Frohe Weinachten

Sue and I met in Cologne for Christmas to be with our friends Thomas and Nicole and their son (and my godson) Joshi. We have been spending Christmas with them on and off since we first met in 2002, when we were cruising through France having given up our jobs and sold our house in the UK. It was, as ever, a traditional German affair with goose and red cabbage and a tree with real candles. The Christmas atmosphere was accentuated by very cold weather and frozen snow carpeting the landscape.

Getting there was hard work, especially for Sue, who worked until the 22nd and then set off from Cordoba the next day, catching a train to Malaga and then a plane to Germany, arriving at 3.00am on the 24th after a gruelling bus ride from the airport. I had an easier time travelling from Italy, but still when I got to my first train station in Cologne I felt like an old and confused man as a ticket machine eat four precious euros in change which I had scraped together to get to the stop nearest to Thomas and Nicole’s house.

In the end I was glad to get back to Italy. My plane climbed through light fog out of Weeze airport to reveal a blue sunlit world, which I had not seen for nearly a week. From way up there the earth was covered in fluffy cloud through which poked strings of massive wind generators, rendered tiny by our height and slowly paddling the surrounding mist. An hour later we were flying over the Alps and I was willing the plane on to Bari.

Now I sit at my PC thinking of Sue back in Spain and preparing for the new school term. I wish I were celebrating the New Year with her tonight. But then in a way I guess I will.

A Perfect Day in Cadiz

It was one of those “perfect” days. The kind of day one starts in a good mood and during which good things happen. We drove to Cadiz down a long sandy spit with a big Atlantic sea pounding the beach. It was grey and misty, but the sunlight down here in Southern Spain is so strong that the clouds were still bright and luminous and every now and then a shaft of silver light would break through and flash off some distant windows.

Cadiz is almost an island and as it grew on the shipping trade from the Mediterranean and the Indies it had nowhere to go but up. A typical dwelling has a warehouse at the bottom, apartments on the middle floors and a tower above from which the ocean could be scanned for the returning fleets. Looking up at one of these towers I could imagine an anxious merchant willing a galleon to coalesce out of the haze.

Now although Cadiz is still a busy port with ferries coming and going to North Africa, it feels like a tourist city, with guided walks everywhere and labels on everything of “interest”. We visited on a public holiday and so the place was full of tourists and locals out for a stroll. Wandering around the grid of narrow streets Sue and I searched for comparisons and found many familiar things, here a bit of the Brighton Pavilion, there something of San Malo or Venice.

After four or five hours we drove back down the sandy spit and headed for our hotel further down the coast. Yes, it had been a good day we acknowledged. Though it’s strange how much more memorable bad days can be. Best write it down.

Cordoba

This is my first time in Sim City. I got here a few days ago after a long drive in the dark from Madrid, finally meeting Sue at the foot of the old Roman bridge in the centre of town at one in the morning, following a series of tired and fractious text messages.

Spanish and Italian are close relatives, so although I understand practically nothing of the language it feels familiar at the same time. This feeling of comfort and familiarity is reinforced by the fact that Sue is working here and so has a support network of colleagues. Added to this I now have a lot of experience of being in foreign cultures and so can relax and let it all wash over me, rather than agonise about not understanding things. Looking at the Spanish news North and South Korea are now at war and half of Spain is either flooded or covered in snow or maybe not.

Cordoba really is Sim City. It has a broad, meandering river, hills and big hotels. Wide boulevards intersect the City interspersed with ancient and modern bridges and fountains. At night men come out and wash the streets with fireman's hoses. Everything has an atmosphere of calm and order and there is a park on every corner. And at the heart of the City one of the most remarkable buildings I have ever seen - the Great Mosque, rededicated as a cathedral during the “reconquest” of Spain by Latin Christendom in the so-called Middle Ages. It is a vast rectangular space full of repetitive arches designed to create a sense of harmony. The proportions combined with the elaborate abstract decoration are hypnotic and leave one with a feeling that one could stroll around in circles for ever soaking in the atmosphere. There is something incredibly seductive about the place, like Islam itself it invites one to surrender to the powerful idea that God knows best and all one has to do is to follow his word and his design. Until that is I feel the need to go for a pee and a coffee at a nearby bar. God may be all-conquering, but possibly not over my prostate.

The Olive Mill

Despite being in her middle eighties Erminia still has the enthusiasm of an excitable child when it comes to the olive harvest. “Have you got your oil yet?” she asked me yesterday morning. “No they told me to come back this evening” I replied.

It was dark by the time I got to the Mill. It’s a small family affair and at this time of the year they are working flat out and everyone looked tired. There were vehicles of all shapes and sizes parked in the Mill compound and an impatient knot of locals waiting to get their olives weighed. Having already delivered our olives I walked through the throng and into the Mill where you are immediately hit by the powerful odour of fresh olive oil. Inside there are rows of fifty litre stainless steel containers that look like milk churns, each with the owner’s name on it in felt tip or stencil. I could see our two churns had already been filled and weighed so I went to the little office to pay before putting our churns onto a trolley and taking them to the car.

There are several olive mills within a few kilometres of our house, but we always use the same one in Locorotondo that Erminia first recommended to us. I think she rather fancies the middle-aged mill owner Donato, because she always has a schoolgirl smile on her face when she talks about him and how clean and tidy he keeps the Mill.

Back home I lug the two heavy churns to our Cantina and unscrew the lids to look at the fresh green and cloudy oil inside. It looks and smells like green vegetable juice. It will be a few weeks before the sediment settles out and it looks more like the stuff you can buy in the supermarket. Staring down into the churns I feel the satisfaction of knowing that we now have at least a year’s supply of our own fresh oil from our own trees. A kind of satisfaction that I never new existed before we set sail from London eight years ago.

This morning Erminia asked me again if I had got our oil. “Yes” I said, “forty eight kilos, so we got a yield of twelve percent, not bad.” “Bravo Docco” Erminia said, nodding appreciatively, although also, I suspect, a little irked that we had done better than her son Georgio, who only got ten.

Fishing for olives

The thing I like best about harvesting olives is gathering the olive-laden nets from under the trees. This feels like what I imagine a fishing boat crew experience as they haul in their catch and spill it on the deck. Although you have some idea how much an individual tree has yielded by looking at the carpet of olives on the nets, its only when you heap them together that you really know. Sometimes a quite insignificant tree produces two or three crate loads while a big old brute that you were relying on disappoints. A bit like life I suppose.

Erminia started asking me last week when I was planning to harvest the olives. “Next week” I said, “if the weather is OK”. Well the weather was OK, so yesterday I launched myself at our olive grove, armed with our olive harvesting machine – basically a small petrol-driven compressor which powers a pair of vibrating combs on the end of a long aluminium pole. After two days I have gathered four hundred kilos of olives, which I will take to the Mill tomorrow. A feel a bit tired and bit stiff, but the effort involved is as nothing compared to our first year here when Sue and I harvested by hand, with the help of friends and the guidance of Erminia and her late husband Paolo. That year Sue and I gathered olives for four solid weeks and lugged a thousand kilos to the mill. It was all a big adventure then and the olive harvest seemed a magical and mysterious thing.

Now some of the mystery has gone from what is actually a very simple process – you prune the trees in the winter and the spring, you harvest the olives in November and take them to the Mill where they crush them to make oil. And yet some of the magic still remains. When you are harvesting olives you feel part of a tradition going back thousands of years. In the Mediterranean the olive tree is revered above all other crops. Not only does it provide oil for cooking, but also before electricity the same oil could light your home and the wood from the pruning is perfect for the oven and the hearth in winter.

The harvest is in Erminia’s genes and each day she comes out to check on my progress and to remonstrate with me for leaving too many olives on the trees. Today she also picked some olives and helped lay one of the nets just to keep her hand in. At one point I caught her frowning at the middle distance, thinking perhaps of her husband Paolo who loved tending olives like no one else I have met. When people are working in the fields it is also Erminia’s instinct to feed them, so today for lunch I got a big bowl of pasta and chick peas with a large cube of belly pork buried in it and a bottle of her fruity red wine - Good peasant grub for a hard-working pretend peasant.

Getting dark

Now the clocks have changed the afternoons are suddenly darker. At four o'clock I realised that I had not yet taken Milly for her walk and that I would need to get a move on if this was to be done before sunset. So we drove out to our favourite spot - the ridge overlooking the coastal plain. When it is not raining I love this time of year. During the summer the land becomes baked and deadened and the intense sunlight bleaches everything. Now the rains have turned the soil a dark chocolate brown from which burst bright green shoots. And the low sun backlights the clouds and accentuates the colours of the dying autumn leaves.

When we got to the ridge there was a southerly gale blowing, blasting low clouds over our heads and out towards the Adriatic. All around we could hear the crack of hunter's shotguns and the occasional dog barking. Milly stays close to me, her ears standing up, tense and alert. Down below I can see the lights of the little seaside town of Torre Canne at the centre of which stands a lighthouse, which has already begun to flash. I switch my MP3 player on and listen to the late John Martyn singing "Ghosts" on one of his last albums:

"Ghosts, they're everywhere ... I meet them in the guise of friends and they all know my name, I know them to look at and they know me just the same."

At this moment, out on the ridge in the gathering gloom, I feel both old and alright. My life is rich, layered and full of texture. The things around me are both themselves and also reflections of other things I have experienced, like echoes or ghosts of those other things, making the present more intense and numinous. I feel blessed and safe and at odds with so much of what I am told about the world. I do not believe that things are getting worse, because my life experience is of things being more or less the same as they ever were.

But I also know that I can only feel this sense of well-being because one day I will be dead and that so much of the pessimism I hear around me is only a reflection of the ineluctable fact that one hundred percent of us will die and that we all know this and it permeates everything we think and do whether we acknowledge it or not.

By the time Milly and I get back to the car it is almost night. I open the tailgate and whistle and Milly stops rubbing her coat in the patch of shit she has just found, pricks up her ears, trots towards me and obediently jumps into the boot. "Good girl!" I say and give her furry, slightly niffy, rump an affectionate pat.

Home Alone

Sue leaves for Spain tomorrow. She has a five-month contract at a school in Cordoba in Andalucía. We’ve both been doing stints away from home since I took a four-month contract in London in 2008. We actually both seem to enjoy this lifestyle, where we are together at home for about half our time, with one of us working away and the other at home for the rest of the time. I plan to stay home for most of the five months, doing work on the house and our land, with perhaps four weeks in Spain, where Sue will rent an apartment.

Meanwhile the winter is fast approaching here. A couple of nights ago we had our first cold snap and the evening air is now full of the smell of wood smoke. Most restaurants have given up completely on their outside terraces and have retreated indoors. One still sees the occasional tourist in shorts and sandals, which always makes me smile, as they wander around seemingly unconscious of the fact that they are surrounded by people wearing overcoats and quilted jackets. In Locorotondo market there are now stalls displaying great heaps of dark brown and shiny chestnuts and artichokes are beginning to appear. Also, the first local oranges are now on sale. I find it hard to get used to the idea that oranges are a winter fruit as I associate cool freshly squeezed orange juice with the summer. Soon I will be able to make my favourite winter salad – finely sliced raw fennel and orange, dressed with olives, olive oil, salt and pepper. But I will have to eat it alone while Sue begins her adventure in Al Andalus.

I will spend most of my time on my own, apart from the occasional meal out or visit to friends. Erminia will also look in every couple of days to make sure I’m still alive and not living in total squalor. She is a far less frequent visitor when Sue is not at home. Much as I like to see her that is fine by me. It’s not that I don’t like people, but when Sue was in Qatar for ten months, I actually found I was quite happy in my own company and enjoyed having so much headspace. After a while one gets very used to pleasing oneself, which does have its drawbacks when you return to living in company. Shortly after Sue returned from the Middle East we were eating lunch together at home when she pointed out that noisily licking your fingers and smacking your lips was not the sort of thing you should do when others were present – “Ah, yes, sorry about that” I said, reddening slightly.

Up on the Roof

I was having a siesta in my bedroom during one of the recent rainstorms when a telltale “plink, plink” reminded me I hadn’t yet done any maintenance on our roof this year. Like most of the local houses ours has a flat roof made of stone blocks. Every year we need to clean and inspect it and look for cracks. So, for the last week Sue and I have been on our knees crawling over the roof and applying various potions and compounds. Each year we try new and more expensive materials hoping that this will obviate the need for a new roof and each year the roof stays watertight for a few weeks before a new “plink, plink” is heard somewhere or there is a sudden outbreak of mould in an unexpected place, sending us back up to look for leaks. And then the summer comes again and bakes everything dry and we forget there is such a thing as winter and then yet again we are taken by surprise by the autumn rains and so it goes around.

Still apart from the pain in my back and in my knees, there are compensations for being up on the roof on a sunny autumn day. The country is green and fresh and the cloudscapes are magnificent. The heel of Italy is in the very centre of the Mediterranean and is like a fulcrum around which revolve all kinds of weather systems from Europe, Africa and Asia. As a result we get to see all sorts of clouds from light little fluffy things through to great towering thunderheads. Being near the edge of a steep ridge sometimes they come at us unexpectedly from over the horizon, spreading like black ink dropped into a water tank. One autumn I saw an airship emerge from the low clouds blowing over the ridge and drone its way to the south as if the dotted cumuli were enemy flak. It turned out to be advertising “the Palm” development in Dubai. Not long afterwards Sue was offered a job in Qatar and it seemed like it had been a portent.

The roof is also a good place to take in the sights and sounds of our little hamlet. Occasionally Milly pads up the stone steps to the roof to check on what we are doing, then she trots to the edge of the roof and looks down on Paolo’s dogs in their pen a few metres away. This invariable sets them off barking. If Paolo is at home this will then cause him to shout at the dogs to be quiet, unaware that Milly is staring insouciantly down at them. More often we hear and sometimes see Erminia stumping around her terrace, letting out little grunts of pain with each step. My favourite sound is when she and her neighbour Yanine conduct a conversation in dialect across about a hundred metres, so neither of them has to leave their houses. Their speech is nothing like standard Italian and I can barely understand a word, but it feels as though I am listening to something timeless. Certainly it is a dialogue that has been going on for at least fifty years.

So now I am indoors writing this blog and the rain is pouring again. I am keeping an ear open but, so far there is no trace of a “plink, plink”, although there is a definite smell of damp in the air ...

Autumn Rain

Since moving to the south of Italy I’ve found myself doing and feeling many unexpected things for a Londoner. For example, waiting anxiously for the autumn rains like Gerard Depardieu in “Jean de Florette”. In my case this is less a matter of life and death and more a desire to save a few euros. The thing is, we don’t have mains water and rely on two large rainwater cisterns under our terrace. In the summer we get them topped up by tanker and there is usually a period in October when you’re not sure whether to order another tanker or wait for the rain to come. This year, I hung on and hung on, looking at the sky and dipping the tanks every couple of days with an old poker on the end of a bit of rope. Each time the poker hit the water it made an increasingly echoey “plink” and the last time it hit the bottom of the tank before it was fully submerged. Even the tiny Gecko that lives in that cistern seemed concerned, flitting too and fro and freezing every few seconds to fix me with his beady eye.

So, last Saturday I finally called Pinuccio, our waterman. This was, of course, an open invitation to the weather gods and since then the rain hasn’t stopped. Much of the time the cloud base has been below the house, consigning us to a dank, cold and misty hell. The rain has eradicated the last vestiges of summer. It seeps into our old stone house and sends the internal temperature plummeting. Soon we will have a riotous explosion of mould to look forward to, which we will have to attack with bleach and rubber gloves until the place smells like a geriatric ward. Erminia has the right idea when the weather gets like this – she goes to bed for most of the time and remerges when the sun comes out again.

Still, the land seems to like it – when I peer through the window at the field beyond the terrace I can practically see the weeds grow. And for the first time this year I can see the olives on the trees from several metres away, creating patches of mottled bright green against the darker hue of the foliage. It looks like we will have a good crop come November. No matter how grey and horrible the weather is we also have the compensation of knowing that eventually there will be a break in the clouds and the land will again have life breathed into it by a golden autumn sun. In fact, Sue has just advised me that the sun has indeed come out and that Erminia is now happily foraging for greens in the field opposite in muddy carpet slippers and a big smile on her face.

Market Day

Every Friday morning when I am home I go to Locorotondo market. Usually I go on my old motorbike with a plastic crate bungeed to the pillion behind my big topbox. This means I can park close to the action while having lots of space to carry my shopping. At the core of the market are the fruit and vegetable stalls, which are fringed with refrigerated vans selling fresh meat, fish, cheese and charcuterie. There are also a few specialists offering rice, pulses, flour, olives and spices. On a couple of streets which run from the market to the town centre there are vendors of clothes, shoes and general tat. One area is devoted to second hand clothes where you have to jostle with big-boned local women to find a bargain.

About half the female population of our area go to market, plus a few blokes and a few tourists. I guess that, like me, most of the tourists were brought up in a supermarket culture and that many find the market a frustrating experience – few of the stallholders speak any English and they are reluctant to sell fruit and vegetables in units of less than a kilo. Also, while a few things will be displayed in abundance, it will be almost impossible to find everything you want if you have a shopping list and a fixed idea of what to buy.

It took me two or three years of living here to learn how to use the market. This is because in order to shop successfully there you need to be able to buy what is good, then go home and work out how to cook it, rather than start with a set of recipes and then go out and buy the ingredients. This in turn requires some knowledge of the local seasons for fruit and vegetables, because it’s the stuff in season locally which will be fresh, cheap and abundant. It also requires a reasonable vocabulary of cooking techniques, so that you can serve up the same vegetable week after week in different ways.

This week early local clementines made their first appearance, bright green with flecks of orange at this stage of the year, piled in great heaps with their leaves on, all shiny and dew-covered. They taste bitter-sweet and fresh and carry with them the promise of still sweeter fruit to come. I bought a kilo and proved to myself that dogs do have a long memory. As I began to peel one at home I found our dog Milly sitting expectantly at my feet, waiting for a segment, although it is several months since the last season ended. I hand her a slice which she wolfed down, before resuming her alert posture, quietly salivating.

La Vendemmia

This week we helped Erminia and her family harvest their grapes. This is one of the milestones of the rural year marking the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. The family has a small vineyard and we have helped with the harvest ever since we first arrived here six years ago. In the first year we had only just moved in and it felt like a great honour to be invited. Back then the event was overseen by Old Paolo, Erminia’s husband. He died two years ago and since then the responsibility of deciding when the grapes will be brought in has fallen to Young Paolo, his grandson, who lives next door to Erminia with his wife Elizabet and baby Domenica.

The actual harvesting is the work of a morning for ten or twelve of us, armed with secateurs and plastic bins. The day was overcast but warm. Fortunately there has not yet been too much autumn rain and the ground was dry. The grapes are small, white and sweet and some had already begun to dry out or go mouldy, but all but the very driest are snipped and dumped into the bins. Afterwards we went back to Paolo and Elizabet’s house for lunch, cooked by Erminia. As ever it was my favourite – orecchiette (discs of pasta) freshly made by Erminia, rabbit stew and polpette (little meatballs, though with not much meat). This was accompanied by “baratierre”, a kind of melon that tastes like cucumber and last year’s wine, which has a simple taste like alcoholic grape juice. For desert there was yellow melon followed by a short black coffee. Lunch was dominated by baby Domenica, not yet a year old, who stared intensely around her in wide-eyed amazement. Her smile and happy gurgles are infectious and put everyone in a good mood.

After lunch the men of the family process the grapes using an ancient press in Erminia’s Cantina. While Sue and I take an afternoon nap in our bedroom, we can hear the mechanical ratcheting noise as the handle on the press is worked, gradually winding the press downwards and forcing the juice onto the floor of the cantina and through a drain to a large cistern beneath it. This year most of the grape juice will be sold and only about a hundred litres will be reserved for family consumption. This is a sign of the times – money is tight and Old Paolo, who for a little man could certainly drink a lot of wine, is no longer around.

Dozing fitfully in bed I think of Old Paolo and the passing of another year, measuring my life away in grape harvests. There surely are a lot worse things to measure it with.

My Second Favorite View

I come to this place several times a week to go running or to walk Milly. On each occasion I try to spend a few moments taking in the scene and the weather. Every day something is different. On some days the sky is so blue and the sea so serene that you can make out trails in the sea where the faintest puff of wind has disturbed the glassy sheen of the water. On other days the sky is full of racing clouds and my face is blasted by a gale roaring down the Adriatic from far away Venice. This wind is called the “bora” and it sends with it big white capped waves that can be spotted even from this ridge several miles from the coast.

If you half close your eyes it is easy to go back in time and imagine this vista over a thousand years ago. Not much has changed, maybe some of the big olive trees down on the coastal plain were little bushes then. The Roman road running through the centre of the plain had already been built as had the little towns clustered long it which still retain their Roman street layout. Dotted all over the plain are large farmhouses many of which must have evolved from Roman villas.

Down there was a kind of artery which connected Italy and Greece in ancient times. Brindisi, thirty miles up the coast, is a fantastic natural harbour perfect for galleys and Corfu is only a hundred miles across the water. Thousands of years ago the Greeks colonised the heel of Italy which is now called “Puglia”. Then the Romans pushed out the Greeks. Later came many other conquerors and brigands – Hannibal, the Normans, the Swabians, the Spanish and the French. Bands of crusaders marched this way to find a boat to take them to the Holy Land and in the nineteenth century the coast was terrorised by Arab pirates. Just sixty-odd years ago the German army became an occupying force when their Italian allies suddenly agreed an armistice with the British and Americans, who in turn pushed the Germans back up north. Even more recently than that the Americans used the airbase at Brindisi to bomb Serbia, a short flight across the Adriatic.

So many tribes have been this way and left their mark on the topography and the people of this region. And yet the view from up here has hardly changed since the Romans built their road, the great sweep of European history having as much impact on the landscape as the shadows of the passing clouds.

Home

We returned home to Puglia this week after a fortnight in the UK. We had no plans for the last couple of days of our stay and so we decided to head for Greenwich in South London. This was a homing instinct. Before we left the UK we had a house there in which we had been happy. We stayed in a pub in the middle of Greenwich and on our first morning I ran through Greenwich Park and across Blackheath to look at our old home, "the Lodgehouse". Here is a picture I took of it before we left the UK in 2002. Later I visited it again with Sue, who was keen to poke around outside and peer in the windows while I hovered nervously, not wanting the owners to see us.

Over dinner that evening we agreed that it had been good to look up our old haunts and that most of our memories of "the Lodgehouse" were good ones. It looks quite grand, but is in fact ludicrously small, as would be clear if there were a person in the photo to give a sense of scale. Nonetheless we have good reason to be thankful to this little house as the profit we made when we sold it funded a two-year sailing trip around the Mediterranean and our current house in Puglia.

Also on my run and later with Sue, I stopped at the top of the steep slope in Greenwich Park and looked out at my favourite view in the world - the Maritime Museum, Greenwich Hospital, the Thames and Canary Wharf. Despite living in another country I love this view more than any other because of what I am - a Londoner. And almost every element of the view has deep associations for me. For example, through the gap between the twin towers of Greenwich Hospital you can see a patch of the River Thames where nearly twenty years ago I anchored my little sailing yacht and helped Dad empty Mum's ashes into the murky green water.

Now we are glad to be back home in our peaceful Italian backwater, but with warm memories of where we come from, happy to have been there and to have come from there, but also happy now to be here. Sometimes I meet English people who live in Puglia who complain that they are here because Britain has "gone to the dogs" or some such place. Bizarrely, some of these "people" say that it is foreign immigrants that have driven them out, seemingly unconscious of the obvious irony that they are foreign immigrants here. For me, living abroad gives me more detachment about my Mother Country and the more detached I become the more I seem to appreciate its qualities.

Pushing Dad

This is me and my Dad last week. Sue looked at the two of us and felt she had to take the picture. We were on a two week trip to the UK to see friends and family. Inevitably we spent a couple of days with Dad in Lincoln. He doesn't like going out much these days, but this time he jumped at my suggestion of going for a drive. He decided he wanted to go to a little seaside resort on the Lincolnshire coast. It was a place he had lived for a few years not long after he retired where he used to fish from the beach almost every day, listening to the roar of the North Sea crashing onto the shingle. He has always loved the sea.

Looking at the picture now it encapsulates for me an ironic reversal of roles: when I was young my Dad would drag me out of bed to go for a run with him. I was fat and unfit and I hated those runs, my Dad charging ahead, exhorting me to keep going and not to be "a quitter."

Dad has always relied a great deal on physical fitness to feel good about himself. So the last few years during which he has had a stroke and lost mobility have been especially hard for him. But, his physical decline has given me a spur to become fitter and stronger. When I started running a couple of years ago I found to my surprise that I actually enjoyed it and that what I had hated on those cold Winter mornings all those years ago, was not the running, but his exhortations. I was never "a quitter" in the sense that he used it, because it was his ambition that I should run with him in the mornings not mine.

And so now I push my Dad as once he pushed me. And as I push I try to accommodate these thoughts with other more generous ones of love and compassion for an old man shuffling towards his final finishing line as best he can. Sometimes I tell him to try to lose weight and to get some more exercise, but mostly I keep my mouth shut, knowing that the desire to do these things has to come from inside. I guess the time for exhortations is over and the time for "acceptance" has come. Or should that be "resignation"?

Fings to do with figs

It's getting towards the end of August and our land is looking parched and tired. When I walk around to inspect the olive trees, dry and brittle weeds snap under my feet and a fine brown dust works its way into my sandals, making my feet itchy. But while everything else wilts under the flaring August sun, our fig trees turn into fruit producing machines. Had I the energy I could drag a bucket of figs back to the house every morning.

Six years ago I don't think I'd ever eaten a fresh fig. Now we have ten trees of different varieties and they are like old friends. Some produce an early crop in June, some don't. Most bear green figs but some have a rich dark purple fruit. Some make fat moist figs and others smaller intensely sweet ones. I usually wander around the trees in the morning picking and eating the sun-warmed fruit for breakfast. I break open the fig with my fingers and inspect how moist it is before popping it into my mouth and chewing slowly on the sweet sticky pulp and firm skin. This is the closest eating gets to sex. Milly often follows me in anticipation of being given a fresh fig or two straight from the tree.

By the first week or two in September the crop is pretty much finished, but the taste lingers on for the rest of the year in the various fig products I make: dried figs; green fig chutney; and fig jam. Milly has her own preservation technique: "fig a la tarmac". First let the figs fall onto a handy road, then leave to dry and get run over by passing cars and trucks for at least a week or two. They are then ready to be peeled from the road surface with ones teeth and chewed vigorously for several minutes. These are abundant until Christmas, but if you keep your eyes and your snout open you can often find the odd one as late as the following May. "Boun appetito!"

To beach or not to beach ...

We finally got it together to go to the beach a couple of days ago. We live on a limestone plateau about one thousand feet above sea level, but it's only a twenty minute drive to the Adriatic. Most days I run or walk along the edge of the plateau and look down across the coastal plain to the sea. In the Winter the sea is often wild and steely grey, with a white fringe at the shoreline as it roars onto the beaches of the deserted little towns and holiday resorts. But in August it is nearly always calm and azure blue, blending at the horizon with an equally blue, equally serene sky. You can practically feel it calling you, "come on down, I am cool, come and lie on the beach next to me, come and jump in." But, it takes a lot to overcome the torpor that descends in August. There is the car to pack, stuff to find, traffic to be negotiated. It all seems too much.

We went to our favorite spot, a little resort which has grown up around an old Watch Tower. We rented two sunbeds and an umbrella and it was so crowded that we had to follow the beach attendant for a couple of hundred meters before he could find a big enough space to set them up. Even then some people complained that they had already claimed the spot. The Attendant smiled at them and said "there's loads of room, you can all pretend that you're one big family." Then we settled down to read and sunbathe. Later on we swam and then ate lunch in one of the little Lidos on the edge of the beach, actually more a collection of shacks decked out for the Summer. I had barbecued fresh octopus in a bread roll, deliciously tender, the oily marinade dripped onto my T shirt as I bit into it.

With so many people around it is actually easier to be anonymous than when there are just a few. There is no room to pose or to stake out much territory, there is just room enough to be. In true Italian style some families are preparing three-course lunches amid the throng. Young women work on their tans, men play cards, babies cry, old ladies adjust their hats and hitch their nickers, all part of one great clump of humanity.

One person seems apart from the rest of us. A black man in bright African colours wanders the beach weighed down with hats, sunglasses and trinkets. His is the only black face on the beach. He probably makes a pittance, paying over most of his takings to some petty criminal. Not wanting to buy anything I avoid his gaze and let him pass on, as does everyone else. I feel a vague sense of unease before I return to the paperback I am reading.

Bloody tomatoes

It's that time of year when all self-respecting Italian peasants must make tomato sauce. Not the thick acidic stuff that people squeeze onto hamburgers, but the simple tomato pulp or "passata" that is the basis for so many Italian pasta sauces and stews.

In the photo Erminia is preparing her boiler, which is sited about ten meters from my bedroom window. In late July and early August there is a fire burning in this thing from about six in the morning, filling our house with the smell of woodsmoke. Erminia is not too fussy about the fuel she uses and this year happily broke up and consigned to the flames an old melamine chest of drawers, which made a thick black sooty mark up the side of her whitewashed kitchen wall and left our house reeking for days of burned plastic. When I went round to investigate, Erminia was crouched over the boiler as black and sweaty as the Chief Stoker on a steamship. "Is it making a smell?" She asked, innocently. "No, it's not a problem," I said, as always.

Normally we make our tomato sauce with Erminia and her family. This means having to get up at five in the morning and be shouted at a lot by Erminia. This year for the first time we decided to go it alone, so we could make about half the quantity considered essential by Erminia and complete the job in relative tranquility. To give her credit she coped pretty well, lending us a big saucepan and dropping in to check on us only four or five times. It's a simple process in which the tomatoes are boiled and then run through a machine which separates the pulp from the skins and the pips (hence "passata" as the tomatoes are "passed" through the machine). Then the pulp is loaded into jars which are boiled to sterilize them. We bought about eighty kilos of fresh tomatoes from our local market and after a hot and sweaty days labour we ended up with about the same number of half kilo jars of tomato sauce.

Obviously we made a massive saving on buying passata from the shops. Well no actually, the cost per jar of the tomatoes alone was more than than the cost of a jar of passata from our local supermarket, not counting our labour and all the equipment and materials we needed. This fact rather begs the question "why??" To which any Southern Italian will give you an unhesitating answer:

"Because, it's ours, we made it, we know what's in it, we know that it's good and we know that we've got enough of it to last us all year, whatever other shit may happen to go down."

Welcome to Puglia.

Erminia

Returning from a cycle ride this morning I surprised our neighbor Erminia as she walked up our drive. "Docco!" She exclaimed with a broad smile. For Erminia my English name "Doug", ending as it does in a consonant, is profoundly unsatisfying and so I have been "Docco" practically from the moment we met six years ago.

Suddenly our dog Milly trots out of the house barking hysterically whilst wagging her tail - her normal reaction to Erminia. This in turns brings Sue onto the terrace fresh from the shower with towels draped around her head and body. "Ciao Erminia" she cries, "how are you?" Erminia stumps her way up the drive with her old walking stick, falls onto a bench and gives her standard reply - "tired!"

Erminia is in her eighties and has lived in our little hamlet since she got married more than sixty years ago. Her husband Paolo died a couple of years back, but she is the matriarch of a large family who all live nearby. It's our good fortune that not only is she a genuine "contadina" or peasant farmer, but also a woman of great intelligence who takes a real interest in the peculiar foreigners who have come to live next door. She has taught us an enormous amount about life and good food, while in turn we have taught her a few things too. It was, for example, a bitter pill for her to swallow to learn that after sixty years of marriage there are men who actually take their own boots off.

Today, as ever, we talk for a few minutes about the weather, the vegetable patch and the latest death or disaster. Then she demands that I take her blood pressure as she usually does about once a week. I tell her to keep quiet and not to look at the dial as the cuff is pumping up around her wrist, but she always ignores me. "What does it say?" she asks, though I'm sure she can read the thing just as well as I. "Err ... 140 over 80" I say. "Hmm ... not bad", she replies. Suddenly, she raises herself to her feet with a grunt of pain and says "I must go"before stumping back down our drive with a cry of "ciao!" "Ciao Erminia!" We cry.

La Pizzica

Sue took this picture last night at a beer festival. A local folk group is playing a highly amplified Pizzica - a traditional dance of Puglia. The band have attitude and perform with a tight, intense rhythm. The dancers are a mix of locals and tourists and mostly they bounce up and down to the insistent beat in a variety of styles.

The couple in the foreground are different. They give the impression of having come here solely to dance the Pizzica and to have been dancing it all their lives. Their steps are precise and they are wholly focused on each other and the music. Sometimes their faces nearly touch and their arms intertwine, but they never actually make physical contact. Some other people in the crowd have noticed the nature of their dance and are watching or taking pictures, but the couple are oblivious. They are serving the dance not the spectators. They seem to be tapping into the ancient and ecstatic roots of the Pizzica. This is, at least, the impression they create.

Here in the South of Italy the past is never far away and it doesn't always have an easy or simple relationship with the present. For centuries the people of this region were mainly oppressed and landless peasants and the Pizzica speaks of this time. Today Puglia is part of a prosperous "modern" democracy, but the transition has come within the memory of those who are only in their thirties and forties. The local teenagers and twenty somethings recognise the dance as part of their heritage, but they don't know the steps and are more comfortable with the music played on MTV Italia. They join in the dance with their own freestyle or look on ambiguously from the fringes.

And what of our middle-aged couple? I feel sure they do come from Puglia, but they are far more likely to be schoolteachers or lawyers than subsistence farmers. And there is a good deal more self-consciousness to their dance than the romantic in me wants to believe. But the beat of the band drives on and on and more people throw themselves into the dance as the night draws in. Maybe it's the beer or maybe something ancient and half-forgotten really is being stirred in our blood.

Shape shifting

That's me on the left in 2005. The picture below is me now, with Sue and our neighbour baby Domenica at her baptism party. The new shape is the product of a mysterious wasting disease called "dieting".

I can tell that many people who last saw me fat and then see me thin, don't recognise me. Sometimes I see on peoples' faces that puzzled look that says "I'm sure I know this person, but who are they?" But there are other people who don't notice the weight loss at all. Perhaps these are people that see my personality rather than my superficial shape. Or maybe they just register other humans by a few tiny face details which don't change much with weight loss.

The attitude of people to my physical shape is influenced by how long they have known me. To a person I have never met before I am a middle-aged man with an unremarkable build. Whereas to people that have known me for a longer time I think I am often seen as an overweight person who is now thin, perhaps too thin. Interestingly there are some people who get angry or irritated by my weight loss. These are usually overweight male contemporaries. Sometimes they get very angry, especially when they are drunk and suggest that I am dangerously thin and need to eat more takeaway food and drink more alcohol in order to be healthy and happy.

Recently I reached the fairly arbitrary "target weight" towards which I had been "dieting" and I announced to Sue that my "diet" was over. I'm beginning to miss it already.

Keeping score

Today I am fifty five years old. I got up early, put on my running kit and drove out to the Ridge. The weather was like in this picture, except I didn't take Milly today. I ran fifteen kilometers. It took me eighty six minutes, a personal best by nearly a minute. There was a cool breeze when I began, but by the time I was finished the Sun was high and the temperature was in the middle thirties. I finished with a sprint to the car, my fist in the air shouting "yes!" As I stretched my tired legs the Sun made the sweat on my arms glisten and the breeze began to cool me again.

When I get home Sue has tied balloons to our gate. Our builders are working on our new outside kitchen and all three wish me "happy birthday". I go inside and there are three presents on the table. I greet Sue, shower, change and boot up my laptop. I enter my time on a spreadsheet and note that the World record for a man of my age to run fifteen kilometers is 56% of the time I ran this morning. My age expressed as a percentage of eighty five years is 65%. On the other hand, if I assume my real adult life didn't begin until I was fifteen and I live to be eighty five, I have so far consumed only 57% of my life. But that's still a lot more than half. To be only at the half-way stage I would need to survive until I am ninety five. I can't kid myself, in this particular race I am much closer to the finish than the start.

Sue makes me scrambled eggs for my breakfast and I open her presents to me: a Fossil necklace; a "T" shirt and; a mosquito incinerator. The latter is one of those contraptions with an ultra violet light that makes a satisfying sizzling sound when a mosquito hits it. Sue knows I have always wanted one of these. It's not enough for mosquitoes to die, I believe they should suffer too.

Today I feel happy and lucky. I may be fifty five, but I've run a personal best and nothing hurts and the woman I love has bought me presents. How about you Mr Mosquito, do you feel lucky?

Message in a virtual bottle?

My first post to my first blog. Sat at my laptop in my bedroom, the shutters closed to keep out the Sun. Fifty five and still not sure what I want to be when I grow up. I feel like one of an infinite number of monkeys, tap, tap, tapping away. Actually in my case the tapping is very intermittent as I am unsure of my purpose. The photo by the way was taken in Napoli.

Sue is at the other end of the house surfing the internet. Milly is no doubt curled up on the tiles in a quiet corner of a quiet room trying not to move. This must be very difficult when all your instincts are telling you to bark at every strange noise and every plaintive yap from the half-rat half-dog that lives up the road.

July and August are our dog days too. Neither of us are working at the moment and there is not much to do on our acre of land at the height of the Summer when the olive trees go into stasis and most of the weeds shrivel up and die. It is a time for trips to the beach and partying with friends. But, I haven't yet done either of these things and I can't shake off a vague feeling of guilt for having nothing pressing to do.

I'm not complaining - I've had enough "interesting times" to know that bored is OK. I guess that's at least one reason why I'm writing this blog ...