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.