Apples and Pears

It was a relatively quiet start to the week, though changes were afoot in downtown MSP. When Stephen arrived home for lunch on Monday it was to report that all the signs at Sigma were being taken down and being replaced with ones proclaiming that it was now Coal. Whilst this may not be a brand name top of the list of any British entrepreneur, it is a well-established chain here in Italy and explains why, for some weeks, our weekly salumi has been wrapped in Coal paper. Old habits, though, will die hard I think and somehow saying we are popping to Coal to do the shopping doesn’t have quite the ring of popping to Sigma. Not that such worries troubled Mrs Carelli, who, ever one to cut to the heart of the matter, wondered to Stephen if the prices would be the same. There is, as they say, only one way to find that out.

It was not the only thing that was undergoing changes as Luigi set about, on Tuesday afternoon, on some judicious pruning of one of their quince trees, the one near the bottom of the field that was blocking the tractor being able to pass under it. The significance of this for us was his appearance mid-afternoon on the tractor with a small trailer attached to it full (it was a small trailer, and by full I mean the bottom was covered) with quince and a son (or nephew, maybe) who had been helping him.

He had brought them because the other week we’d asked if it was ok for me to take the fruit from the mele cotogne tree in the field, but we were meaning the one at the bottom of the path that marks the turning point on walks with Bella and Harry. I’ve been monitoring this tree’s progress since the start of lockdown back in March when the first small blossom buds appeared, and have been sharing its progress with daily and then weekly pictures on Facebook. And here is where I have to offer an apology to the people who have been following the progress as I have been consistently misnaming it. That, he said when we remarked that it was the one we had meant, is a pere cotogne not a mele cotogne. Well who knew the fruit came in two varieties? Not Google translate as when I did a check later it gave quince as the translation for both, as it did for just cotogne on its own. Anyway, as if we didn’t have enough of whatever you want to call them, I collected some of the fruit from our adopted tree on Thursday morning as I wasn’t going to be let it feel abandoned after eight months of solicitous nursing.

It was also on Tuesday that Stephen eventually gave up on trying to charge the battery on the Freeclimber and take it to Ivan, the nice misterman at the garage up the road. If you are wondering what had happened to our (and Mirco’s) search for a new car, that has been put on the back boiler indefinitely, but it does mean that we have to do something about licking the FC into shape, and this was the first step. He left it with Ivan, asking him to have a good look at it and see what he could find.

The answer to that was simple. Nothing, as he told Stephen when he dropped by the next day, other than the battery was only 8 volts and he advised a 12 volt one. Stephen told him to effect the change and was more than pleased when driving to the factory on Thursday morning after picking up the car that it had started first time and did seem to be purring along nicely – until, that is, he turned the corner by the ferramenta, a hundred metres or so from the Carellis’, when he had a flat tyre.

He limped to the factory and phoned up the garage, who, if they were surprised to hear from again so soon didn’t show it, to ask if they could come to see to the tyre. They duly did so, then returned before lunch with a temporary spare one so Stephen could get home and also with the bad news that the tyre had split along the rim wall, meaning that even with the best will in the world it was beyond repair. What could we do but ask Ivan to price up a set of new, all-weather ones, but we couldn’t help feeling that the Freeclimber didn’t seem to be all that grateful that we’d decided to keep it in the bosom of the family.

While the garage man was sourcing tyres, we got on with the end of the week and as I was having my haircut at Rocco’s on Friday morning Stephen was doing the shopping at Sigma – or Coal, if you prefer – in between complaining to any of the staff he could buttonhole that he didn’t like the colour scheme, mainly focusing his ire on the looming grey of the ceiling. Oddly enough, no one seemed to want to take this up with him, maybe because they had little say in the matter or maybe they realised that Coal was not going to change its corporate identity because one man in Monte San Pietrangeli had taken against it.

In the afternoon, it was time to set to with the quince and Stephen put the first part of the operation into action when he used the recipe I’d found online to start off some quince liqueur, flavoured (surprisingly for an Italian recipe) with cloves, star anise and cinnamon. Fruit and spices are now nicely steeping in a litre of 96º alcohol, on sale here in any reputable (and not so reputable) supermarket. Don’t worry, though, it will eventually be watered down with a syrup solution to make something more quaffable rather than something to take the polish off an antique table.

Having finished this, Stephen phoned the garage to see how things were with the tyres, and on being told that they had arrived made arrangements to take the Freeclimber the following morning. Consequently, he took the car up just after breakfast yesterday, with me following in the Panda so I could bring him back. He collected it just before lunchtime (going on foot, this time, as I had a lesson) and returned on the new, all-weather tyres which he proclaimed an improvement on the previous, off road ones – not least because when he braked the car actually stopped, which is always an advantage. We can only hope that that is it for the time being and we might get at least a couple of months of uninterrupted service.

In between taking and collecting the car we had a surprise visitor as the nice road man appeared to check on its current state. He seemed pleased that it had held up well (!?), though in comparative terms conceded that it was still not good. He gave it as his opinion that it was as yet too dry for any remedial work to be carried out and we would have to wait until a few days of rain had softened it up, he then went on his way saying he would be back at some point in the future but without specifying when, exactly.

As for today, we have accepted that autumn is definitely here with Stephen making a tentative start on the wardrobe changeover this morning by packing away our swimwear. There was a slight pang in this, as whilst he had some use out of his, my collection of swim shorts have not had the opportunity of adding a dash of style to Porto San Giorgio beach this year. We will keep our fingers crossed that things will be better next summer and we will once again be able to cut fine figures walking up the shore.

In the afternoon it was time for phase two of Operation Cotogne when we threw caution to the wind and made chutney. This was an adventure as, to the best of my knowledge, no recipe for it exists - quince being used to make paste in the UK and chutney not being anything that exists in Italy. We used my apple chutney recipe and substituted the mele cotogne, which we grated as chunks would take forever to soften, the fruit being somewhat on the hard side. I’m pleased to say that the resulting concoction smelt right and looked right, so if all is right when we uncork a jar in a couple of months’ time we may be able to add yet another codicil to the Anglo-Italian concordat.