Lying Fallow

It's mid-winter here in Puglia and life has settled into a quiet routine.  I'm teaching three days per week now in Ostuni and work is building up.  On my non-teaching days I'm continuing my desultory decluttering campaign, filling a bin liner most days with grimy unwanted junk, much of it coated in dust and hairs from our little dog Milly, who died three years ago.  With each sack dragged to the communal refuse bin, three hundred metres up the road, I feel a bit lighter.

I feel like I'm lying fallow, hunkering down in our little stone house recharging my batteries for some new and as yet unspecified expedition into the outside world.  Sue is studying hard for her Masters and with not much money coming in we're leading a frugal lifestyle with our main outings being country walks and Friday trips to Locorotondo market.  It's been good to renew our relationship with the countryside around here, which after ten years still continues to grow on me.  Even in winter it's fertile, the little patchwork of fields dotted with rows of growing things like brocoli, fennel and artichokes.  On many days it's grey and wet with low cloud scudding over the limestone ridge on which we live, but then, the sun breaks out and suffuses the land with a pure bright light you never see in Northern Europe.  On the sunny days you can stand in a sheltered corner and feel the Sun warm your aching winter bones like magic.

A couple of times we've had a big black slobbery lodger called Jairo.  We take him for long walks and at night he sleeps on a trampoline-like bed at the foot of ours, snoring and farting contentedly into the small hours like an old man.  Sometimes it feels like Dad is in the room with us, rather than in his new hospital-type bed, which he is winched in and out of by his homecarers.  Sometimes when hobbling around the house I catch a glimpse of this old bloke looking at me in the mirror, bald and creased and wrapped up against the cold and I think surely I'm too old to have a Dad.

Decluttering

Living in Malaysia has taught us one major lesson - most of the junk you accumulate through life has no utility whatsoever and is not missed when you can't get at it.  We arrived in Sarawak with a suitcase each plus three air-freighted cardboard boxes and not once in two years did I think "oh, if only I'd packed that handy plastic ice cream tub crammed with old keys, badges, coins and fluff".

As well as being glad to be back home in Puglia I also felt I'd returned to a mountain of dusty and useless junk.  Disposal has however been another matter.  Books have been the toughest challenge, nobody wants grimy and mildewed English language tomes in the South of Italy.  They're probably not wildly popular in Sutton come to think of it.

Sue was all for sticking the lot on a big bonfire, but for me the connotations were just too strong and after a lot of aversion therapy I finally managed to train myself to throw them in the paper recycling container next to Locorotondo stadium.  After about the fifth box I began to feel strangely lighter.

As I write this I've just realised why this process of throwing shit away is so traumatic - it's an admission that our life is too short to ever need the stuff again.  Although, as I looked through the letter box shaped hole in the recycling bin at my tea-stained copy of "Finegan's Wake" I did console myself with the thought that I could always download it to my kindle - yeh right.

Christmas in England

Back in Puglia after an exhausting Christmas in the UK.  Stansted - Lincoln - London - Devon - London - Lincoln - Stansted.  After so long away in Malaysia duty and a degree of guilt called and by the time we put all our commitments together the schedule was complicated. 


For Christmas itself we were in Devon with Sue's sister Julie and her family and Jim and Audrey who we drove from London.  The Devon countryside was wet and wild, the woodland bare and the streams and rivers in flood.  For the first time I looked at the picturesque country cottages and imagined what a hard life it would have been to live in a small English village a hundred years ago, when money and food were often short and the weather harsh.

We saw Dad at the beginning and end of our trip and for the first time in many years he seemed accepting of his lot.  Homecarers come in four times a day, to get him out of bed, toilet him and put him back to bed.  Not much of a life one might think, revolving around "Bargain Hunt" and the evening soaps.  But he feels safe and he sees people.  Walking now seems to be a distant and untroubling memory.

He talked to Sue a couple of times about how he felt he was slowing down and that death might not be so far away.  His mood seemed less morbid than accepting.  I'm not worried that he didn't share these thoughts with me, we seem more easy with each other than we have for years and our understanding feels tacit.

One evening I went for a run to the local woodland lake listening to radio 4 on my Ipod.  As I reached the water's edge the guest on "Desert Island Discs" requested "In the Bleak Midwinter".  The choir started up as I looked out over the lake to the silver birches beyond against a background of luminous blue sky and throbbing stars and I felt myself letting go of something.