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.