Ready for inspection

After a few weeks of blog entries that have been on the longer side, you will be relieved to know that this one is another of the bijou entries and won’t make too many demands either on your time or your good nature in humouring me. It also means that it will be short on drama, thrills, cliffhangers and unexpected plot twists, but there again, you can’t have everything.

The week started with the same old same old, so nothing exciting there – or maybe not quite. In a daring break with tradition we went shopping at Sigma on Monday morning instead of Tuesday, which caused several hearts to palpitate but fortunately with no untoward after effects. The change was because Tuesday morning I had to take Stephen to Civitanova to catch his usual train for Milan as it was time for Linea Pelle. This passed in the usual round of stand visiting, trend spotting and contact building while I held the fort at home.

This stewardship was not without incident, but I managed to come unscathed through the following:

One

Vanna messaged me on Wednesday morning to say that she had to cancel our lunchtime lesson as she had an unexpected visit from some of her suppliers. As Rocco had already cancelled his afternoon lesson a couple of days earlier, it meant that I had a completely free day so was therefore able to recline on the chaise longue, eating chocolate and reading trashy magazines.

Two

That last sentence is not true as we don’t actually have a chaise longue. What there was, though, was a dead rat on the terrazzo. How it got there is a mystery, but there is circumstantial evidence as to how it may have happened, namely:

When we returned from our morning walk I left Harry and Bella in the garden while I saw to a couple of things downstairs. On coming back up, Bella and Harry had already returned to the terrazzo and the rat was lying peacefully on its side at the top of the steps, completely unharmed, except for being dead of course. What it did have, though, were patches of wet fur, and doing my best Inspector Montalbano I deduced that a dog (or dogs) unknown had found the corpse in the garden and galloped up with it in its mouth then deposited it on the terrazzo when he (or she) realised it wasn’t as much fun as he (or she) had hoped it would be.

Fortunately I had in my hand a bucket and cloth that I was going to use to wash down the shutters, so I managed to scoop up the late rodent and dispose of it where it would be able to provide nutrients for the local flora.

Three

Whilst working in the office in the afternoon, the sky started to darken and the wind to get up. Realising what this meant, I quickly shot upstairs to close all the shutters (so glad I’d cleaned them that morning) just in time before the ten-minute maelstrom hit. This, as is usually the case, marked a change in the weather and when, after 36 dull and rainy hours, the sun reappeared on Friday morning there was a definite chill in the air that hadn’t been there before.

What had been there before but now wasn’t, well, not as it had been, was one of the trees that Mario and Luigi wanted to prune. It had received a pruning all right, but slightly more drastic than had been anticipated as it had been blown over in the ten-minute turbulence and was sprawled down the banking and partway across the drive. It being somewhat on the heavy side, I was only able to shift it enough to make a path for the car, an interim measure till Stephen returned.

And Four

On Friday, whilst on our after-lunch walk, I received a phone call from Giordano, who said that he had been looking into the Italian citizenship issue. Firstly, as everyone does, he asked if the organ grinder was there, but I said Stephen was away until the following evening. He settled, then, for giving a message to the monkey, saying to give him a call next week, when Stephen was back, and to drop by his office for a chat.

*

After all this responsibility you can see why I was more than pleased to meet Stephen off the Milan train at Civitanova station yesterday evening, even if he was a little late in arriving. This was due, apparently, to someone being on the track just outside Florence. Heaven knows why, but it did cause a bit of a back up for the trains using that particular line. The good news, though, is that Stephen was able to strike up a conversation with the inspector after pointing out to him that there was no power coming through to the charging sockets. The inspector, who was called Diego, was being very friendly and chatty (ah the glamour of being a foreigner in a strange land) and seemed to be making a bid to oust Manuel as Stephen’s bff until he committed the fatal error on seeing Stephen’s name on his ticket of calling him Steve – and as far as that particular diminutive goes it’s one strike and you’re out.

As for today, it was shopping time this morning – after I had done my chores and Stephen had chopped up the fallen tree into manageable pieces to haul to the side of the house – for me to get the necessary items for my up-coming adventure. What this is, you will have to wait till next week to find out, but if I tell you that I bought a pair of slip-on flip-flops, a pair of grip socks, a new pair of tracksuit bottoms and a yoga mat, to solve the mystery I suggest you do as I did and make like Montalbano.