Sweet like chocolate

9th January 2022

The clear skies that eventually decided to show their faces yesterday, just in time for twilight, had the decency to hang around into Monday, allowing Stephen to take down the terrazzo lights in the afternoon as a final farewell to the holiday season – or almost.

Before that, he started his morning with a phone call to IKEA about the uncooperative oven. The nice lady he spoke to was very sympathetic and said that someone from the service team would be in touch. As of today, we are still waiting…

Having put that issue into motion, albeit a slow moving one, it was then out and about for Stephen, calling at the factory and also at bff Manuel’s. No doubt there was some talk of a business nature, but more importantly it was to call on Mr Fix-it to once again help us with renewing our Tessera Sanitaria and thus avoiding the four days back and forth to Fermo that it used to take. As last year, his contact at the hospital sent him the completed forms and he forwarded them to Stephen.

The next morning, now things were back to a normal routine, we only spent twenty minutes waiting to pay the fee for the health cards at the Post Office before breakfasting at Pina. Prior to this, though, Stephen was again on the phone, this time to the occulist in Civitanova, as it was coming up to a year since he said my cataracts were not at a stage to warrant any sort of intervention and to give it 12 months.

Well, we have, and while I have managed ok, I am now getting to the stage where I have to lean into the computer to be able to read it, and I only drive local, familiar routes where I don’t need to read the road signs. My appointment is for 8th February, and then we will see how much longer after that I am going to be a menace to society – though even with cataracts I like to think that I drive more safely than all those octogenarians who can’t even see over the steering wheel. I am also able to more or less centre the car between the lines of a parking space, something admittedly that is regarded as aberrant behaviour in Italy.

Thursday was Epiphany and another holiday which following our recent trend we again spent quietly at home. For Italians this is when, as you should remember by now (and if not, why not?), the witch Befana brings a sock of goodies to those who have behaved well during the previous year or a sock of coal to those who haven’t. I patently had a fabulous year as she left me a sock with a selection of Pina’s finest chocolates, one of each of the types that they sell, as other bars do, individually so you can have one with your caffè. They are so good I am rationing them out one per day with my coffee after lunch, so Befana will appreciate my abstemiousness and reward me with even more next time.

We did have a moment of what passes as excitement for us yesterday morning as it was time to collect this year’s free recycling bags from the Comune. In times past this has been at the old church in the main square, but that has undergone restoration and is now destined for grander things than being a warehouse. Instead, we had to go to the restored depository in the row of houses in the street behind, where this year the man doling out the bags actually seemed to understand us when we said the name Webster and suggested he look on the last page – though maybe not as he when he looked there he did ask I were Michael Wild.

If this were not enough, when we left clutching our bags Stephen hung a right rather than a left back to the car, and I followed him up to Pina where, as a perfect end to our little trip we treated ourselves to a cappuccino and a piece of crostata each while keeping our ears open for any gossip. Maybe not the most earthshattering of things, but in this brave new world you have to take your fun where you can find it.

Less fun was today’s weather, which was grey then rainy then snowy – but every cloud does have a silver lining as we found out in a most surprising way. The snow that started late afternoon continued for several hours, covering the ground and the cars and also, presumably, the electric substation as halfway through Queer Eye the power went off and stayed off for several minutes. It spluttered back to life only to go off again shortly afterwards, but for a shorter time.

When it again returned, it stayed around long enough for us to finish the programme, but more importantly it also kicked the oven back into life. After eleven days of proclaiming FAIL and refusing to respond to our initial attempts to coax it back into action, the surge of energy from the electricity must have worked some magic. We are now crossing our fingers and hoping that the restoration is not temporary, though what will be more interesting is when the service centre eventually gets round to calling us and we have to explain that we no longer need them without appearing totally stupid. It’s a tough one, I know.