For what we are about to receive

9th October 2022

You won’t be hanging around for long this week so I wouldn’t bother taking your coat off – unless, of course, you want to feel the benefit when you go out again…

It’s been a week of the quotidian, if one you can use those two words together. The excitement on Monday was the arrival of our new vacuum cleaner, a Hoover nonetheless, as the tube on the old one, which had given sterling service, had split beyond functionality and repair. These new cordless stick type look very strange and unbalanced to me (I blame James Dyson - for many things, actually) but it seems to do the job well so what more can one ask.

On Tuesday, Mario and Luigi kindly put on a cabaret show to keep Harry entertained as they set about sawing up the various trunks that they had spent the previous day hauling on the tractor and arranging in a becoming way on the top of the banking opposite our house. I’m not sure if they have finished the job as some of the pieces are still looking decidedly on the chunky side, but after another session on Wednesday they took, making the most of the warm sunny weather, to tilling the field, breaking up the soil and churning the left-over sunflower stalks into the earth.

In the evening, Stephen (I had a six o’clock lesson) took Bella and Harry for their annual check-up and vaccinations at the vets. He chose then as he knew from asking Maddalena that her sister, Chiara, was on duty and being on his own wanted to make sure he had reliable assistance should anything untoward occur. It didn’t, and the dogs were both fine, especially Bella as she is becoming quite a grande dame now – not that you would believe it when you see the turn of speed she has at the whiff of a fallen nut or two.

A diversion was added a little unexpectedly to the end of the week when Stephen received a call from Maddalena on Wednesday evening, suggesting that we should go out to dinner sometime. There being no time like the present, unless it is two days later, Friday was fixed on as, like all the other evenings, we had a convenient space in our social diary. After a brief discussion they agreed that Pina would be the ideal spot, and indeed it was. The summer being over, we ate in the basement restaurant, along with an assortment of near and distant family members at the large table in front of the TV set. After an antipasto for twenty between the four of us, we wisely passed on a primo piatto because the secondo was generous enough for us to trough well and still have leftovers to take home to make vegetable soup yesterday lunchtime and polish off the meat for tonight’s dinner.

And Stephen was in need of sustenance by the time evening came around as he had had a busy day with the wardrobe changeover from summer to winter, involving emptying and refilling wardrobes and drawers as well as schlepping cases and storage crates up and down the stairs from the lumber room (not that I was idle, but my tasks were somewhat more sedentary).

This has been a timely operation, because it looks like we will have to be donning thick woollies if we want to keep warm. According to a feature on the BBC News app, the Italian government, like all the others I would guess, has given advice to its citizens on how to reduce energy consumption. This includes lowering the central heating by one degree and turning it off completely for an hour a day. What it omitted, though, was any suggestions on how to get the best use out of your wood supply, which would have been much more use to us. That’s the trouble with these career politicians in their centrally heated, air conditioned luxury towers: no idea how we ordinary country folk live.

(No, despite what it looks like, Stephen isn't praying, just taking a moment of quiet reflection during one of his all too infrequent pauses when speaking.)