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.