The Phoney War: Christmas 2012

Although we had some snow in early December, the weather over Christmas was unseasonably mild - we rarely had to light the wood stove in the kitchen. Unfortunately the weather forecast suggests this is simply the lull before the storm and General Winter will launch his blitzkrieg towards the end of this week. It seems likely we will have a repeat of last year's appalling winter.
 Sophy and Adam arrived on Christmas Eve - eventually. Owing to fog their plane was diverted from Ancona to Pescara. They shared a taxi with an English couple from the airport to Pedaso where Pat picked them up.
  Pat's riding instructor, Glyn, was a very congenial guest for Christmas dinner.

As the large turkey which Pat had ordered from the organic shop in Servigliano had been swept away in floods we replaced it with three small ones. To our surprise they tasted better than a large one, so we will probably stick with tacchinelli next Christmas.
  The day after Boxing Day, Sophy, Adam and Pat went for a trek at San Ruffino in the morning -see video above - and in the evening we went for Pat's birthday dinner at the Hotel Leone in Montélparo, owned by the nephew of the couple with whom Sophy and Adam had shared a taxi from Pescara.
  Like last year, the village erected a large number of cribs. New locales this year included the approach to the panoramic terrace, the cage which formerly housed a falcon, the cantina of the Palazzo Mercuri and the the former alimentari pictured below.

The Conways very kindly invited us to their New Year's Eve celebration. Gordon was amongst our fellow-guests.

  On Saturday we went to the Centro Ippico Balduccia at Sant'Arcangelo di Romagna near Rimini. Pat was thinking of buying the very beautiful grey pictured below.

 Unfortunately Pat and Glyn decided that it would be too spirited for her to feel comfortable with.

    On the way back we stopped at the Chienti service station on the A14 for dinner and I bought Camilleri's latest Montalbano detective novel, Una voce di notte. James and Gabrielle bought me two novels for Christmas, Bring up the Bodies and Alone in Berlin. In addition, Apple's seasonal app, The Twelve Days of Christmas, which offers a free gift each day from Boxing Day to the Epiphany included two e-novels: Margaret Mazzantini's Venuto al mondo and Il mercante di libri maledetti by Marcello Simoni. So when the snow arrives at least I'll have plenty to read.

End of World Review

The twin highlights of 2012 were the family get-together

in August - when James, Gabrielle, Ruby and Olly made it across from Australia together with Candy and Quinn and Matthew and Charlie from Norfolk - and Pat's riding holiday with Sophy in Ireland the previous month.

Pat made her usual Flying Granny visits to the UK at regular intervals to look after Quinn. Apart from the family in August, we had Maggie and Phil as guests in March, and Dave came over in June to keep me company during one of Pat's visits to Candy and Quinn. An extremely severe winter - we were snowed in for four weeks -

prevented us from coming over for Quinn's birthday but we made it for Candy's in April, and I was able to pop over to Leicester for a couple of days to see Dave & Sue. In July I took Quinn with me to Leicester while Pat was in Ireland and we both had a thoroughly enjoyable time.

My final visit to the UK in November

ended unhappily as I managed to leave my suitcase on the train. Not, alas, the only sign of my deteriorating memory: next stop the Laurels! Fortunately, the suitcase was recovered and Pat brought it back to Italy the following month. It did, however, lead to an underwear crisis which I failed to resolve satisfactorily. Apart from visits to the UK we had two trips to Senigallia on the Adriatic coast to stay with two Italian friends, Peppe and Angiola.

Next March we plan, Mayan prophecies allowing, to visit Sophy and Adam in Dubai.

We has a super Christmas last year

with Sophy and Adam and Candy and Quinn, but were expecting to spend this year on our own. Happily, owing to a change of plans, Sophy and Adam will be coming across from Christmas Eve to the 29th. This year I failed to get any letters published in the Guardian. However, my English tourist guide to Montefalcone, published by the Comune, did get a mention in the Italian press. My translation of two mediæval texts about the Appenine Sybil has fared less well, the President of the Mountain Community insisting that it contain an Italian as well as an English translation of Antoine de la Salle's Le Paradis de la Reine Sibylle. God knows why as there is an Italian translation readily available and in my view the language into which a text is being translated should always be done by a native speaker. And the more I read Italian the more it reveals its way of structuring experience to be very different from that of the English language. A reflection, I suppose, of its different culture: its attitude to animals and the behaviour of its old men are two cases in point. Not that English culture is static: it's changing as its vocabulary becomes increasingly Americanised and its sport globalised.

Northern Italy suffered two major earthquakes this year, the earlier one figurative, the latter literal. The second devastated swathes of Emilia Romagna, the first exposed the xenophobic and separatist Northern League as being as corrupt as Italy's other political parties. Their only saving grace is that they have the sense to realise that Europe hangs together or its nations will hang separately as the balance of power swings eastwards. Meanwhile the UK's paranoia increases as it tilts at bogus enemies whilst its leaders snuggle ever closer to its inhabitants' real foes. Having made great strides in its mission to destroy the NHS, the Tories are renewing their attack on the BBC - after the temporary setback to the fortunes of its puppet-master Murdoch - by using the Savile affair as a crowbar. If the blogosphere is to be believed, there were far more powerful figures involved in his repulsive circle of abusers than a few clapped out DJs. Some at the very top of government in the 1970s have sailed off to the next world, others are still alive and as exempt from police investigation as Savile was when it might have done some good. Meanwhile the BBC is being berated for wasting public funds on Entwhistle's £450,000 pay-off. Rather fades into insignificance, I'd say, compared to the £370,000 pension the taxpayer is giving Fred Goodwin every year for helping to plunge the country into its greatest post-war financial crisis.

Apart from War and Peace my reading has has been largely confined to crime fiction: Dave introduced me to Jo Nesbos and Fred Vargas's novels, and they were a jolly good read. The one literary work I read, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, was a disappointment. In an attempt to improve her mind, Pat is doggedly persevering with Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain. She is not enjoying it!

Finally, if you wish to respond to this post Lynn Truss may be able to give you some hints. A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to one and all - assuming the Mayans got it wrong!

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Pat Tyler

Pat got from the UK last Friday after a week at Candy's working hard tiling her bathroom and finishing knitting Quinn's cardigan. She brought back my suit carrier and a large number of Christmas presents, one of which - shampoo from Deborah- was confiscated by Stansted security.

The dying of the light.

For some years now I haven't had to remember much: my memory's been outsourced to the Internet. Can't recall the source of a quotation? No problem, just Google it. And the coming of the iPhone meant this information was always on tap. No doubt the spread of literacy brought a similar feeling of emancipation to those who'd been previously totally reliant on their powers of recall. And just like an unfortunate who's lost a scrap of paper containing a piece of vital information, I'm bereft when our Internet connection's down. But unlike the scrap of paper, the information in cyberspace is still there and can be retrieved the following day.
   Two years ago, having bought an iPhone 4, I gave Candy my first iPhone, the 3G, which I'd acquired in the summer of 2008. On my recent visit to England I similarly passed on the iPhone 4, having upgraded to this year's model, and Quinn became the proud recipient of the 3G - minus SIM card - which he is using to play games on. But what a sad state the phone is in, bits of plastic are flaking off, and the volume switch has virtually disintegrated. Unfortunately, as my misadventures in England this November bear witness, the physical state of this former repository of my memory reflects the state of my actual memory. My forgetting to remove my luggage from the train, mentioned in an earlier post, was merely the culmination of a series of lapses.
   In the course of mooching about School after the OEs' dinner, Sam, Eccles and I ended up in the choir stalls. A battered copy of The Public School Hymn Book was in the pile of music by the organ. I thumbed through the book to find my favourite hymn, number 311 Lord Dismiss Us with Thy Blessing, always sung on the last day of term. To my horror I discovered that 311 far from being the best of hymns was the very worst: Lord Behold Us with Thy Blessing. No prizes for guessing when that was sung! For over fifty years, ever since leaving the wretched place, I've bored people with my fond recollections of hymn number 311, when all the time it was actually number 317. Soon I'll be confiding to people what a splendid chap Hitler was for standing up to Churchill's aggression and saving England from being invaded by the Nazis.
   Worse was to follow. When Matthew and Charlie came to Candy's for supper the conversation turned to their visit to Montefalcone this year. They said they hoped to come again, to which I responded that it would be a pity if this year's visit should be their only one. But it wasn't, they said. Oh yes it was, I insisted until with a sudden start I remembered that they were of course quite right, and the memory of their visit the previous year blazed into life.
   Just as the colour fades from an old man's hair, so his inner light begins to flicker warning him that soon it will disappear altogether. All that is left is to take to heart Thomas's plea to his father and

'Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'

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Pants!

The word 'pants', as any fule kno, is one of the many examples of the UK and the US being divided by their common language. In America the word signifies 'trousers'; in England what we wear underneath them. I used to be puzzled by the fact that in American English the word can also be used as a pejorative term e.g. 'your phone is pants'. I no longer am.
   A couple of years ago Sophy bought me some Pierre Cardin underpants for Christmas. They were admirable garments in almost every respect: boxers with lycra, my preferred style of underwear. Unfortunately they had a fatal flaw: no flies. One of the many advantages of being male is not having to get undressed every time you want a pee. No long queues in public lavatories for us chaps; no problem either when you're caught short on a country walk. And now, I raged, before throwing them into a drawer for redundant clothes, some buffoon has decided to discard centuries of collective wisdom in order to make a fashion statement. Alas, two years on I have discovered the problem is much greater than even my worst nightmares would have led me to believe. To explain.
  One of the unfortunate consequences of my recent encounter with the widder-woman was  leaving a week's supply of underwear in the UK. This meant I had to fish out the Pierre Cardin pants from the reject drawer. It also meant I had to buy more underwear. And this is when I made my terrible discovery: in the whole of the Girasole shopping centre not a single outlet sold cotton and lycra boxers with flies. The cheap unknown labels had joined their upmarket cousins in this sartorial lunacy. And at last I appreciated our transatlantic cousins' linguistic wisdom: nowadays:

                                                    Pants ARE pants!

… trains and … planes …

On Saturday I returned from a trip I'd made to the UK to attend the OEs' Bristol dinner and to visit Candy and Quinn.
  I'm in rather better physical shape than either my Bristol host, Sam Jefferies - he's been recently diagnosed with Deep Vein Thrombosis - or Sam's other guest, Eccles Vincent, who's recently had a triple heart by-pass. However, as a quick glance at my vacant stare in the photo at the top of the page will confirm, the same cannot be said for my mental state.
  I don't normally talk to my fellow travellers on planes or trains but was given little choice on the second leg of my journey from Bristol to March. Having changed trains at Birmingham I sat next to a student bound for Cambridge and opposite a man in his forties. As soon as I was seated he said, "Why has your hair got no colour?"
  "Because I'm old," I replied. "Yours'll be the same when you reach my age."
  "I don't think so," he replied in a Dublin accent. He was drunk, but not aggressively so, and over the next half an hour or so his life-story emerged. He'd been taken into care at 12, had been living rough for the past five years and had seen the inside of a large number of English and Irish gaols. On Friday he'd been released from Gloucester prison. On Sunday he was arrested in Cheltenham for being drunk and disorderly. Having spent the night in the cells, the magistrate before whom he'd appeared had given him a train ticket to Corby where he had some acquaintances. I learned we shared a christian name and a religion. I didn't begrudge giving him the pound he solicited before he changed trains at Leicester. Neither did the student sitting next to me. Despite his frequent profanities, a well-spoken elderly woman sitting across the aisle gave him some cash without being asked. He didn't  pretend to be anything other than a irredeemable alcoholic or ask for pity, but he certainly evoked it.
    Having had one conversation on a train I made the fatal mistake of having a second. After a pleasant few days with Candy and Quinn - I saw Richard and Jane on Tuesday morning who gave me lunch; Matthew and Charley came to Candy's for dinner the same evening;

on Thursday evening Candy, Quinn and I had dinner at the Crown; and on Friday morning  I went round to see Linda and Shen - Candy took me to Downham station early on Saturday morning. I began chatting to a woman in her sixties on the platform and, having carried her suitcase onto the train bound for King's Cross and stowed my own safely in the luggage-rack, we carried on our conversation. Widowed the same year that  Pat and I moved to Italy, she was on her way to spend one of her twice yearly holidays with her son who had moved to Florida a couple of weeks before his father's unexpected death. Gathering up my hat, scarf and man-bag I bade her farewell at Cambridge where I had to change trains for Stansted. Strolling down the platform and eyeing the closed refreshment kiosks - it was still only 6.30 - I was brought up short by the tannoy warning passengers to keep their luggage with them at all times. With a sickening feeling I realised that mine was heading for King's Cross, snugly ensconced in the luggage rack where I'd left it.
   Fortunately my 'moment of madness' had a happy outcome. Cambridge Station 'Communication Centre' rang King's Cross who phoned Candy when they'd retrieved the case. When Shen returned from visiting his mother in London he brought my case back with him and Pat will bring it home in early December. But I strongly advise my elderly readers to avoid engaging widder-wimmin in conversation when travelling by public transport; instead focus your few remaining mental powers on remembering to take your luggage with you when you alight!

The Courtyard Circular: October 2012

Tuesday 2nd. 

Picked up John and Judy at Comunanza bus station to take them to their home in the Faveto. They had flown to Rome and made the rest of their way via bus and taxi.

Wednesday 3rd - Saturday 6th. 

Spent a very enjoyable few days as Peppe and Angiola's guest in Senigallia.

3rd Visited Senigallia's castle in the afternoon.

4th In the morning went out on Peppe's boat with Peppe and Angiola, Massimo and Augosto. I took    the helm for a while.

In the afternoon Peppe and I visited Pio Nono's birthplace. In the evening we went to the Pesce Azzurro restaurant in Fano with Massimo and his wife, Uliana.

5th After lunch we went to Ancona and visited Trajan's Arch (see head picture), the Archæological museum and the cathedral.

6th In the morning went with Peppe to the Palazzo  Pianetti

 in Jesi via Massimo's country house

 and Ostra.

Lunch at Peppe's house with his son and daughter-in-law and their daughter and his daughter, Giovanna, and her two daughters. In the evening I went to Ancona airport to meet Pat back from her visit to Candy and Quinn.

Thursday 11th 

Supper at Jane's with Peppe and Angiola.


Friday 12th. 

Peppe and Angiola and Tony and Shona came to supper.


Saturday and Sunday 13th &14th. 

Montefalcone's annual Sagra dell'Autunno. Despite a dire weather forecast, it turned out dry and fairly sunny unlike the previous year.


Monday 15th. 

Dinner at the Taverna in Santa Vittoria as Tony and Shona's guests.


Tuesday 16th

Lunch at Jane's with Tony and Shona. They returned to the UK the following day.


Friday 19th. 

Jane came to supper, was very appreciative of Pat's curry. She returned to the UK the following Monday.


Sunday 21st.

Went to Smerillo's annual Castagne in the Piazza.


Wednesday 24th. 

Visited Glyn at his home in Monte Rinaldo in afternoon. Went with him to the Taverna in evening. 


Monday 29th.

Lit fire for the first time since last Spring


Tuesday 30th.

Snow appeared overnight on the Sibillini mountains. Winter has definitely arrived.