The price is right

2oth October 2024

After the feast of last week’s double whammy we come to the famine of the post-holiday week where the main focus was on getting back into the groove and one member of the family having to recover from his over-exuberance. A clue: it was neither me nor Stephen.

That only leaves Harry, who seemed moderately pleased to see us when we went to pick him up from the kennels late Monday morning and slightly more pleased to be home where he ran round the garden – not that he was in much of a condition to voice his pleasure. The couple of videos Loris sent of him while we were away showed him happily playing with other dogs in the exercise area, and indeed Daniela had said while we were doing the necessaries that Harry è bravissimo. What she might have said, and what the videos didn’t show, was Harry è fortissimo. He obviously put so much energy into his barking that he had lost his voice, managing only a hoarse approximation of a woof. 

Harry wasn’t the only one making whoopee in our absence. Before we went to collect him, while I was getting on with some chores, Stephen set about washing down the terrazzo. The local woodpigeons seemed to have been having some friends over and chose our railings on which to hang out and share the craic – leaving not only their muddy footprints but also a lot of what my granny said was good luck when a bird dropped it on your head.

It was then more or less back to normal for the rest of the week. Stephen contacted Irene about the house on Wednesday and she suggested the following Monday would be a good day to get together. He suggested her office and she said she would get back to us with a suggested time; I’ll let you know as soon as we hear.

There was a change of routine on Friday morning as Coal is closed for two weeks for refurbishment. We’re agog to see what the results will be, but it looks pretty drastic. The front is fenced off with more than enough workmen to go round and a gaping hole in the wall where the door to the Zona Pranzo once was. If I were to take bets, I’d say it looks like this area, separate from the store and supposedly for people to eat the prepared food bought at the deli counter, will be incorporated into one large shop – which makes sense. The only people I ever saw in there were the cleaner and those using the Amazon hub (me and Stephen). Expect a full report on the grand reopening.

Friday evening we met Marco and Maddalena at the pub for the obligatory debrief on our holiday. Yesterday Stephen spent the bulk of his time ironing, which he might as well have been doing as the weather was terrible. It was a day of rain, coming in blustery wodges, and while Harry and I managed to avoid the heavy downpours by judicious timing of our walks, our poor road has taken a battering with the same old fractures opening up again.

This morning was devoted to finishing off what we can now really call the dressing room with yet another trip to IKEA to return and get a refund for the lights that didn’t fit and to make up the set of missing door handles. We dealt with the first as soon as we got there, or rather almost as soon. Stephen decided he had got the wrong part of the extensive complex, then after we walked away decided it was correct after all – which meant that the couple returning what looked like a whole kitchen got in just before us and we had fifteen minutes to wait while all the bits and pieces were scanned.

The handles were the last thing we picked up, when we went to the large warehouse section at the end of the magical mystery tour that is a trip round IKEA. Here we added the two mirrors and the two cabinets we had plumped for on our way round the shop to the rug, the copious hangers, the light fitting, and the plant and plant pot already in the trolley. We then asked the nice man at the central desk where the handles were and he directed us to the very end of the warehouse section and to the right, where the handle section is almost hidden from view against the side wall and where we were able to claim the last packet of the ones we needed.

Job done, we paid, stocked up on jam and meatballs from the food section and headed home, but if we thought that was the end of our current dalliance with IKEA we were wrong. In the afternoon, the cabinets were assembled without any problem and the mirrors similarly hung with apparent ease. The problem arose when Stephen checked the box with the light and saw what we had missed in the shop – that it was dimmable and the remote needed to control the level was not, of course, supplied.

That is something for another day. More importantly, was continuing the decompression programme from our holidays with dinner at Verde Pistacchio – going from six nights out on the trot to two in a week seemed a reasonable debrief. And not only was the meal reasonable (Black Angus beef kebabs) as well, but also the price – so much so that when I paid on the way out and Laura, the owner, said how much it was, I expressed surprise. “It’s not pizza,” she said, plaintively, before Stephen put her right that I wasn’t complaining, that I thought she had missed something. No, it was all right she assured me as she showed the bill, pointing out it was all there.

It was in the car on the way home, when I put on my reading glasses, that I saw where the discrepancy lay. They had charged us for a jug of their house Rosso Piceno when we had had a bottle – but seeing as the wine in the bottle tasted pretty much like when we had a jug the other time we went, I think we can call it quits. The problem of the remote control dimmer is enough to worry about.