Sugar and spice

31st March 2024

With the fine weather continuing, Stephen came home for lunch on Monday to find the door stop wedging open the front door, just enough to let Bella and Harry squeeze in and out but not enough to encourage the bees buzzing round the nearby plant, currently in flower, to venture inside.

This might seem a little previous, what with us still being in March, but it was a pre-emptive strike on my part to avoid having to disrupt my morning lesson and don my commissioner’s uniform for their benefit. So warm was it, that Stephen judged it time to retrieve and hang the door screen. It seemed we might indeed have shot the gun when rain and cooler weather returned on Tuesday, but as it has become steadily warmer towards the weekend it was a good idea after all. So much milder is it that today, for the first time this year, we have had no need for any form of heating, neither the fire nor a quick burst of the central heating to take off an evening chill.

After his lunchtime good deed, it was back to work for Stephen and I was not expecting him home till a bit later

in the evening as a client from London was arriving in the afternoon. I was surprised, therefore, to hear him walk through the door (closed by now) sometime before six. Apparently, Bertrando had the jolly wheeze of, once they had collected the client at Ancona train station, to take him straight to Civitanova, where he was staying, rather than to the office in Montegranaro and then to his Airbnb apartment, and conduct the initial meeting in a convenient bar.

What extra free time he gained on Monday was, however, used up on Tuesday when he had a full day of factory visits and decision making with the visitor, which meant to his chagrin, and mine, that he had to forgo Pina and I had to do the shopping all on my own. Don’t worry, I managed. Stephen was out of the house by eight, and it was over twelve hours till he returned. It could have been later had the client not been desperate to eat dinner, having fasted all day. This was due to Ramadan, but not for religious reasons. He told Stephen that a few years ago he worked in a place where the majority of his colleagues were Muslim, and decided to join them in their daily fast during this observance.

He was so taken with how much better he felt for doing it that he has continued ever since, even though he no longer works in the same place. At 6.30, though, when he was able to break the fast, Stephen had to be a bit creative in finding a place to eat in Civitanova. He remembered that I Due Re, a chalet on the lungomare, was open and did decent pizze. The waitress was somewhat surprised to see them walk through the door. Yes, she told them, they were open but it would be twenty minutes before the pizza oven was up to temperature. Till then they were welcome to take a table and wait. When the food did arrive, pizza followed by penne carbonara (I know, but that is what he chose), it didn’t hang around very long and hence Stephen making it home just as I was finishing my dinner, taken at a civilised time.

Wednesday proved an exciting day when I found myself on a magical mystery tour of Civitanova. Well, that might be hyping it a little, but it was a part of the town I had only passed through on a couple of occasions. The reason? A new pair of glasses for Stephen that I had offered to buy him for his upcoming birthday. The place? Not so much a shop as a by invitation only select showroom known only to the select few privy to its existence. Obviously, I’m not one of those, but fortunately I know a man who knows a man who is – i.e. Manuel. Stephen had been there a few times with his bff, and had been told about a very fine square-shaped translucent greeny-blue pair that were just what he was looking for.

And indeed they proved so to be. He tried them on, liked them, tried on another pair, and another, and several others, suffered indecision, especially when he donned a pair of Tom Ford frames that had a Tom Cruise Top Gun vibe. After much consideration, though, he felt they made him look more like Droopy, the cartoon dog, than the pint-sized action hero and went back to the original pair, the ones that had drawn him there in the first place. The owner took his measurements, packed them up and said they would be ready by the end of next week and off we went on an unplanned detour. Manuel had to pick up his lady friend in Monte Urano (who, proving it is a small world after all, lived in the apartment above my Monday night student), so he also decided we would stop off at Totò (yes, that’s a name from the past) for a Crodino as an aperitivo while he got some pizze to augment dinner, seeing as there was now an extra guest.

We got an early start on the holiday weekend by having dinner at the pub on Thursday evening, thinking it would be fairly quiet – until we walked through the door and saw the vast majority of tables already set with place mats and packets of cutlery. We’re not quite sure what the occasion was, maybe just one of those nights on which a group of men of a certain age think it’s a good idea to get together and eat and drink wine, though in acknowledgement of changing times when the people eventually gathered there was a reasonable smattering of women – there’s moda for MSP. Fortunately, there were a couple of booths not commandeered for the event, and one of them was empty. We settled down, but then shuffled up to make room for Alessandra and Ben, a couple we know, and his parents on a visit here, who, like us, were not expecting such a crowd. Good for the pub, I say, and good for making sure it keeps going.

Something else that keeps going (see what I did there) is the Good Friday reenactment of Christ’s passion, though this year, for the first time since we moved to MSP, they had to do without our presence. An evening spent at home marked the theme for the weekend, apart from Stephen and I going on separate jaunts yesterday afternoon. His was to Civitanova to collect his new glasses, ready in double-quick time. Mine was to Montegranaro to drop in on Marzia and Diego. I had not seen them since last June as, being in their final year and studying fiercely – particularly Marzia who wants to do medicine – they have not been able to fit in lessons. I’m pleased to say they looked very well and were as happy to see me as I was to see them – and Marzia’s mum told me how much she missed seeing me on a Friday afternoon, which was wonderful for my ego.

Before all that, though, I had a baking session in the morning, something that has not happened for too long, especially as, inspired by Easter, I made some hot cross buns for the first time since I don’t know when. These worked out very well, even though we hit that slight hiccup of the misalignment of British and Italian ingredients. This time it was mixed spice, a must-have for most festive baking in the UK but non-existent here, but fortunately a Google search meant I was able to cobble together an approximation. I also threw in some Rice Krispie Easter nests for good measure (Cadbury’s mini eggs courtesy of Stephen and Amazon), because, as our fine haul of eggs shows, if there is one thing you can’t have too much at this time of year, it’s chocolate.