Hot air

24th July 2022

After what seemed to us, at least, a hectic period, with oculists and opticians and doctors and clinics, not to mention a new job, the past week has been altogether quieter.

Wednesday did provide a bit of a tasty filling between the supermarket white bread blandness of the other days of the working week, though even then it was more egg mayonnaise than coronation chicken. Stephen managed, first thing in the morning while all was quiet, to pay the insurance on the Panda AND take some money out of the Unicredit cash machine, which had recovered from its false alarm of last week. The fiercely efficient lady was also true to form, with a t-shirt showing a design of a pair of ballet shoes with a wealth of Swarovski style crystals splashed across it. Fabulous.

As for me, I had to rethink my assumption that everything was gently winding down when I had two messages in the afternoon. The first was from Piergiorgio, the academic for whom I check the articles and who had not been in touch for a while, to say that he had something for me to look at and that there would be a second one at the end of the month, if I was available. Of course I was, and he duly sent me the first one, to do with footballers’ ankle movement, which I checked and returned by the end of the week.

The other message was from my student, Andrea, who had supposedly stopped for the summer a few weeks ago. That was before his motorbike decided to have a disagreement with a car, resulting on a broken elbow and enforced leisure at home. He thought that squeezing in a couple of lessons a week would be one way to pass the time (yes, he was that bored) and so we arranged a Skype session for Thursday morning that featured listening, reading and talking pretty heavily, what with him not being in a position to write. He is going to have a couple of lessons a week until he is able to get out and about again, maybe the middle of August, so in the meantime I will do my best to deaden the pain with a general anaesthetic, English style.

This weekend, the two cherry liqueurs, the standard method with the brandy and Stephen’s experiment with the left-over 90% alcohol (a store cupboard basic in any well-regulated household) were ready for bottling. The first was easy, just strain and fill, but the second needed a little more work with the addition of a sugar syrup after straining to (a) add extra sweetness to the natural sugar from the fruit and therefore make it a little less like fire water and (b) lower the alcohol content to make it a little less like fire water. A quick sample (on a teaspoon) suggests that both varieties have much to recommend them.

Yesterday, after dinner, we decided to take a trip into the centre of MSP – first to buy a tub of ice cream each from Pina and then attend the summer concert of the town band, Bandistico Mauro Cecchini, in Piazza Umberto. This seemed an eminently sensible thing to do when temperatures, even in the evening, persist in hitting the mid-30s. There was a good turnout for the concert, and some might even, like us, have had no familial connection to any of the forty-odd band members – and it started more or less on time, only twenty minutes after that stated on the poster.

The band rattled through its progamme, and would have come in at well under an hour but for two things. The first was a demonstration part way through, presumably to give the band chance to catch its breath, of the preparatory musical course followed by the young children at the infant school. I’m not sure what this was exactly, for with the square being only on a slight incline and there being no platform and the children being very small it was impossible to see what was happening, but it involved a lot of clapping to pieces of music. The second, was that before the playing of the national anthem, we had to have a break for speeches, the net for which seemed to be cast quite wide around those gathered.

These included Gigi, a venerable and much respected ex-band member, who when called to the microphone had to make slow and somewhat unsteady progress from the back of the audience only to say that he didn’t really have anything to say and totter back again. Of such things is a sense of community made, though really, I think a better way to honour him would have been to leave him sitting at the back and run up to Pina for a tub of ice cream. I can heartily recommend the coffee ripple.