After leaving my hotel in Bari on the morning of 22nd September I drove home in brilliant sunshine with my heart thumping with a mixture of joy and anxiety. Being a pessimist I half expected to see a smoking ruin with pigs rootling in the blackened foundations. In fact, the place looked little different to how we'd left it. Our neighbour Paolo did a great job keeping an eye on things and maintaining the land, including pruning many of the olive trees, which was way beyond what I'd asked him to do.
I had two weeks to smarten the place up before Sue arrived and I worked hard to get rid of as much of the accumulated grime as I could, with the help of Paolo's wife Elizabet and his mum Palma.The last few weeks have flown by and my sense of time now feels strangely distorted. So little has changed here in Puglia that it doesn't feel as if we've been gone for two years, but then when I look back on Borneo our time there seems to have lasted forever.
Overall, the absence has allowed me to return and see our home with fresh eyes and really appreciate it all over again. Our little patch of Puglia, high up on the limestone plateau called the Murghe, between Locorotondo and Cisternino, with its patchwork of smallholdings and hamlets,
is a very special place and we were lucky to have stumbled upon it nine years ago. Our sense of being home has been intensified by the welcome our neighbours have given us, especially our adopted mum, Erminia, who stumps round from next door most days, her stick clacking on the paving stones and looks at us as we come out of the house to greet her with a satisfied smile on her face.It's good to be back!
