Christmas in Newark

Sue's dental problems put our planned trip to India for December and January on hold and on 20th December I picked her up from Stansted with the intention of spending Christmas and the New Year in Newark.

Just before she arrived I damaged my right knee crawling around the bathroom doing tiling and pipework and we ended up a couple of convalescents, with me hobbling along and Sue often in intense pain from her dental work.  This got so bad that just after Christmas she had to go to a dentist who prescribed her antibiotics to deal with an infection which had flared up.

Notwithstanding our health problems we had a remarkably good time chilling out watching TV, going shopping and doing local walks.  On Christmas Day we went for a walk along the River Trent and got chatting to an older man who knew a lot about local history and whose conversation seemed to turn worryingly often to anecdotes about suicide.  Maybe we provided him with a welcome distraction.  He also confirmed that a big splash that Sue had heard might have been an otter.

With no particular schedule, I felt for the first time part of a "retired" couple without being too depressed at the prospect.

The Other Route to Stansted Airport Station

I flew back to Stansted on Saturday night and got the courtesy bus to the Holiday Inn where I crashed for the night.

Next morning, lacking the £3 change for the bus ride, I decided to walk back to the airport railway station, just over a mile away.

It's not a route designed for pedestrians and I had to edge my way along the side of crash barriers and frost-encrusted embankments navigating by the airport conning tower.

I was in a funny mood.  I'd started the day watching Boris Johnson being interviewed by Andrew Marr.  The whole thing had a surreal air, a lop-sided and articulate Marr asking intelligent questions of what looked like a badly-stuffed teddy bear spouting intellectual sounding nonsense interspersed with a constantly repeated tagline - "sturm and drang ... take back control ... blah, blah, blah ... take back control ...".  The one question that I was dying for Andrew Marr to ask was "why do you keep repeating 'take back control'?  Are you trying to brainwash us?"

When I reached the perimeter of the Airport it seemed appropriate that the sign had a letter missing, like a robot eye which had come adrift from its socket.  "Take back control ... take back control ..."

Along the Acquadotto

Life seems on hold as I wait for news from Sue about her dad.  When I awoke this morning I was struck by the profound quiet of Contrada Papariello, punctuated by the very occasional car and, at this time of the year, the odd shotgun going off.  It's been a pleasant day, presided over by a watery sun and this afternoon I set off on my bicycle for a ride along the Acquadotto.

The Acquadotto Pugliese is a civil engineering marvel which transports fresh water from Campania on the other side of the Apennines all the way to the far south of Puglia.  It was begun at the beginning of the twentieth century and took decades to complete.  It's still a lifeline for Puglia's population and agriculture, but over the last few years it's also become an increasingly popular linear park and I frequently run or bicycle some of the more attractive local stretches, especially the section starting from the pumping station at Figazzano, a village a few kilometres away which was also Erminia's birthplace and where many members of her family still live.  As the photo shows it looks rather like a disused railway line and the path is actually a service road, which mostly runs immediately above the actual water main, although sometimes when the main is tunnelled through a hill the road takes a more roundabout course.

The light was great today so I took my camera.  The house opposite is only a couple of hundred metres from the path and I've always admired its compact solidity and the relationship it has with the surrounding fields and woodland.  The kind of place I'd like to live, if I had the time and money to do it up.

On the way back I took the panorama below which shows a great swathe of the Val d'Itria with the town of Martina Franca on the ridge in the distance, looking down over the patchwork of olive groves and vineyards that the area is famous for.  I guess one day we will repatriate when our acre of land and old stone house becomes too much for our old bones to manage, but it's hard to contemplate on a day like today.

Waiting

On Friday evening I took the car to a garage in Locorotondo for four new tyres and was told by the mechanic that it would be ready in "un'oretta".  Like any time estimate in Italy this can mean a lot of things, literally it's "approximately an hour", but in reality it could be anything from a half to three hours.

I'd come prepared and left the car to stroll around the town with my camera.  Here's me going for a moody shot reflected in the window of a backstreet house.

Locorotondo on a late Autumn evening before the restaurants open is as quiet as the grave and I wandered around the side streets trying to capture some of the lonely and slightly sinister atmosphere, a bit like a deserted fairground, which was appropriate as there was a fairground setting up on the outskirts of town, by the football ground advertising "live animals".  I took my godson Joshi to it once and I can still remember the tense and exhausted demeanour of the bald lion tamer who looked more like a drug dealer than a circus act.

The time passed remarkably quickly and I returned to the garage exactly an hour later (so very British) to find the mechanic, a little to my surprise, just lowering the car back to the ground.  "A post ..." he says, short for "tutte a posto", meaning "it's all ok".

On Sunday Sue and I went to a big shopping centre near Bari, largely because Sue's dental surgery is now beginning to heal more and she is desperate to get out of the house.  In the middle of a crowded mall my 'phone suddenly starts to vibrate and I can see it's a UK number.  I hear the voice of Sue's brother Mike and I immediately know that something is wrong.  You get to a certain age and you are always expecting this kind of call.  Sure enough Sue's dad Jim is in hospital with breathing difficulties and the family is spooked by the A&E consultant wanting to know if it's appropriate to put "DNR" on his records.

So now Sue is waiting - for a plane to Heathrow at Brindisi Airport.  Actually the news last night seemed more positive that Jim would be able to get over this latest chest infection, but she wisely followed her gut and booked the plane ticket last night anyway.

La Tufara

I never tire of this view, out over the coastal plain at the little hamlet of La Tufara, ten minutes down the road from our house.  I come here to run and sometimes just to take the air and to think.  There have been so many dramatic changes in the world these last few months, Brexit, the attempted coup and crackdown in Turkey, the siege of Aleppo and now the prospect of President Donald Trump.  I like to look down there and think this view hasn't changed much in a thousand years or so - the same Roman road, the same villas, towns and olive groves.  Sure, it's also seen a lot of change, Hannibal came this way terrorising the locals, then the Normans, followed by Arab raiding parties, then the Germans who were chased up and out of the peninsula by the British and Americans.  Even just a few years ago US fighter jets screamed over this ridge to bomb Serbia not far away cross the Adriatic and yet still the olives get picked each year and milled into oil.

Objectively life is good right now, we have sufficient income not to worry about money and to do what we want within reason and my celebrancy work is going well.  In fact, I've just got a wedding to do in one of those grand houses down there in May for a lovely English couple.  But international events cast their shadow and Sue's mood is being dragged down by the dental work she's having, which leaves her in constant pain and me feeling helpless.

Anyway, life goes on and Sue's teeth will get better and things will start to look up.  Our little cat friend is already seeing better days.  In August I mentioned that she was pining for the death of her two kittens and now here she is looking fat glossy and very pregnant.

And when the sun come out our land is alive with colour, even as winter starts to bite.

Golden Brown

I've bought a camera to replace the one I left on the train several weeks back.  It's a sophisticated Sony that I got after hours of research on Ebay and is a perfect match for the lenses and accessories left over from the old one.  It has a "panorama" feature, which I used to take this picture of Dobson's Quay, the neighbouring pizzeria and the River Trent.

The autumn colours here are amazing and after my morning run I went out with my camera to capture them.  The landscape is covered with these fabulous dead leaves picking out the trees in gold and giving them golden shadows.

Then I walked to the market and found there's a stall there selling second hand camera equipment and I bought an old Minolta 50mm prime lens from this man (I used the lens which I was testing) for a mere £30.  It's called a "prime" as it has a fixed focal length, i.e. you can't zoom it, which makes it simple and fast to focus and 50mm is the "classic" focal length, being closest to what we see from the unadjusted eye.

And here's a "panorama" shot of the market -

Back in the UK

I arrived in the UK last Tuesday on the latest of my bouncings between Locorotondo and Newark.  Ostensibly I'm here to do a wedding and go to the BHA Celebrant's Conference.  The wedding was yesterday in a pub in Lincoln and was lovely and the Conference is next weekend.  I have a few meetings in between.  Actually, I feel sad to be here.  Sue has been having very painful dental work, which from her perspective feels like it's been going on forever and has put her life on hold with no immediate prospect of it finishing and I want to be at home in Italy with her.  We were planning to go to India for a couple of months in December and January, but this may have to be delayed or postponed.

Although I have a fair bit to do I feel strangely at a loose end, waiting for things to happen and stuff to arrive.  I feel I should be phoning friends, but something in me keeps putting this off until tomorrow.  It's the same with this blog.  Ever since dad died I've been less motivated to keep it up, even though I never shared it with him when he was alive anyway.  It's like there's no one up there on the road ahead to whom I'm accountable anymore.  This should be a relief, but actually it's lonely.

When I was back in Puglia Sue and I went to a memorial Mass for Claude's mother Cecile, who died in August, so he too is now the last of a family line.  It was a lovely event taken by an English priest who has use of a beautiful chapel in Ceglie Messapica and afterwards there was a supper in a local pizzeria, where we were able to catch up with Claude and Jane and their other guests.  It's been a while since we've seen them and it got me to thinking back to the time when we all first arrived in Puglia, twelve years ago now.  I feel our experiment with Southern Italian culture has left us all older and wiser and possibly happier than we would otherwise have been.

Back in Puglia in September Sue and I did quite a bit of walking - even in our local area we're still discovering new tracks and paths, like this beautifully paved country lane seemingly in the middle of nowhere, leading nowhere.

Perhaps one day I'll go back to the particular spot and find out where it leads ...

The Digital Burial of D J Duckworth

I decided it was time to take the reference to my dad's memorial service off the home page of my blog.  Instead, I've put the text of the ceremony, plus a few pictures, into a blog post dated 14th March 2015, the date of the memorial.

As I was doing it I got to thinking that this was yet another stage in moving on from his death and that by consigning the text to the back pages of my blog I was conducting a kind of burial.  There is such a vast amount of stuff on the world wide web now that most of it is effectively buried, because the population of readers is so small compared to the volume of reading material.

I think this point is often lost in the debate about how we live in a surveillance society.  There may be a CCTV camera on practically every street corner in the UK, but if there is no one monitoring them except maybe a bored and over-worked security guard nodding off in a control room, then what does it matter?  I suppose the answer to that is it depends on the sophistication of the search engines that pick over all the stored images, sounds and words.  My guess is most of them are like brainless nincompoops moving at the speed of light with an attention span of less than a millisecond throwing up almost random hits.

A Walk Through the Ancient Olives

Last Sunday Sue booked us on a guided walk among the olive trees near Ostuni, starting near the sixteenth century Masseria D'Agnano (opposite).  Discretely beautiful and in a fabulous location on the edge of the Murghe, it's being renovated.  The perfect hideaway for a Russian billionaire perhaps, or for me if I had the money.

Our guide was a young local man who is a member of  a group devoted to the preservation of the ancient olive groves of the coastal plain, some of which he confirmed are thousands of years old.  Looking out over the trees below, he came up with the interesting insight that these were the oilfields of the Roman Empire, oil which was prized not primarily for cooking, but for keeping Rome lit at night.

Later he took us to this cave, which his group had cleared and where everyone took this shot.  I tried to resist but sometimes you just have to add to your collection of pictures framed by cavemouths and the view was great, looking out across the olive groves to the seaside town of Torre Canne with its distinctive lighthouse.

On returning to where our cars were parked our guide then led us through some trees and to a small cave which contained a massive grinding stone.  He explained that a donkey would pull another big stone, mounted on a wooden beam, which pivoted from a depression in the centre of the base stone to crush the olives to a paste, the first stage in the production of olive oil.  This primitive olive mill was documented as having been abandoned in the seventeenth century and could have been created hundreds of years before that.  There is no signpost to this deeply atmospheric spot, but now we know where it is we will be back.

The Cat Days of August

It's my last chance to write a blog post in August.  It's been a busy old month, dominated by hot but changeable weather, with strong winds wooshing through our pine tree and making doors bang and curtains fly in an unsettling manner.  The last couple of days have by contrast been hot and still like August in Puglia should be.

Sue's sister Julie and her daughters Grace and Alice and son Joe with girlfriend Rachel came in late July and left on 3rd August.  While they were here we celebrated mine, Sue and Mimingo's birthdays along with the Convertini family with a barbecue on our terrace.  Towards the end of their stay there was the added excitement of Rachel discovering she'd lost her passport on the outward journey, resulting in her having to get a coach to Rome to get emergency papers from the British Consulate.

While they were here we all got a lot of entertainment from the antics of two kittens who had been born somewhere near our terrace sometime in June.  Sue has been feeding and keeping an eye on them, but sadly they both died over the last week and I had to dig two little graves.  Their mum is still around crying plaintively for her little ones to come and feed.

After the Iredale's left we got down to making passata and the other late summer activity of drying figs, as the trees sagged under the weight of their plump, syrup dripping fruit.  I also popped across to the UK to do my second wedding and the naming of three children.  Both had an RAF connection as the wedding was in the Officer's Mess of the old RAF Hemswell, where some of the film "the dam busters" was made, and the naming was at RAF Cranwell, just a few hundred metres from the officer's college with it's great facade and parade ground.

This year too we both managed to spend Feragosto hanging around Locorotondo and watching the festivities for the feast of San Rocco, who as far as I can tell was an itinerant nutter who spent his days limping around and pointing to his stigmata - a rather unsightly thigh wound.  Still the roast pork roll at a stall near the funfair was delicious.  Usually we make a desultory attempt to stay awake for the midnight firework competition on 16th August, when the Comune of Locorotondo sponsors a serious attempt to torch the entire Val d'Itrea, but this year we were too Feragosto'd out to even try.

In this summer of catching up for lost time in Puglia we also managed to spend a few days at the beach.  Here are Sue and I in characteristic poses.

We've also been able to get some walking in, exploring places new to us on the ridge that drops down from our limestone plateau, the "Murghe", to the Adriatic.  The monument below is yet another statue of San Oronzo, the man who apparently saved Ostuni, or was it Lecce, or both, from the plague.  And thus another August drifts past ....

Keith's Ashes

After my Saturday run Sue and I got the train to Brighton and met up with Keith's sister Brenda and Jane, Alison and Graham, her old colleagues from Hargrave Park, where Sue first met Keith.  During brunch Brenda gave us each a small pot of Keith's ashes to do with as we wished and confirmed her intention to scatter a larger pot on the beach, Brighton being one of his favourite haunts.

After brunch we wandered around the Lanes and Sue and I reminded ourselves why we like Brighton so much - a slightly louche London-on-sea, pretentious but able to take the piss out of itself and home, bless it, of Britain's first green MP.  It doesn't deserve to be stuck in the UK really, it should have itself towed into the middle of the English Channel and begin a new life as a cool version of Jersey.  I bought a pair of Doc Martins with part of Uccello's the Battle of San Romano printed on them, which seemed the right thing to do.  Then we made our way to the seafront, scrunching across the shingle in the teeth of a strengthening breeze.

The ash scattering was a fun mess, very appropriate really, as we staggered around barefoot in the surf, scattering roses and trying not to fall over or get ash in each other's eyes.  Then we had a toast to Keith with plastic glasses filled with champagne, which Brenda had bought in Marks and Spencer.

RIP Keith Ramptahal, too soon gone.

Bloody Littlehampton

Sue came over from Italy last weekend for a get-together in Brighton in memory of our friend Keith Ramptahal.  We stayed in Littlehampton in a tired B&B and on Saturday I went for a run along the coast to Angmering-on-sea.

It was a very English scene on which to reflect about "Brexit" and this very peculiar little country that I come from.  There was a strong breeze behind me as I ran past neat semi-detached houses, across meadowlands and into secluded private housing estates.  Lots of tidy white people were walking their dogs plus the odd man in a cheap tracksuit nursing a can of strong cider.

The return run was hard work in the face of the wind and I began to resent it as I plodded on with a forward lean.  Bloody wind, bloody Littlehampton, bloody country, bloody brexit.

Last Brexit From Boston

On EU referendum day I had my first funeral at Boston Crematorium, the English heartland of Brexit, with a higher percentage of people who want Britain out of the EU than anywhere else in the country.  It was a damp, grey morning as I drove from Newark across miles of largely empty farmland.  As I pulled into the car park of a large Asda, the Boston Stump loomed out of the mist.  Driving on through the town I saw rows of neat terraced houses interspersed with Eastern European food stores.

The crem. is a grim fifties edifice in some well-kept parkland.  I was shown into the Vestry and later given a quick tour of the chapel and shown the buttons for changing the music and closing the curtains.  I drove back to Newark at lunchtime, and in the afternoon picked up my motorbike from the garage and had a nice chat with the garage owner about bikes and touring and double-checking the bill he even found a mistake and knocked a few quid off.  Then I went to the Polling Station where the Poll Clerk offered my a munchie before handing me my ballot paper.  "How very English" I thought, in a good way as a rode my motorbike back to Dobson's Quay.

After a run along the Trent I kicked back in front of the TV and got ready for the first referendum results to come in, convinced of a win for "remain."  I became hypnotised by the results strapline as the votes for Brexit piled up until it was clear by the early hours that a majority had voted to leave the EU.  It was fascinating to watch the ill-disguised shock on the faces of the presenters who had obviously voted mainly for "remain" and could scarcely believe what they were seeing.  I voted "remain" too but at the same time felt a certain guilty pleasure in watching so many smug professionals have the smile wiped off their faces, though that was obliterated by the ghastly spectacle of a triumphant Nigel Farage.

Now, two days later I feel anxious, but also excited.  For good or bad this result is going to lead to change and already it's interesting to see even some of the most die-hard remainers beginning to start seeing the opportunities.

Back to the UK

Sat on plane from Brindisi to Stansted, bored and tired.  Somewhere below through the clouds is a flat bit of France or Germany.  I'm only over for three odd weeks during which I have a funeral, a memorial and a wedding.  Also in two weeks I'm meeting Sue at Stansted so we can go together to a kind of memorial meet up in Brighton for our old friend Keith.

Oh and there's the UK referendum on EU membership.  Reading the Guardian the chattering classes are suddenly in a panic as the polls swing towards Brexit from a comfortable remain lead a few weeks ago.  I find all this scary and disorientating.  I had complacently assumed that as the deadline loomed people's fear of change would widen the gap in favour of remain and this may still prove to be the case.  But I'm realising increasingly that there are a lot of angry and dispossessed people out there who pin their anger on immigration and see Brexit as some kind of solution.

My reaction to all this is complicated.  I am a European but I'm not in love with the Brussels bureaucracy.  I also fear what a Britain outside Europe might become - a more nasty and alienated place than it is today governed by toffs I feel no connection with.

Interesting times.

Peschici

I took this photo last week lying on our bed in the afternoon in a lovely little hotel in the centre of Peschici, a small port and resort on the tip of the Gargano peninsula in the north of Puglia.

Since I got back to Puglia in early May we've been working hard getting our house and land ready for the summer, so we took a break for a few days to relax and recharge our batteries.

It's only our second time in the Gargano, the first time being a day trip with Old Paolo and Erminia to St Giovani Rotondo, the centre of the Padre Pio industry not long after we bought the house in 2004.

Although further north than our home it actually feels more remote, because it's far from the main autoroutes and regional airports.

At the centre of the peninsula is the Foresta Umbra, an ancient woodland of oak, beech and pine to which wolves were reintroduced a few years ago.  We took a stroll in it for a couple of hours, enjoying the shade and the peace and feeling strangely reminded of the Bornean rainforest.

But mainly we just strolled around the local seaside towns, taking in the views and the sunsets, dining on excellent seafood and eating ice cream.

It was however still early in the season and many of the locals were still frantically tarting the place up before the tourists arrive in greater numbers.  Unfortunately, this didn't extend to removing a rusty chunk of reinforcing bar attached to a lump of concrete buried on Peschici beach, which I managed to hook my foot under going for an early morning run sending me flying and burying my chin in the sand and bruising my ribs, which still hurt when I cough now more than ten days later.

Newark Now and Then

It's been a couple of months since we bought our apartment in Newark and I'm beginning to get a handle on the place.  From the windows of our apartment there's a good view of the main town-centre car park next to a bridge over the river Trent.  It's packed during the day and empties out completely after the bars and restaurants have closed around 11pm.  Now sunnier weather has arrived it's become a popular spot for bikers to come for a drink at the pub/barge moored next to the carpark.  I guess many of them are from the nearby city of Nottingham and they make me feel at home here.

Also from our windows we can see the massive spire of the church of St Mary Magdalene which was finished in 1350 and is a landmark for miles around.  It's strange to think it's been there for nearly eight hundred years and sometimes one can hear, that most English of sounds, the pealing of church bells, crashing out from its bell chamber. Strange as well to think that at the time it was built Newark was governed by a regime which would have had more in common with Islamic State than a modern "developed" nation.  Indeed, during the English Civil War in the seventeenth century most of its stained-glass windows were kicked in by what the BBC today would probably describe as "terrorists" or "insurgents".

Walking round the town today it's a very civilised place full of antique warehouses, upmarket food shops, cafes and the usual high street chains.  There are lots of wrinkly old folk moving around deliberately, like tortoises dressed by Marks and Spencer, looking for ways to kill the time.  I kill time observing them and they make me uneasy.

For me, the most unexpected thing about the place is that it is still affected by the trauma of a war nearly five hundred years ago.  Newark was a Royalist stronghold in the English Civil War (now known as the "British Civil Wars" I'm informed in the "National Civil War Centre" based in the town museum) and was besieged several times.  The town is dominated by references to the seiges - part of the defensive earthworks (the Queen's sconce) are now a park, the spire has a cannonball hole in it and Newark Castle is a ruin part-demolished by the victors after the capitulation of the town in 1646.  Apparently it was saved from being razed to the ground because the plague broke out in the town and the fearful occupiers buggered off.  And here it still stands today, "one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit" and a gaunt reminder of just how shit the past really was.

Back to the Blog

It's more than six months since I last wrote up my blog.

I've thought a lot about why I stopped and it's definitely connected to dad's death and my leaving of my father's house, physically and emotionally.  At one level I never wanted dad to read my blog, but in another way it actually was for him.  I was accounting for my actions to my parents, like I'd done throughout my life.  Do we all do this or am I queer?  An issue I've come to reflect on in a more general sense since dad died.

I shall tell the story of the last few months in pictures.

In September 2015 I moved from dad's bungalow to temporary digs in Lincoln with Harry and Zack and their delightful dog Oscar, with whom I enjoyed many excellent runs along the banks of the River Witham.

In November Sue finished her contract in Borneo and returned to Puglia, where after a gap of some years we finally did our olive harvest together again.  Also that month I completed a Humanist weddings course.

In December we spent Christmas with Sue's mum and dad then returned to Puglia to celebrate the New Year with our friends Mat and Sarah from Washington.

In January we went to a memorial get together for Sue's friend Keith Ramptahal at one of his favourite haunts - the Jamie Oliver restaurant in Islington.  It was a chance for Sue to catch-up with old colleagues and we also got to hear more of the story of his final few months.

In February I took Sue for a mystery break, paid for by some old reward points on a credit card, to a rather grand palazzo in the beautiful town of Matera, an hour and half's drive from our home in Puglia.

In March we bought a two-bedroomed apartment in Dobson's Quay, an old Victorian warehouse conversion in Newark, Nottinghamshire, with the proceeds of the sale of dad's little bungalow.  It's in a great spot in the centre of town with views over the River Trent.  That month I also led my second baby naming.

Also in March I travelled up to Peebles in Scotland to conduct the funeral of our good friend Carole's dad Jack, a fine man who set a great example of how to grow old while enjoying what you've still got rather than mourning what you've lost.  I've not done a lot of funerals this year so far, but the ones I have done have been very rewarding, including my first "ashes-centred" funeral in a hotel in Lincoln and a ceremony in a restaurant near Mansfield for a fascinating man whose feisty daughters were burying him at sea the following week.

I'm currently at the apartment in Newark, while Sue is at home in Puglia experimenting with being "retired".  My head is full of stuff - plans for upgrading the apartment, which has had a hard rental life for the last fifteen years and trying to make sense of my new lifestyle bouncing too and fro between Puglia and the East Midlands.

It's a funny old life.