Just a quickie

2nd November 2025

With the past week being one of the most uneventful on record, this blog will take up as much of your time as the average Italian takes when dropping into a bar for a caffè (or espresso for those of you who aren’t sophisticated international travellers like what I am).

So what can I tell you? The road was more or less unaffected by last Sunday’s rain, and the weather has been warm and sunny - unseasonably so, maybe, but appreciated by Harry and Peggy. Most nights we’ve had a boost of central heating just to take the evening chill away (inside, that is; we’re in one of those odd times when it’s actually warmer outside). We’d been looking forward to lighting our first fire of the autumn yesterday but we didn’t even bother with firing the radiators.

Friday was Hallowe’en, something that was more or less non-existent when we came to Italy ten years ago, but such is the inexorable march of Netflix and American culture that it’s infiltrated even MSP. I’m not complaining, though; at least it doesn’t last for two weeks, like Black Friday (how?) and Stephen did come home with a present for me – a cheery little orange bucket with a grinning wraith-like face filled with Lindt chocolates and topped off with a jolly colour coordinated arrangement. 

Having resurrected my baking bug, it was the return of rock buns yesterday afternoon, which went down a treat later for our merenda. A batch of chicken and pepper casserole and a cheese and ham torta were divided up for weekend meals and the freezer, which now looks pleasingly full.

Such is my devotion to you, gentle reader, that I couldn’t let a whole week pass without doing something other than potter around at home, and so we fell back on an old favourite this morning with a trip to Corridomnia. Besides the usual double-whammy of Risparmio Casa and DiverXo (a little busier than our last couple of visits, now people aren’t flocking to the coast on Sundays), there were one or two other necessities that meant we left with a full boot. Namely (and don’t get too excited):

·      Molasses and agave syrup from the organic shop. The latter is a new departure for us in the hope that it might be a reasonable substitute for golden syrup, meaning I can once more make our much-missed ginger biscuits and ginger cake.

·      Several packs of hide chews from Arcplanet, for Peggy and Harry, of course.

·      New jogging bottoms for me. No, not to go jogging (as if) but to wear in a morning while I do my chores and to replace the pair jettisoned in the spring wardrobe changeover.

·      Sleep shorts for Stephen.

I won’t add anything else to this last one as such things that side of life are a personal matter and best left to Stephen himself. As Miss Manners, doyenne of all things etiquette, once replied to a woman who had written to her, asking if she thought it unreasonable that her husband became upset if she used his towel. “Certainly not, marriage is no excuse for that sort of intimacy.”