Tinsel and lights

8th December 2024

The week started with good news, at least for Stephen, when his slated visits to Milan this month were slashed from two to one. He still had to make an overnight trip on Wednesday with a collection of samples, returning home Thursday evening – and that is about all there is to say which is remotely interesting to the lay person on that subject.

He won’t, however, have go back for the Christmas party on the 17th, something that neither he nor Cecilia were particularly looking forward to, it being a long way to go to stand around like spare parts while the metropolitan elite strut their stuff. Bertrando, however, was exercising a three whip until, in a turnabout that would have made Dickens proud, the true meaning of Christmas entered his soul when the date of his young daughter’s first dance recital was revealed as being the same day, (it is Italy, remember; why should you need more than two weeks’ notice?) Obviously, there was no contest, especially when you throw in that the next day is parents’ consultation day with the class teacher.

When Stephen delivered this hefty blow to the bosses up in Milan, they seemed a little surprised that Bertrando would put family before business and partying (so we know where the Spirit of Christmas Present needs to drop by next). You and Cecilia could still come, they said, but Stephen demurred politely. Like that was ever going to happen.

The rest of the week was just the usual nonsense. I thought the queue in the Post Office on Tuesday morning was manageable, with only three in front of me when I went to post a couple of cards, but it turned into a bit of a delay, especially as the lady of more than a certain age seemed to have several accounts to sort out. Still, fifteen minutes wasn’t bad as these things go, except the chaos reigning in Pina when we went in for breakfast slowed us down even further. Why it was a particularly busy morning is anyone’s guess, but it was heaving (by MSP standards that is), aided by the same lady commandeering the counter while she made her mind up what to have. Just as well we’d set out earlier than usual, just in case.

Stephen headed northward as planned on Wednesday, leaving me in breathless anticipation of the arrival of the geologist and his team to set up the monitoring equipment. That they didn’t appear was not a total surprise, not because I didn’t have faith in them but because the day was a particularly miserable one of endless drizzly rain. It wasn’t much better the next day, and again I was not really expecting them but I was able to stand down officially when Stephen passed on a message he’d received from Fabrizio, apologising profusely and saying he had to reschedule for Monday 16th as he had an urgent matter to see to. With our monitoring stretching over a year, I suppose there is no deadline looming and therefore can’t be considered critical – at least, let’s hope so.

Today being festa (but not a day off work with it being a Sunday), celebrating the Immaculate Conception of the Madonna, and sort of an unofficial start of the Christmas period in Italy (though like other places, that start seems to be moving inexorably – and inexplicably - towards the beginning of October) seemed a good time for Stephen to set to with the decorations. Unlike last year, we have a tree, one of a more modest size than our previous one that Stephen declared too big to use so didn’t, which arrived to my surprise last Monday when Stephen appeared with it at lunchtime. A surprise not just because I was not expecting it but also because he had asked Cecilia to get it when she went to Ikea over the weekend – whereas he had doggedly spurned my encouragement to buy one when he mentioned it on both his previous visits.

Yesterday he put up the tree and arranged the lights and did one or two other little touches around the house, but these didn’t include the outside lights which he was unable to find no matter how much he searched the lumber room. This was a double blow as he was counting on them after the new tubular lights he’d theoretically bought in the Black Friday sale failed to turn up – because, as he found out when he looked, he hadn’t moved them from the basked to the checkout. We debated what to do, whether to order some more from Amazon or buy some from the Chinese shop at Corridomnia. We went to Macerata last night to eat polpette at Sugo, it being some time since we had been there, and to have a browse around the shops beforehand, so it would have been an easy matter to stop off as you drive by it on the way.

He wasn’t able to decide what to do for the best – which is just as well. When he came to finish off the decorations this morning by putting the baubles on the tree and titivating the rest of the house with various Christmas curios, he found that he hadn’t, as he had begun to suspect, ousted the lights in the great summer clear out. When he came across them in the lumber room, it seemed that his cunning plan to label them New Christmas Lights, as cunning as a fox what used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University but has moved on, and is now working for the UN at the High Commission of International Cunning Planning, wasn’t quite cunning enough.