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.