Hanging on

9th March 2025

The first bit of good news is that clear skies returned on Monday, and even though that meant a drop in overnight temperatures and waking to frost on Tuesday and Wednesday, it was worth it for the warmer and sunnier days. The other bit of good news is that things have actually happened this past week, so fasten your safety belts.

Monday was also when the time had come for my check up with the nice Dr Scorolli, the oculista, it being a year since my last visit. I felt pretty certain that he would say the cataract in my left eye was now ripe for operation. I was wrong. After his assistant carried out the eye examination, the good doctor did his fine tuning (including, amongst all the cutting-edge technology, asking me to hold up a piece of rough card with a small hole roughly cut in the centre to look at a large letter ‘O’ on the vision chart – which was somehow comforting). He said that all was fine with the right eye and that the left had only deteriorated slightly, so it was best to leave it another year.

He did say he would give a prescription for a slightly stronger contact lens for the left eye, the strongest he was able to go, which would boost the distance vision a bit. This surprised me; last year he said that there wasn’t any point in going stronger as it wouldn’t make any difference, but I kept well shtum. He’s the expert after all.

As if that wasn’t enough for one day, Stephen received a message later saying that Fabrizio, the geologist, would be coming on Wednesday to install the monitoring equipment. He was as good, if not better, than his word, arriving with his oppo, Roberto, well before 8 o’clock. They spent a couple of hours feeding the equipment down the tube and fixing everything up, as well as chatting with Stephen and handing over the initial report from the soil samples. This was fairly reassuring. The rating for most of the strata was good to fair, apart from the one which seemed to be made up of vegetation and which, Fabrizio thought, might be significant. Anyway, with all now set we only have a year to wait (just like my eye), but Roberto will be back in three months’ time to collect the first set of data.

There were further house matters that morning as Irene had asked us to call by the office. Stephen excused me, as I had my weekly chat with Nicola at 10.30, and I probably wasn’t really needed, and went on his own. He was right to a certain extent as she gave him the invoice for the measuring work so my role only came into play later when I went online to pay it. She also updated him on the Loris situation (i.e. just the same – as we know seeing as he and his crane are still ensconced in the town square, taking up valuable Tuesday morning parking spaces) and showed him another piece of monitoring equipment, a small, crystal prism set in a metal disc, and looking like something from a spy movie. We need three of these, she said, one each for the diagonally opposite corners of our house, and another for Mario and Luigi’s up at the top. Stephen is biding his time for a suitable moment to ask them if that is ok – maybe later on in the afternoon when they are relaxing in their cantina.

The weekend has been spent mostly at home, with Stephen giving his Christmas present of a mini chainsaw its maiden outing and spending a happy couple of hours setting about some recalcitrant branches, and I am proud to say that I helped when his attention turned to the persimmon tree. He was bothered by its overall shape, wanting it to be lower and rounder rather than it spreading upwards as it seemed to want to do. I was called into action as he needed me to hold the ladders, the shape of the tree and the banking around it not lending themselves to a high degree of stability.

We made a formidable team, I like to think, and not only did I hold the ladders with great aplomb but I also passed the chainsaw and the loppers back and forth as required and cleared away branches that had become tangled up. I hope you’re impressed, because I certainly was.

That was all done and dusted by mid-afternoon, fitting in nicely with Giorgiottica reopening for its evening session. We thought that dropping off the new prescription for my left contact lens would only take a few minutes, as long as they were not busy but, despite being the only people in the opticians, it took us a bit longer than that.

It was the nice lady assistant who saw to us first, and I wondered why she was taking such a long time looking at the computer screen until Stephen told me she was trying to find the best make at the best price. Who knew it was so complicated? Complicated enough for her to get reinforcements in the shape of the optician himself, who then went through a process of showing me the difference in vision between how it is now and how it would be with the new prescription, both for distance and for reading, i.e. the former better, the latter worse.

To get to the point, the new lenses were ordered, but as they are bespoke and not standard there will be a three-week lead in time from order to delivery, and, of course, they will be more expensive (but not that much, about the cost of a cappuccino each - a cappuccino in Italy that is). As for the question of reading, he told me to bring my reading glasses with me next time (for reading glasses, read magnifiers from Amazon, 4 pairs for €8 so the finest quality) so we can sort out what is the best combination for me. I rather think it won’t be my premium Amazon purchases.

That should all, but I have saved the really exciting news of the week till last, which is to do with Stephen’s collection of hats. He has been in a quandary since we sorted out the dressing room with the new wardrobes, as previously he had piled them on top of each other on the various tines of Arthur’s antlers (for those not in the know, Arthur is the stag’s head he bought on impulse many, many years ago from the antique emporium in Ramsbottom, and which used to in the office  and then took up residence in the dressing room when we moved here. With the new wardrobes taking up most of the wall space, poor Arthur is now reclining on top of the cupboard in the back room, contemplating the ceiling while Stephen hits on where to put him next.

That left him with the problem of what to do with his caps, and for the past couple of months he has kept them piled in a basket on a shelf in one of the wardrobes, not particularly conducive to selecting just the right one to finish off that day’s ensemble. Help arrived, however, when, with the help of Amazon, he came across cap hangers, which clip onto the bill (no, I didn’t know that was what the stiff part that sticks out was called, either; thank you Google Search) and then hang over the rail.

There was one slight drawback when he hurried home with his parcel, Wednesday lunchtime: the packet only contained twenty hangers, not enough for all his caps, so he had to winkle out the most used ones. As for the others, they will have to wait until he orders some more hangers, and we get another wardrobe.