Look at me, Pa...

24th January 2021

This is one of those weeks where the blog will be but a momentary diversion, there not having been anything of great import happening over the past seven days other than the great stand-by in times of conversational need, the weather.

We have been treated to quite a variety this week, though not yet, thankfully or un, depending on your viewpoint, snow. It started off, as my mother would say without any scientific justification, too cold to snow, meaning it was clear and sharply frosty and cold enough to freeze the water in the outside dog bowl – freeze solid that is, not just with a top layer of ice. By Friday, however, with the advent of strong winds overnight, clouds had gathered and the temperature had risen to 12C during the day. This lasted till today, when the clouds persisted as did the wind, but a drop to 5C and the onset of rain at lunchtime meant the week finished on a decidedly grey and wintery note – odd that, what with it being January.

If the weather hadn’t been enough to encourage us to hunker down at home, the return to being an orange zone would have. With breakfast out being again off the agenda Stephen did the Tuesday shopping da solo on his way to the factory. We did, however, manage a tour of some of the better known retail outlets together on Thursday afternoon. Working on the basis these days one never knows, even if positive numbers are holding relatively steady in Italy, what tomorrow will bring by way of restrictions, we thought it wise to stock up on some basics while we still could.

You will, by now, be familiar with our usual route on such occasions: Acqua e Sapone, L’Ebolario, and Click Café. This time we added in a stop at the cheap petrol station in Torre San Patrizio - and that underlines one of the (few?) benefits of travel restrictions, for if past evidence is anything to go by a full tank should last us well into spring. And in addition, to prove that Stephen really knows how to show a guy a good time, we even managed to drop by Roc Pellami whilst he hunted for a batch of leather to match some previously used in a production. Unfortunately the best they could manage was a couple of shades off and with a slightly different finish but hey, by Italian standards it was a perfect fit.

You could be forgiven for wondering what has become of us al when the social and cultural highlight of the week is a trip to the herbal shop to buy a room diffuser. Maybe, though, what is needed is a change of viewpoint. That is certainly a philosophy that Harry seems to subscribe to, given that yesterday while Stephen was doing his usual Saturday morning floor cleaning in the company of Radcliffe and Maconie, Harry took the opportunity offered to sidle into the back room and jump onto the windowsill, something he has never done before. We think he must have executed a double jump, onto the chair and then the sill, managing not to knock anything off in the process for which we are grateful. After a good while as master of all he surveyed, he found that getting down was a different matter. His pathetic whining and doleful eyes suggested that his new vantage point hadn’t delivered all that he’d hoped for – a bit like the rest of us then, really.