Christmas in Sarawak

We decided to go away for a few days around Christmas and booked three nights in a smart hotel in Kuching, the regional capital and three nights at a small beach resort, Sematan, in the far west of Sarawak.

The Pullman in Kuching was much as one would expect.  Nice rooms, big bathrooms, big breakfast buffets and lots of affluent looking people traipsing up and down.  It was OK but not an experience either of us feel in a hurry to repeat.  I like smartish hotels but I don't feel so comfortable in them here, maybe because they make me feel more part of an affluent elite that I don't want to admit to belonging to.  If so, this is probably hypocrisy.

On 27 December we drove to the Sematan Beach resort, which was much more fun.  A collection of chalets on the edge of the South China sea facing a massive sandy beach where the tide goes out by about half a kilometre.  Our booking included a buffet breakfast and evening meal and the resort was packed with mainly Chinese holidaymakers.  We spent our time wandering the beach, exploring, reading and generally lazing around.  One afternoon we hired bicycles and got soaked to the skin, much to the amusement of the locals and the resort staff.  It's hard to overstate just how surprised most local people were to see us.  You don't see a white person in more then a decade, then all of sudden two old ones come along at once, soaking wet, riding bicycles and smiling and waving at you.  Very strange.

The weather was warm, as it always is and wet.  Well this is the monsoon season.  This means that much of the time we were hemmed in by great grey towering clouds, pregnant with water.  It rained several times a day and especially at night, sometimes for hours.  Impossibly heavy rain, like the intense rain in the middle of a heavy shower, but all the time.  It would keep me awake at night sometimes, hammering on the roof of our chalet as if sacks of nails were being continuously emptied onto it.

At the end of our stay we loaded our wet things into the back of the car and headed back to Saratok, happy to have been to Sematan and keen to return one day, preferably outside the monsoon season.

Kapit

Sue does not have to be back at work until early January and so we have a total of four or five weeks together to travel and allow me to acclimatise.  Last weekend we went to Sibu, the nearest large town, some two hours drive from Saratok.  Sibu lies on the Rejang river and from there we took a day trip on the river ferries to Kapit, a small town in the interior which can only be reached by river I believe.

The ferries travel at 20-30 knots and the journey to Kapit takes about two and a half hours.  We travelled "business class", which is one step down from "first class" and entitled us to air conditioning and a flickering film on DVD which could barely be heard above the roar of the engine.  During the trip a man wandered round with a large bin liner full of crisps and other packet snacks for sale.

As we hammered our way up river I scanned the shoreline for crocodiles and, out of the corner of my eye briefly glimpsed a large one basking on a log with its legs dangling over the sides.  I don't think Sue believed me.  The river is an artery into the interior of the island and we saw many big tugs towing barges full of logs,  (Borneo is said to be losing its rainforest at the rate of one percent a year).

Kapit itself was cooler than Sibu and noticeably less humid, perhaps because it is a couple of hundred metres higher.  We had a pleasant stroll around the little town and visited Fort Silvia built by one of the Brookes, "the White Rajahs of Sarawak" in the 1880s.  Inside is a dusty little museum where we signed the Visitor's Book before getting our boat back.

Kabong Wedding

We went last Sunday to a wedding in Kabong, the village and district in which Sue works.  It was about a thirty minute drive from Saratok and my first opportunity to get a feel for the area that Sue travels to most working days.

Stopping to ask directions some way from our destination it was clear that a large section of the local community already knew who we were and why we were there.  Central Kabong is a collection of houses on stilts over a salt marsh linked by a network of wooden walkways.

The wedding was for the brother of Nora one of the teachers of English with whom Sue works.  This was the second ceremony, the first having been held in the regional capital Kuching.

They are a large, sophisticated and well travelled family and as a result I felt both very welcome and remarkably at ease in a setting like nothing else I have ever experienced.  We joined in the ceremony, took photos, ate, danced and relaxed in a palpable atmosphere of hospitality and goodwill.  Like all good ceremonies it also went on for the perfect length with no sense of obligation to linger.  We headed back to Saratok after a couple hours, exhausted more than anything else by the sheer variety of images and sensations.

Hello Borneo!

I've been here twelve days I realised checking my diary.  What have I done?  Where has it gone?  I feel like I've been on one of those kids roundabouts which you suddenly step off and stagger drunkenly away from, slowly regaining your balance.

I shook hands with young Paolo at Bari Airport then stepped on an Alitalia flight to Rome.  At Rome I got a Malaysian Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur.  It was half empty and I had a window seat right at the back.  The time drifted away eating airline curries and catching up on films I'd missed, "Rise of Planet of the Apes" and "the King's Speech".  Beneath me drifted Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India.  It got dark, then we dropped down towards KL over the Malacca Strait at dawn.  The light in KL was liquid gold, but my plane for Borneo it seemed left from a different airport.  Dazed I found my way to the bus station and was hurried onto a bus dragging my luggage behind me.

The bus tore round a ring road.  It was full of asian faces and suddenly I felt very big and pink and kind of floppy.  After twenty minutes we arrived at LCCT, which I realised with a smile stood for Low Cost Carrier Terminal.  It was satisfyingly like a bus station and my Air Asia plane to Sibu was the bus, it made Ryan Air look up-market, I was surprised not to see people strap hanging.  For two hours I dropped in and out of consciousness, then we dived into the cloud base and as the mist began to clear I could see palms and deep green fields and rivers like big brown snakes.  Sibu Airport was made of grey stained concrete with rusty bits of steel reinforcing poking out.  As we entered the Arrivals Hall we passed a pile of damp, crumpled red carpet smelling of mould and obviously there for minor VIPs.


In my second immigration queue of the day I suddenly glimpsed Sue in the terminal beyond, looking thin and tanned.

Welcome to Borneo!

Bye bye Puglia

I'm just waiting for Cosimo our wireless internet man to come and disconnect our service, so it seemed like a good moment to send a last message from Puglia, at least for now.

Everything is pretty much stowed away and my bags are packed.  It's a fantastic sunny day here as if to mock my leaving.  For most of the past ten days since I returned from the UK its been wet and horrible, making it difficult to do much outside.

Looking back over the past few months I've got a lot done, including late last week showing a prospective buyer over La Fulica and agreeing a deal, which I hope will be finalised before Christmas.

I leave tomorrow morning at 4.00am for Bari Airport, to where our neighbour Paolo is very kindly giving me a lift.  Erminia has been pretty good about all our comings and goings.  I've only had one "of course I'll probably be dead by the time you return" and even that was said with a twinkle in her eye.  But then southern Italians understand the business of migration, it's been an economic necessity here for centuries.  What she can never get her head round however is that we might actually want to this.

OK, Im signing off before Cosimo gets here and drags me from the keyboard.  "Bye, bye,Puglia, I will miss you and look forward to coming back after our adventure!"

No Weddings and Thirteen Funerals

I’m writing this on board the plane to Bari – a first for me.  I’m so tired I can’t sleep, stuck in limbo between places, anxious, as ever about what I’ll find when I arrive.  A dread instilled in me by a worrying Mother who was capable of working herself into frenzy if I was even a few minutes late.   Even if I wasn’t late come to think of it.

On Friday and Saturday I attended the last two days of my Humanist funerals course, during which we trainee celebrants each conducted “mock” funerals.  I presided over the burial of fiesty motorcycle riding, drug abusing Kellie in the grounds of the St John’s hotel, Solihull, on Friday afternoon as the sun went down.  Having done four burials on the Friday we sat through nine cremations at the Robin Hood Crematorium on the Saturday.  The day began with a tour of the “backstage” areas, including the ovens and a collection of blackened artificial hips and knee joints, by a lugubrious Brummie with a beergut and a nylon tie.

By cremation number eight most of us were getting hysterical.

Our parting in the fading light of the Crematorium gardens was strangely emotional, given that we had only known one another for five days spread over a couple of months.  Hugs and farewell kisses and injunctions to “keep in touch”.  But then I guess you'd possibly struggle to go to thirteen funerals in a lifetime, let alone do them in two days.

Doctor Botox

“Same day vaccinations” it said on the internet.  The clinic was in a big Victorian terrace on a main road near Leicester city centre.   I had to negotiate an entry phone and was then let into to a very smart suite of offices with soft carpets, swirling feature wallpaper and chandeliers.  The attractive young asian PA told me to fix myself a coffee and the Doctor would see me shortly.  Sure enough I was shown into the surgery a few minutes later, coffee in hand.  Behind an imposing desk lounged a young asian guy with slick black hair, an expensive shirt and a very personable manner.

Talking through the options for vaccination he made me feel relaxed, despite the subject matter.  “Yes, I’d definitely get a rabies vaccination.  Trouble is there is not much of the post infection vaccine available these days and without you are dead, no question.”   Actually we couldn’t do that one as it needs a jab a week for three weeks.  But I settled for two jabs which should protect me from four or five miscellaneous diseases.  We retired to a consulting room where I laid on the couch, listened to soft music and didn’t feel a thing.

I found myself smiling as I paid out £121 for the jabs and received a crisply printed invoice and record card.  The card had my name written in a section called “the nitty gritty”.

“Actually, I spend most of my time giving middle-aged women botox jabs.”  He said as I was getting ready to leave.  “It’s great, I spend all day injecting grateful women and chatting.”

“Well someone’s got to do it.”  I said, as I shook his hand and smiled.

My Brighton Family

This is Denise, my landlady during my four weeks in Brighton doing the “CELTA” English language teaching course.  The three people gathered with me round the dinner table are my fellow students: Ali from Dubai; Enrico from Trento in Northern Italy and; Natalia from Mexico.

It seems strange to think that I knew none of these people four short weeks ago and now I feel like I’m leaving my surrogate family.  Denise is a devout Catholic with a mixed English/French background and political views somewhere to the right of Pope John Paul II.  She also has the proverbial “heart of gold”.  At seventy seven years of age and with a hip operation due in a few days, she looks after four students, including giving us all a hearty breakfast and a solid supper and doing our washing.  On top of this she has that wonderful knack of creating a chaotic, welcoming and homely atmosphere where people feel free to do as they wish.  And all for £115 per week.

 

She insisted on my fixing myself and her a large scotch each before dinner every evening.  Personally I see Tony Blair as a flawed person probably doing his best, rather than as the Anti-Christ.  But this is small thing easy to forgive in one with so generous a spirit.

Good luck Denise, Ali, Enrico and the graceful Natalia, I shall miss you guys!

Helta CELTA

There’s been a long gap in this blog while I went to the UK to study for my Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CELTA).  Four weeks of twelve-hour days seven days a week. 

Before the course I laughingly thought that I would have a little time and space to write my blog and have the odd day out.  Instead it’s been: get up; go for a run along the Brighton seafront; finish the lesson plan for that day’s teaching; discuss the lesson plan with my tutor and fellow trainees; give the lesson; analyse the lesson; have a sandwich and talk about teaching; go to training sessions on how to teach; go home and work on an assignment about teaching; look at watch; say “good God is that the time?” And; go to bed.

Twelve of us started this intellectual and emotional assault course and eleven of us finished.  Most of the others are twenty somethings looking to travel or just to get a job in this increasingly tough economic climate.  Decent people and good colleagues, although they did at times make me feel very old.  For the first time in my life I started to notice an occasional “doesn’t he do well for his age?” subtext in some of their comments.

Anyway, it’s over now and I feel peculiarly sad.  It has been a very intense experience.  Maybe I’m just tired.

When Come Husband?

This is what Sue is constantly being asked in Borneo.  When indeed.  My life right now is made of lists.  I spend my days ticking things off, adding new things and studying.  Studying English, trying to get to grips with stuff which for some reason I never learned when I acquired the language in the first place: adverbs; clauses; perfect tenses and; past participles.  Studying funerals, I've now written my first Humanist funeral service for my course.

Also trying to sell the boat.  I've slashed the price and four people were interested at the last count.

On my laptop I have two countdown clocks: one showing how long before I return to the UK for my teaching English as a foreign language course and to finish my funeral celebrant course (14 days, 1 hour and 56 minutes) and; one showing my deadline for leaving for Borneo (64 days, 2 hours and 55 minutes).  Why the extra hour?  Of course, the clocks change.

Sue meanwhile is having a fascinating time in Borneo.  Her posting is now Kabong, not Mukah which we originally selected.  It's a rural coastal area and two of the schools are by idyllic beaches on the South China Sea.  On the downside you can't swim because of the jellyfish and three people have been eaten by crocodiles in the last year.  She is going to rent a big house in the small town of Saratok.  The picture is of the Saratok town clock, which sadly doesn't work.  The Saratok clock ain't got no tock.

I suspect none of this is going seem real until I finally step on the plane for Borneo, not that I am at all clear where I will actually be getting it from right now.

Gas Street Basin blues

God I feel old today.  I flew from Bari to Birmingham via Zurich this morning, so I could attend the first day of my Celebrant course.  Having checked into my hotel I took a stroll around the city centre.  I have been coming here since the early seventies.  First as a schoolboy in a canal boat and later as a stressed executive in a company car.  As I walked around layer after layer of memories began to be peeled away.

On the way back to the hotel I dropped into an Indian restaurant and found myself in a building over the canal that you can see in both these photos, looking out over Gas Street Basin.  When I first came here forty years ago the Basin was derelict and forgotten and the only way to get into it was through a gap in the fence of the ATV Television Centre car park.  Now it's a fashionable post-industrial residential and shopping zone.  In the intervening period there has even been time for a new pub to be built and fall derelict, now boarded up and awaiting further redevelopment.

I remember spending a night in the Basin on a canal holiday with my friend Ken and our English teacher Mr Topless.  Were we woken up by the slap-slapping of a towrope passing over the roof of the boat as a horse-drawn barge passed by?  Or was that another time, or never, just a borrowing from someone else's memories?  It's all such a long time ago.

Action Stations

The day after my last post Sue got confirmation of her job in Borneo along with a whole raft of information, so we are now running around like maniacs.

Sue sets off for Kota Kinabalu from Bari Airport on Friday.  Last weekend we spent booking tickets and pouring over Google Earth at the 20 possible postings Sue had to chose from.  She finally settled on Mukah a small fishing town in Sarawak.

Originally I planned to join her before Christmas, but already I can feel the pull of a new adventure and hope to depart by the end of November if possible.  This would mean leaving Puglia in mid October to go to the UK where my current plan is to do my British Humanist Society celebrant training and a one month Teaching English as a Foreign Language course in Brighton.

I feel scared and disorientated by the speed with which all this is happening and I will be sad to see Sue off on Friday, even though we will hopefully see each other again before November is out.

The local speciality in Mukah is sago worm, large white grubs found in the trunks of sago trees and eaten raw.  They taste like chicken allegedly.  Mmmmm.

Argh!!! (continued)

Ha, ha!  Nearly two weeks ago I expected that our lives would by now have some shape and clarity.  Well not quite.  Sue had her interview and on Monday was made a provisional job offer by the British Council in Borneo.  However, since then we have heard nothing further despite the fact that the job is meant to start in less than two weeks.  Knowing how Byzantine the processes are for this kind of overseas aid work Sue can’t yet be sure that the job is in the bag and therefore can’t really begin preparing to go.  I know she is excited about the job and in her head she is already driving around remote village schools, but she is also conflicted about leaving our home.  Over the last couple of days she has been taking pot plants from off our terrace and planting them on our land – as if she is releasing them into the wild, which made me sad.

I heard nothing about the interim management job I went for and sent an email to the agency last Friday when the same job was readvertised.  I actually got quite a polite email saying they were still deciding who to put forward to the client and would get back to me.  So a glimmer of hope remains about this.  I also had a derisory offer for “La Fulica” a couple of days ago, which I would nevertheless have accepted outright, were it not for the fact that it also involved delivering her to Greece.

Basically I feel powerless.  Constantly in anticipation of an email which will create some more certainty and unable to do much to make anything happen.  Well maybe in another two weeks …. !!

Argh!!!

Considering it's the dog days of high summer our lives have been very stressful waiting for things to happen.  Usually I write about this stuff after the event, but this time I'm in the middle of it.  Last Thursday I was accepted onto a training course to become a "celebrant" at humanist funerals.  It's a short course, but after it I will be able to officiate in crematoria and other places in the UK where people want a non-religious funeral or memorial service.  Last Wednesday I sent my CV off to an agency for a well paid interim management job in London.  I know that I would be very good at this particular job, but that because of my age and (for an accountant) "exotic" lifestyle I don't stand much chance of getting an interview.  Realistically, if I don't hear today I can forget it and I will need to start accepting that the chances of finding well paid consultancy work in the UK are getting increasingly remote.  As a fall-back I am considering training to teach English as a foreign language, which means a four-week course, probably in London.

Today Sue learned that she has an interview as a teacher trainer/mentor with the British Council in the Malaysian part of Borneo on a two-year contract.

So, putting this lot together: Sue and I may end up living in Borneo for two years; or, Sue may be in Borneo and me in London earning good money and being a busy celebrant to boot; or, I may be in London while Sue teaches English in Puglia and studies for an MA; or, we may both remain in Puglia eking out our savings and becoming more and more shabby genteel before finally starving to death; or, none of the above.

We should know which of these combinations is going to happen by about next Friday.  Sometimes life is so full of possibilities I could scream!

Dad, again

Dad rang me last Monday from A&E to say he had had a fall. Since then I’ve been putting in calls to try to piece together what actually happened.  Not easy as he is pathologically incapable of telling the truth about himself and even at the best of times the NHS has trouble getting its story straight.

If I took the various things he has told me at face value then his strength has been failing rapidly over the last few weeks leading to a fall in which he probably broke his hip and he is now awaiting a “special scan”, which will determine if he has a fracture and possibly the extent to which he is riddled with bone cancer.  Following the “special scan” the doctors will finally realise how badly they have misdiagnosed his increasing mobility problems and will operate on his hip or his knee or both, leading to death on the operating table or a “cure”.

Reading between the lines a more believable storyline might read:  Dad is obese and has bad arthritis in several joints which has a variable but increasing effect on his mobility.  For the last couple of weeks it has been especially bad, leading him to believe he is in a rapid terminal decline.  Last Monday he was visited at home by a new female GP, who he obviously fancies and who told him that there was very little the NHS could now do for him. Immediately she left, Dad in a fit of anger lowered himself to the floor and pressed his fall alarm summoning an ambulance.  At the hospital his inability to describe his symptoms in a clear and rational way led to the clinicians not finding much and not knowing what to do next.  So he has been given a low priority and shunted into a bed awaiting a scan, which the clinicians have called “special” just to get him off their backs.

As a result of writing this the scan will probably reveal he really is very ill and will now stoically fade away leaving me filled with remorse.  Yeah, right!

I think this is called compassion fatigue.

Happy birthday??

I was 56 on Friday and it’s more or less a year since I started this blog. When I began I was unsure what I was writing for. Looking at the stuff I’ve written since I find much of it seems self-satisfied and self-justificatory. Actually, paging at random through the blogs of others, the majority of whom seem to be female christians of various ages from the mid west of the United States, I am clearly not alone.

In my case I guess it comes with the territory. Brought up by a controlling Mother who used her anxiety to keep me constantly accountable, it’s like a part of me is for ever engaged in the process of answering the question “where have you been, I’ve been worried sick about you.” Over time, the process of creating a bland and positive narrative becomes ingrained.

So, as I approach a second year of blogging about myself, I think it’s time to become a bit more real and a bit more interesting, if I can. Starting with the question “why am I writing this blog?” The answer is bleeding obvious – for it to be read, of course.

Brindisi now and then

Sue and I took a day trip to Brindisi last week to fulfil a promise we made five years ago to visit the Archeological Museum.  There were only a handful of people there, all foreigners, wandering around the pottery shards and broken statues.  You are left with the impression that Brindisi was less a Roman town, than a Roman occupied town, building on Greek civilisations that were many centuries older.  Also one gets a feel for the tremendous strategic importance of this natural galley harbour, which was the gateway to Greece and the Eastern Mediteranean.

When we first came to the Museum five years ago, on a similarly hot Summer day, it was shut for renovation.  If I'm honest I was in a bad way at the time, in the grip of depression, struggling to see anything good in anything, more interested in the shade than the light.  Now life seems a lot better, if a bit uncertain.  Sue has finished work for the Summer and is now casting around for what to do next.  I too am looking for work, although increasingly pessimistic about finding any.  This seems to be becoming our pattern of the last few years, trying to ensure that we don't become so preoccupied with earning a living that the Summer slips past almost without our noticing or having enjoyed it to the full.  We should have such problems!

After the Museum we wandered around the sleepy old town in the height of midday sun, then went for lunch.  The grilled cuttlefish I had were so pretty Sue insisted I take a photo of them.

HOT

High summer has arrived and it's hot, hot, hot here in Puglia - pushing forty centigrade on our terrace at lunchtime.  Too hot to do much during the middle of the day except try to sleep.

For a few days we had a sirocco, the wind out of the south that blows from the deserts of North Africa.  Everyone here hates the sirocco - in the winter it brings humid air that feels muggy and unpleasant and breeds mould and in the summer it's like living in a fan oven, cooking the poor tomatoes and aubergines on the vine and making the lettuces wilt and flop onto the parched earth.  The only defence is to shut all the doors and windows in the middle of the day to stop the heat invading the house.  Then all one can do is lie down next to a fan feeling the sweat congeal on one's skin and look anxiously at the thermometer, hoping is doesn't climb above thirty, when things start to get really unbearable.

But now the sirocco has ceased blowing and conditions are hot, still and dry.  Good weather for the beach or for a cycle expedition, post siesta.  Yesterday I rode to Ostuni - the White City, while most people were still asleep.  Very little was stirring in the countryside except the cicadas.  Even in the late afternoon I could feel my knees burning under a sky bleached almost white by the flaring sun which turned the shadows an intense black.  This is the time of year when the South of Italy is most at home with itself, quiet as the grave, brooding in the sultry atmosphere.  In Italian the South of Italy is called the "mezzogiorno", literally the "midday", where nothing happens or ever can.

Dad's typewriter

Dad asked me to take his typewriter to the local hospice charity shop yesterday.  It’s a fairly new electric one.  Lifting it from his desk made me feel sad this morning.  Writing carefully crafted letters to authority about this and that has always been such a part of him and his sense of himself and now he seems happy to casually cast this tool away.  “Are you sure you want me to take it?” I asked a couple of times and “yes” he was quite sure.   He told me to take its PVC dustcover as well – “I made that myself” he said proudly.  I could tell he had, he has always been a dedicated adapter of his possessions to make them more “practical” as he might say.

The charity shop is in a little row in the local shopping centre, dominated by a Coop, a chippy and a Mobility shop with a line of electric buggies outside.  The man at the counter looked at me blankly as I handed over the machine, “the manageress said yesterday I should bring it in” I said and he nodded as I set it down in front of him.  I wanted to say “it’s my Dad’s you know, he’s written a lot of letters on it, but now he doesn’t have the dexterity in his fingers.  I hope it goes to a good home.”  But I didn’t, I knew this would be too much information for the retired chap at the counter who had clients to deal with.  And so this milestone in Dad’s life disappeared quickly from the rear view mirror in his accelerating journey into oblivion.  It’s funny how a cheap electric typewriter can make one so inexpressibly sad.

Nocera Umbra

We went to Umbria last weekend to see our good friends Carole and Kevin.  Summer has arrived with a vengeance in the South and it was a hot drive north up the motorway that runs along the Adriatic coast.  Finally we turned left and wound our way up into the Appenines, to the small hill town of Nocera Umbra in the mountainous heartland of Italy.  We stayed in an apartment in an old farmhouse outside the town and this was the view from our window.

Carole and Kevin have recently returned to their town house here after an absence of fourteen years.  They bought the place in the late 80s and then were forced out when a series of earthquakes in September 1997 made most of the old town centre uninhabitable.  Now they are the first people to move back to their street, surrounded by scaffolding and building work and a network of improvised water pipes and electricity cables.

The restoration of Nocera Umbra following the quakes is a very Italian story of graft and inefficiency on the one hand and loyalty, patience and tenacity on the other.  I last came here with them about four years ago, when to keep their sanity they had really given up hope that one day they might actually get their home back.  But, slowly the restoration continued to the point where it became feasible for them to sell their trullo complex in Puglia and make plans to return.

It must be strange, picking up the threads that they had to drop so suddenly all those years ago, when their Italian dream unravelled in a few short days.  I really hope they weave something new here from the old.  They certainly deserve to.  Good luck my dears!

Doha on my mind

Funny how the mind works. It was hot and sunny when I set off for my run this morning. On the way back, sweat dripping off my forehead, my MP3 player ran out of podcasts and flipped on to John Martyn's album "Grace and Danger". Suddenly I was back in Doha where I first heard it in April 2009. He recorded the album in 1980 as a way of dealing with the break up of his marriage. It was so raw that Island Records didn't want to release it. It was the album I should have listened to when my marriage broke up in 1989.

I had decided to walk from Sue's apartment to the "Oasis" leisure club in the height of the midday sun. I took my MP3 player and selected "Grace and Danger", which I had just downloaded, to keep me company. I was well covered up, but even so I could feel the odd patch of exposed skin stinging with the intensity of the sun's rays. During my hour or so out on the streets I was the only person I saw actually walking. By the time I reached the "Oasis" I was in a kind of trance induced by the heat and John Martyn's music. "When the hurt in your heart has gone ... I'll still be your friend ... right to the end of the river and further still ...this hurt it will never end."

The "Oasis" is the pool and leisure centre of a now demolished hotel. To reach it you had to crunch your way across a building site full of rubble and twisted steel reinforcing bars. The reception area had a 1970s post-colonial feel, all potted palms and dusty models of Arab dhows. I cooled off in the pool with a handful of locals and ex-pat workers as the big birds of Qatar Airways roared skywards above us from the adjacent airport, making one's stomach tingle with the growl of their engines.

I often return in my mind to that particular, hot and dusty day. For some reason I can't quite pin down it was a kind of bliss.

Olive pruning

The seasons in Puglia are incredibly distinct and when the Summer arrives it's like God, or Silvio Berlusconi, has flipped a switch. The switch got flipped this week, sending the temperatures above 30 centigrade and making us realise that olive pruning can be postponed no longer. Actually Erminia has been dropping hints for weeks. Until three years ago her husband, old Paolo, would come over to supervise. This involved me holding the ladder while he wobbled at the top of it, pruning, swigging wine and farting by turns or (infinitely preferable) me at the top of the ladder while Paolo hollered instructions and poked me with a long stick from below - "taglia! (cut) "lascia!" (leave). The old bugger's been dead a while now, but those words still ring in my ears while I am pruning. Now we are left to our own devices as Erminia's arthritic hips means she no longer ventures far into our fields either.

Every part of the Mediterranean has its own pruning technique which makes something essentially simple seem very complicated. To cut (or prune) a long story short - olive trees are not trees at all, but bushes that behave rather like roses. To make them trees and to make the trees productive they need regular pruning. Pruning styles vary depending on how the olives are harvested and how much value is placed on the bi-product of firewood and kindling. Up here, where olives have traditionally been harvested by hand, the trees are pruned to create ladder holds. They are also pruned hard as a high value is placed here on wood for the hearth and the kitchen. We don't need the wood and we use a harvesting machine so we don't need ladders either, but we still try to copy the traditional local pruning style, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because we couldn't bear the aggravation we would get from Erminia if we attempted to do otherwise.

On a hot day it's a real joy to be out in our fields with the saw and the secateurs, cutting one's way upwards through the canopy of olive leaves into the dazzling sunshine. Because the work is seasonal it takes me back to seasons gone by and inevitably I think of Old Paolo and our little dog Milly too, who would happily chase lizards or dig for moles as Sue and I laboured away. It seems right that we buried her among the olive trees.

To the lighthouse!

Once a week when I am home I usually take a morning ride to this lighthouse. I have to drop down about 1000 feet off the ridge on which we live, then across the coastal plain to the little resort of Torre Canne. This only takes about half an hour, but it then takes me over an hour to grind my way back up again.

During the ride I travel through three different worlds. The limestone plateau called the Murghe, which is a patchwork quilt of little stone houses and small holdings, the plain below, a good five centigrade warmer most of the year and dominated by large estates of majestic olive trees, then the coastal strip, full of camper vans and holiday makers in the Summer season.

The climb back is a good antidote to life's petty frustrations such as "will the part I have ordered from the UK to get my motorbike back on the road ever arrive?" I seem to spend a lot of my life waiting for things at the moment, but out on the bike there is just the one hill to climb. From the plain the Murgh looks very like the North Downs, the intercostal muscle that separates London from its lungs - the counties of Kent and Surrey. As I look at the band of green stretching in front of me I often think of my Mum, who when my Dad or I would point out the Downs while out on a Sunday drive would cry anxiously, "where, what are you looking at?" She would stare blankly at the line of hills and simply not see them as a separate entity.

I only bought the bike about a year ago, the first new one I have ever owned and the steepest part of the climb is a measure of my increasing fitness, as over the months I have tackled it in successively higher gears. I get back home after a couple of hours, hot, sweaty and ready for breakfast and the day ahead.

Stranded in Puglia

This is my motorbike, gassed up and ready to go to England yesterday morning. I'd been dithering for several days about whether to ride back to the UK for the bike's annual inspection and finally got my act together after Sue and her friend Barbara set off for a weekend in Prague.

It was a lovely sunny morning when I set off with the intention of staying in Rimini on Friday evening before tackling the Alps. I took a scenic road to Bari and was tooling along happily when bam, the bike lost all power and glided to halt on the roadside with all the electrics dead.

After a desultory attempt to find the problem, with trucks and lorries thundering past within a few inches, I gave it up as a bad job and hitched a lift to the nearest town. I was picked up by the classic Pugliese peasant farmer or "contadino" driving a battered hatchback. "Where are you from then?" "London eh? My son lives in Manchester." "So you've got a place here in Puglia?Here's my card, you need fruit, veg, wine or oil, you just call me."

So Giovanni drove me to Putignano where he found a mechanic who found a motorbike mechanic who came out and picked up my bike. So now my beloved Suzuki Bandit, which I have owned since 1998 lies in a garage twenty miles from home awaiting a part which will maybe see me on my way to England next week or maybe not. On this particular day I guess it was Italy 1, Japan nil.

The Cathedral at Ostuni

Sue's Australian friend Barbara came to stay this week and so we did the sightseeing thing. I'm proud of my adopted home and enjoy showing people around, especially as it allows one to look with fresh eyes at familiar things.

Today we went to the "White City" of Ostuni, which sits on the edge of the limestone plateau on which we live, surveying the Adriatic Sea and the coastal plain several hundred feet below. Your man on the left is Saint Oronzo, who stands on a tall column in the town centre. He's the local early Christian martyr and miracle worker credited with saving a nearby town from the plague.

Ostuni is a tourist ghetto, but it also has a sleepy southern italian dignity.

After wandering around the gift shops we climbed up the hill to the medieval cathedral. Barbara is a catholic and so I guess it had a special resonance for her. I mooched around on my own, playing with my camera, while Sue and Barbara read the guide and peered quizzically at the artefacts.

We were the only people there and after a while I began to feel a sense of peace and melancholy as I gazed at the doe-eyed Madonnas and the images of Saint Oronzo, most of which register the mild suprise one sees on the face of so many saints.

Sue asked me if I was feeling OK and I smiled and said "fine", before we emerged blinking into the evening sunshine to wander the lime-washed alleys for a little longer until it was time for dinner.

Just one tender stroke

Rereading my last post it looks like my attempt to put Dad back in the box of his bungalow. But Dad wouldn’t go back so easily.

He said he wanted to return home and he did get discharged there from hospital eventually. But, I wonder if it was what he really wanted or whether he thought it was what he was expected to want. A lot of pressure is put on older people by the caring professions to seek to live an “independent” life. Children as well, I guess, generally want their parents to behave as if they are going to live for ever. The truth is Dad was scared of going home and it was a hard struggle for him when he got there. When you are overweight and have very limited mobility even the floor is a scary place and gravity is your enemy, trying to put you there, unable to get up again, at every opportunity.

For a while Dad experimented with simply giving up the fight and on two occasions he got me or his friend Bernie to lower him to the floor, complaining hysterically that his knee wouldn’t hold him. At that stage there is nothing to be done but to call an ambulance to get help putting him back in a chair. The last time this happened I looked at Dad lying on the carpet like a beached walrus and struggled to control my anger and frustration. I felt sure there was a wilful element to this “giving up”, partly caused by him having had too much to drink that lunchtime and at that moment I saw only too clearly how old people can get abused by those that are supposed to be "caring" for them.

Anyway, I called the ambulance, stressing that this was not a serious emergency and then joined Dad on the carpet to wait. He talked about how he wished he was dead, partly because that was how he felt and partly to manipulate me into feeling sorry for him. Then quite instinctively he reached out and gently stroked my hair. Just one tender stroke. And my heart bled for him and me and the relationship between us that never quite made it.

So now I am home again in Puglia, thinking about that tiny moment and whether it has changed anything.