High times

25th April 2021

With the start of a new week our thoughts once again turned to things medicinal and taking our test results to the doctor in order to learn the worst. The first step in doing this was fixing a time for each of us through her appointment service, unlike previously when Stephen aided and abetted by bff Manuel went straight to source.

Where this central service is located is anyone’s guess, though it is, I think, somewhere in this country - not that it made communication between Stephen and the nice lady who answered any the easier. Being the first time he’d used it we were, naturally enough, not registered on the system and having to spell out English names was more of a hurdle than it maybe should have been due to our lack of familiarity with the Italian phonic alphabet. This system uses cities for each of the letters, starting with Ancona for A before moving on to Bologna, Catania and so on all the way down to Zara – which may be either for the shop or for a province of the Kingdom of Italy on the Dalmatian coast, from 1918 to 1947. I’ll let you decide on that one.

A slight confusion arose as Stephen, not knowing the appropriate town, used any he could think of, a strategy further complicated by W not appearing in the Italian alphabet, and then muddied even more when, on confirming the spellings of our names forgot which towns he had previously used and threw in a whole new selection. The lady, to her credited, kept up a slightly exasperated professional tone, and did assure us that it would be much simpler in future as our telephone number was now registered on the system and would therefore bring up our details once we had given it. We will see.

Due to keeping clear of my lesson commitments, my appointment was made for Thursday morning but Stephen had his on Tuesday evening, following which more drastic alterations have been made to our diet. To go with his high blood pressure he has high levels of sugar and his cholesterol is of concern, meaning cutting back on meat and only being allowed one piece of fruit a day. He also shows signs of dehydration (not a surprise) and is under instructions to drink more water.

As for me, all of my results were in the green zone apart from my cholesterol. That, to Stephen’s perverted joy, was deemed to be in the high zone as opposed to his moderately high rating. As for how it affects my diet, the good news is that it doesn’t, mainly because of all the changes we’ve already had to suffer. There was one bright spot, though, when to the doctor’s evident surprise she told us that our vitamin D levels were exemplary. All right, that might not be the word she used, but surely you don’t begrudge us one crumb of comfort.

This though leaves me with a dilemma. One of the reasons our Vitamin D is good is because we take cod liver oil capsules regularly – every day in my case. However, when we returned home and I started going through all the cupboards to see how much saturated fat there was in everything, I was astounded to see how much this supposedly healthy daily supplement contained. So here’s the rub, do I continue taking them and run the risk of a heart attack or stroke, or cut them out and live in fear of developing Covid, schizophrenia and rickets? It’s enough to drive you to drink – which at least is fat free.

So what else was there of note?

Wednesday saw the restart of my lesson with Rocco and Antonella, now that he had shorn his way through the backlog of hirsute locals that had amassed during Zona Rossa. Stephen had fun on Thursday when he received notice from Italian Customs that they were holding a parcel for him and could not release it till they had more precise details as to what it contained. A birthday present did not seem to be enough to satisfy them so he had to set about finding not only the nature of the contents and the cost but also to ask his sister, from whom it came, for proof of both of these things. It makes you long even more, if that is possible, for those wonderful days before the dreaded B word when life was so much better.

Because of this and having to attend an evening meeting at the factory, he arrived home on Thursday just before dinner, rushing in in a bit of a flap, but as I had everything under control he had no need to worry – that is until the next morning when he discovered that he hadn’t turned off his headlights and the battery in the Freeclimber was as flat as a flat thing. Fortunately, unlike all those other times in the past, a day plugged into the mains seemed to reinvigorate it and it repaid such solicitous attention by not immediately losing all the charge again as it had in a previous life.

Being still in orange (though with a promise of a return to yellow next week) the weekend was comfortingly unexciting. With the weather hitting a dry patch, Stephen’s thoughts turned to things gardening but he abandoned his hand chainsaw in favour of the strimmer, spending some time on Friday and yesterday afternoon on the long grass around the back and the sides of the house. The downside to this was that whereas the hand chainsaw only gave his hands the tremens, with the strimmer it was his whole body. The upside, though, is maybe using a strimmer is akin to those bizarre slimming machines that promise weight loss and a toned body just by shaking you about. Only time will tell. As for today, he gave his new workout routine the elbow in order to erect the canes in the lotto for the anticipated tomato plants – something made more imminent by a very balmy afternoon.

I said the weekend was unexciting but that doesn’t mean it was without its dilemmas, namely what to do about our weekend aperitivo now Stephen has to cut back on sugar. A bowl of crisps is a fond memory and with such a thing as low calorie tonic water not existing – as far as provincial Le Marche is concerned, I can’t vouch for the great Italian metropolises – it looks like our weekend g&t’s are heading the same way. Well, we thought, we can switch to white wine and soda as a sugar free alternative, little suspecting that while there is a whole gamut (at least by MSP standards) of Schweppes products on Coal’s shelves, soda water is not one of them. The best we could come up with was a bottle of sugar free gassosa, the very sweet fizzy drink much loved by Italians. This may have lacked the sophistication of a soda spritzer, but did make it feel like you were at a children’s party – albeit an alcoholic one.