The Year of the Horse: 2013 Review.

For 1.354 billion Chinese people the Year of the Horse begins at the end of next month; it started for us on the 21st March when Pat's horse, Daisy, finally arrived at the livery stables near Amandola. Pat's passion for riding had been rekindled by the magnificent holiday in Ireland Sophy treated her to last year, and it wasn't long before she wanted to own a horse again. After a sticky start to the year when she fell and broke her shoulder, we eventually settled on the beautiful Andalusian pictured above.
  March was also memorable for our visit to Sophy and Adam in Dubai where her proud parents witnessed their elder daughter gain a place on the podium in the Spinney's Cup.

Early in June my life entered extra time - an event celebrated with family and friends at a garden party at Candy's house in Upwell. James came over from Australia and Matthew and his wife Charlie supplied us with a mini marquee. Sophy supplied the drinks but, alas, was prevented from leaving Dubai by an Emirati jobsworth.

The psalm which famously tells us that 'The days of our years are threescore and ten" continues "and if by reason of our strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow". The severe bout of sciatica I suffered in the early part of the year suggests  the psalmist's likely to be proved right. The pain went after a few months but I'm left with a permanent limp.

   In July Dave came over to Italy to accompany me to the Leonard Cohen concert in Rome for which Matthew and James had very generously bought me tickets.

   In October I had a trip to the mountains of Abruzzo with Peppe and Angiola 

which took in the earthquake devastated city of L'Aquila:

   As usual, Pat made several visits to the UK to look after Quinn while Candy was away on business. I went over in November to attend Dave's belated celebration of his seventieth:

to look after Quinn and to attend the OEs' Bristol dinner with Mike Jefferies and Chris Vincent. In this photo my old form-mate Chris "Umpter" Northover (centre) as outgoing President hands over his chain of office to another of my friends and contemporaries, Geoff "Dwarf" Beynon, (left) while the Lord Mayor looks on:

The day after the dinner, Mike, his wife Pam, Chris and I  had an enjoyable excursion to the Wye Valley.

We had a hot summer and temperatures  remained in the twenties until virtually the end of October. November, however, saw a precipitous drop in temperature with heavy snow at the end of the month - and I'm not talking about the couple of centimetres which brings the UK to its knees.

Let's hope the weather's better in 2015 as from that year ex-pat pensioners will no longer be eligible for the winter fuel allowance.

  November's snow was followed by torrential rain early this month which not only removed the snow but huge chunks from a large number of roads as well, including the one below Montefalcone's town walls.

We are expecting a particularly enjoyable family Christmas this year as both Sophy and Adam and Candy and Quinn will be joining us in the flesh, whilst we hope to FaceTime - Apple's version of Skype - Matthew and Charlie and James, Gabriel, Ruby and Olly.

Tenth Anniversary

Today marks the 10th anniversary of our move to that magical place beyond the clouds - Montefalcone Appennino.

"The thin night darkens. A breeze from the creased water

sighs the streets close under Milk waking Wood. The Wood,

whose every tree-foot's cloven in the black glad sight of

the hunters of lovers, that is a God-built garden to Mary

Ann Sailors who knows there is Heaven on earth and the

chosen people of His kind fire in Llaregyb's land, that is

the fairday farmhands' wantoning ignorant chapel of

bridesbeds, and, to the Reverend Eli Jenkins, a greenleaved

sermon on the innocence of men, the suddenly wind-shaken

wood springs awake for the second dark time this one

Spring day."

The Courtyard Circular: October and November 2013.

October.

After a wet and relatively cold spell at the beginning of the month the weather improved  and remained good until October was almost over -  22º at San Lorenzo on the 28th - before rain arrived on the 29th and the temperature dropped to the mid-teens.

  Pat was in England from the 6th to the 12th but Tony and Shona arrived for the Sagra on the 7th, Jane on the 5th and John and Judi on the 11th. I had lunch at Peppe and Angiola's together with Tony and Shona on the 10th and Pat and I had supper with the Cairns at the Taverna on the 17th.

 On the 20th Peppe and Angiola took me to visit Calascio a village in the Monti della Laga in Abruzzo:

 

We then went on to L'Aquila which despite Berlusconi's promise to rebuild the city quickly still looks like a modern version of Pompei over four years after the earthquake which killed 297 people in the city and its hinterland.

Click here to see other photos of the trip.

October's other positive event was finding Meg safe and well after she had disappeared overnight on the 23rd.

Now for the bad news! 

November.

Things have continued to fall apart. Although I got the computer back with a new graphics card last month the coffee machine decided to pack up at the beginning of November, just before I went to the UK for Dave's seventieth, and to look after Quinn and attend the OEs' Bristol dinner. We took it to Porto d'Ascoli to be repaired when I got back, picked it up last Saturday and found that the problem was still there so I've taken it back today.

   Snow arrived on the 25th, and on the 26th I woke to find it had snowed very heavily overnight. 

It began thawing on the 28th.

  Although my computer was repaired gratis, it ended up costing me 80 euros as I managed to be caught twice by speed cameras: the first time going to Ascoli to take the computer to be repaired and the second when I went to pick it up.

  

The Sprawl of the House of Escher.

Montefalcone is perched on a cliff two and a half thousand feet above sea level. For a Westcountryman, who'd been exiled to the East Anglian fens for over thirty years, that is one of its many attractions. Except in winter. Once the snow has been ploughed the residual layer is soon compacted by the incessant motorised traffic - like the English, the Italians will never walk anywhere if they can drive, no matter how narrow the street - into treacherous ice, making walking round the village a hazardous enterprise. In winter my thrice daily walk with the dogs - we have no garden, and dog faeces wouldn't add to the attractiveness of our 16th century courtyard - changes from an idyll to a nightmare. Two dogs pulling on their leads while you climb up an ice covered street isn't much fun. Going down the slope, though, is even worse, and unfortunately if you go up a hill during your walk logic dictates you must inevitably walk down one to return to your starting point. 

  For many years we were perplexed, and impoverished, by Enel - the Italian electricity company - charging us the higher rate applicable to non-residents. Then one day we noticed that the bill related to 34 Via Roma but was invoiced to 18 Via San Pietro. It took several years to convince Enel that the two addresses related to the same property. For our house sprawls over a slope: the front door and cantinas are accessed from Via Roma whereas if you enter the house from Via San Pietro you find yourself on the floor above. 

   And this has proved a blessing when going shopping in winter. As you can see from the map I can climb up the hill where the village shop is located and return home with my purchases without ever having to go back down it.  

So in this case Escher triumphs over logic; if only it were always so.

UCAS

Unlike my trip to the UK in November 2012, last week's visit passed off without any major disasters. True, I managed to leave my hat behind in the Lamb and Flag, Welney,  the Tuesday before last when I went there with Richard Dalton, and the previous Sunday I'd left the parmesan I'd brought over for Sam Jefferies in Dave's fridge in Leicester. But Candy drove me to Welney on our way back from Quinn's swimming lesson in Downham to retrieve the hat, and Dave very kindly posted the cheese to Sam in Bristol. It arrived there before I did. And, above all, when I flew back to Italy this Monday - despite only having forty minutes to do so - I managed to get from the plane to the coach for Pedaso, so avoiding having to spend the night in Fiumicino.
   The beginning of the trip, though, was a little more stressful thanks to UCAS. To explain. When I was at work  I had quite a lot of involvement with UCAS, helping our FE students to compile their HE applications and, as Course Director, dealing with applications to our BA Humanities programme. Apart from the slight absurdity of receiving UCAS forms from my own FE students I had no problems with UCAS. It was certainly an improvement on the system obtaining when I was applying to university in the early sixties: you had to fill in a separate form for every university you hoped might offer you a place. In a word, UCAS simplified things.
  In July I read an amusing article by Beppe Severgnini in the Corriere della Sera in which he referred to UCAS. Only here the initials stood for the legendary Ufficio Complicazioni Affari Semplici [The office for complicating straightforward transactions] which  Severgnini dubbed one of Italy's longest lived institutions. It was one which I had had plenty of dealings with in Italy; to my surprise, I was to discover it had extended its tentacles across the Channel.
   When Dave came over to Rome in the summer for the Cohen concert I booked us train tickets from Rome to Ancona online from Trenitalia, Italy's publicly owned railway company. It was a simple matter: you made the booking and the tickets were emailed to you. Before I came to England in November I booked a National Express coach ticket from Wisbech to Bristol online from the company's website. Like the Trenitalia tickets they were emailed to me. Unfortunately the British railway companies have outsourced their online booking to Italy's UCAS. Rather than simply emailing you the tickets they send you a code which has to be punched into a machine on the station platform, having first inserted the debit card with which you bought the tickets. Envisaging problems I didn't book the first train to leave Stansted after my plane was due to land. The tickets are non-transferable and had the plane landed late I could well have missed the train. So with over an hour in hand to collect the tickets I thought I had UCAS licked. It was only when the ticket inspector asked to  see my ticket that I discovered I'd nearly lost. The machine on the platform had spewed out three cards, and as only one of them was the ticket I'd paid scant attention to the other two. When I handed the inspector my ticket he asked me for my receipt - "The ticket's not valid without it," he added. So that was what one of the other cards was. God knows what I'd done with it, I didn't think it had any importance. Fortunately he added that it would be valid if I could show him the email confirming the purchase which I was able to.
  Thereafter, the trip went smoothly. Dave's daughter, Kate, picked me up from Leicester station, and his cousin John took me to Dave's seventieth party. It was also a mini Keele reunion, with Arthur McCutcheon and Mike Farmer as well as Dave and myself (see the photo heading this post). The following day Dave, Arthur and I FaceTimed another Keele contemporary, Joe Pownall, whom Sue - in a piece of investigative work worthy of Miss Marple - had managed to track down. Dave and I hadn't been in touch with him since the late seventies.
  After six days staying at Candy's I went to the Old Elizabethans' dinner in Bristol

 

on the 9th, staying with Sam and Pam Jefferies. Chris Vincent was also staying with Sam:

The following day the four of us went to the Wye Valley in the afternoon

 

and in the evening Mike Farmer popped in on his way home from a party in Chippenham.

  And on Monday I returned home to a Le Marche swept by tempests which had killed two people in the north of the Region.

Miracle at Montefalcone

On Wednesday the 23rd, just after five, I took the dogs to the upper woods (to the left on the map, to the right in the photo) for their usual late afternoon walk. When we reached Valentino and Cecilia's house 1, one of their adopted strays, Fred, joined us. When it was time to put them on the lead to return home Meg and Fred had disappeared, a not uncommon event. I spent ten fruitless minutes calling her. Then Pat arrived. Fred reappeared but as there was still no sign of Meg we retraced our route through the woods constantly calling her, to no avail although I could hear a dog which sounded like her barking below me in the  far distance. By now it was dark.       

   Pat took Eva home and then drove round the roads (see red arrows below) which encircle the upper woods and, on the eastern side divide them from the lower woods, 

looking for Meg. I stayed at the point 2 from which I could hear barking, continually calling her.  Then, when Pat phoned to say there was no sign of Meg on the roads,  I used the iPhone's torch, to help me slowly navigate my way out of the upper woods to Fred's 1 where Pat was waiting in the car. We drove to where 3 we could once again hear the barking, which we now discovered was coming from the lower woods (to the right on the map, to the left in the photo) . Carrying the torch Pat had brought from home, I attempted to go towards the sound down a steep and muddy path 4. Unfortunately, it led me away from the barking so we gave up and got home almost four hours after the walk began. Pat was convinced we'd never see Meg again. 

  At seven the next morning Pat took Eva to the upper woods to look for Meg while I walked to where we'd heard the barking from the lower woods, crossing myself as I passed a shrine to Our Lady 5 en route. There was no longer any barking but I thought that if I could get to below where we'd previously heard it I might be able to climb up through the woods to find her. I set off down a track by the cemetery 6, well to the south east of the previous evening's barking. When I got to the bottom and turned a corner there she was - Meg, alive and well - trapped inside a chain-link fence surrounding a plantation of oak trees 7, and nowhere near where I'd had a very faint hope she might be.  If I hadn't found her she would almost certainly have starved to death. The gate was padlocked but I managed to pull up enough of the bottom of a section of fencing to get her out. In a way it was fortunate that she'd been trapped because, given her predilection for trying to round up cars as if they were sheep, she'd have probably have been run over if she'd tried to make her way home in the dark.

 Was her salvation a fortunate concatenation of circumstances or divine intervention? Take your pick.

Update to May 4th's Post.

The BBC have recently screened the Italian TV dramatisation of The Young Montalbano complete with English subtitles. Episode 3, Back to Basics, incorporates the plot of Pezzetti di spago assolutamente inutilizzabili.

The Courtyard Circular: August and September 2013

August.

August, as usual, saw  our social life take a severe downturn as term ended for the dayboys: the Rogers went home on the 5th and the Cairns on the  9th. We had Sunday lunch at the Trattoria di Moro with Tony and Shona before they left, and coffee at John and Judy's a couple of days before their departure. On the 13th went with Glyn to a concert of Celtic music, La Cuma di Notte at the Monte Rinaldo archeological site. It wasn't very good and - even worse - while I was filming a song the screen on my camera packed up.

The following day we had a pleasant birthday lunch with Glyn at Il Faro on Pedaso beach, followed by heavy rain. Ferragosto began as though it were an English bank holiday,  grey and much cooler. However it picked up in the afternoon with blue skies and temperature in the mid-twenties. Although it never returned to the low thirties of  early August, the weather remained good on the whole until the last Sunday in September when I had to finally abandon shorts.

September: Things - and people - fall apart.

The month began fairly well. On Sunday 1st Pat had an enjoyable hack out on Daisy and in the late afternoon we went to a Chopin concert given by Gil Jetley at his house.



On the 6th we got the second load of wood in before Pat went to the UK until the 13th
the following day.

 On the 8th I went to Joey Luis's confirmation in Force,

returning home to stack the wood to make room for the third and final load on the 11th.
   Then things carried on from last month's camera disaster as more things started to fall apart. Firstly, while Pat was away the boiler decided to pack up so I was without hot water until the 15th when Pompeo and Peppe effected a temporary fix. It went off again on the 18th and we're still awaiting some replacement parts. Secondly, warning lights came on in the car, one of which began flashing menancingly. Thirdly, installing an iTunes update on the 18th in order to download iOS 7 led to a distorted graphical display followed by flickering and crashing. Eventually the computer became unusable. Fortunately, searching the web revealed that the mid-2011 model of my computer came with a faulty graphics card and Apple would replace it gratis. Took the computer to Ascoli last Tuesday and will pick it up tomorrow.
  And it's not just things which are breaking. On the 22nd I got my foot caught in a shop-fitting at Lupo's alimentari and went sprawling, the corner of another fitting hitting me in the mid-riff. The same day at mass Don Marco fainted and fell backwards hitting his head on the altar steps. He was taken to Fermo Hospital but, fortunately, was back at his post this Sunday. As has my sciatica since the last week of September!