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 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.
