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"?