machine. Only he couldn’t as he didn’t have our bank card with him, not realising he needed it. Simona, ever helpful, said it was easy and she would show him if he came back in the afternoon.

This she did, while she also had to deal with some disgruntled customers who had, like Stephen, arrived thinking they were entering a bank. They may have been more disgruntled if they found out, as Stephen did whilst chatting with Simona, that the government is planning to introduce a fabulous money-making wheeze on cash withdrawals whereby any amount over €1,200 will have a 2% surcharge applied. Not that that will ever be something to cause us concern, but all of my cash rich readers need to be aware should they ever be in Italy and decide to have a night on the town.

After all his rushing around, Stephen had time to relax on his slow train ride to Milan (much cheaper than the Freccia Rossa though that would have got him there in a third of the time), though it was maybe not as relaxing as it should have been thanks to receiving an email from Booking.com saying that his apartment had been cancelled. This, as you can imagine, caused a moment or two of panic. The sight did, out of the goodness of its heart, send him an email showing a list of all the available apartments that he would have to book himself. He chose the first one, not so much because it looked the best but because it was the only one that didn’t cost well over €1,000. It all, however, turned out all right in the end as the new place was clean, modern and well situated, and the difference in price, as it was not Stephen’s fault, would be refunded.

As for me, after taking Stephen to the station early doors yesterday morning, it was back to LCDDB for my lesson with Alessio and then the rest of the weekend pottering about and keeping myself occupied as best I could. For whilst Stephen might be away wheeling and dealing and rubbing shoulders with the great and the good of the shoe world, as Milton said, they also serve who only stand and wait.