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.