Sue and I met in Cologne for Christmas to be with our friends Thomas and Nicole and their son (and my godson) Joshi. We have been spending Christmas with them on and off since we first met in 2002, when we were cruising through France having given up our jobs and sold our house in the UK. It was, as ever, a traditional German affair with goose and red cabbage and a tree with real candles. The Christmas atmosphere was accentuated by very cold weather and frozen snow carpeting the landscape. Getting there was hard work, especially for Sue, who worked until the 22nd and then set off from Cordoba the next day, catching a train to Malaga and then a plane to Germany, arriving at 3.00am on the 24th after a gruelling bus ride from the airport. I had an easier time travelling from Italy, but still when I got to my first train station in Cologne I felt like an old and confused man as a ticket machine eat four precious euros in change which I had scraped together to get to the stop nearest t...

It was one of those “perfect” days. The kind of day one starts in a good mood and during which good things happen. We drove to Cadiz down a long sandy spit with a big Atlantic sea pounding the beach. It was grey and misty, but the sunlight down here in Southern Spain is so strong that the clouds were still bright and luminous and every now and then a shaft of silver light would break through and flash off some distant windows. Cadiz is almost an island and as it grew on the shipping trade from the Mediterranean and the Indies it had nowhere to go but up. A typical dwelling has a warehouse at the bottom, apartments on the middle floors and a tower above from which the ocean could be scanned for the returning fleets. Looking up at one of these towers I could imagine an anxious merchant willing a galleon to coalesce out of the haze. Now although Cadiz is still a busy port with ferries coming and going to North Africa, it feels like a tourist city, with guided walks everywhere and lab...

This is my first time in Sim City. I got here a few days ago after a long drive in the dark from Madrid, finally meeting Sue at the foot of the old Roman bridge in the centre of town at one in the morning, following a series of tired and fractious text messages. Spanish and Italian are close relatives, so although I understand practically nothing of the language it feels familiar at the same time. This feeling of comfort and familiarity is reinforced by the fact that Sue is working here and so has a support network of colleagues. Added to this I now have a lot of experience of being in foreign cultures and so can relax and let it all wash over me, rather than agonise about not understanding things. Looking at the Spanish news North and South Korea are now at war and half of Spain is either flooded or covered in snow or maybe not. Cordoba really is Sim City. It has a broad, meandering river, hills and big hotels. Wide boulevards intersect the City interspersed with ancient and modern br...

Despite being in her middle eighties Erminia still has the enthusiasm of an excitable child when it comes to the olive harvest. “Have you got your oil yet?” she asked me yesterday morning. “No they told me to come back this evening” I replied. It was dark by the time I got to the Mill. It’s a small family affair and at this time of the year they are working flat out and everyone looked tired. There were vehicles of all shapes and sizes parked in the Mill compound and an impatient knot of locals waiting to get their olives weighed. Having already delivered our olives I walked through the throng and into the Mill where you are immediately hit by the powerful odour of fresh olive oil. Inside there are rows of fifty litre stainless steel containers that look like milk churns, each with the owner’s name on it in felt tip or stencil. I could see our two churns had already been filled and weighed so I went to the little office to pay before putting our churns onto a trolley and takin...

The thing I like best about harvesting olives is gathering the olive-laden nets from under the trees. This feels like what I imagine a fishing boat crew experience as they haul in their catch and spill it on the deck. Although you have some idea how much an individual tree has yielded by looking at the carpet of olives on the nets, its only when you heap them together that you really know. Sometimes a quite insignificant tree produces two or three crate loads while a big old brute that you were relying on disappoints. A bit like life I suppose. Erminia started asking me last week when I was planning to harvest the olives. “Next week” I said, “if the weather is OK”. Well the weather was OK, so yesterday I launched myself at our olive grove, armed with our olive harvesting machine – basically a small petrol-driven compressor which powers a pair of vibrating combs on the end of a long aluminium pole. After two days I have gathered four hundred kilos of olives, which I will take to ...

Now the clocks have changed the afternoons are suddenly darker. At four o'clock I realised that I had not yet taken Milly for her walk and that I would need to get a move on if this was to be done before sunset. So we drove out to our favourite spot - the ridge overlooking the coastal plain. When it is not raining I love this time of year. During the summer the land becomes baked and deadened and the intense sunlight bleaches everything. Now the rains have turned the soil a dark chocolate brown from which burst bright green shoots. And the low sun backlights the clouds and accentuates the colours of the dying autumn leaves. When we got to the ridge there was a southerly gale blowing, blasting low clouds over our heads and out towards the Adriatic. All around we could hear the crack of hunter's shotguns and the occasional dog barking. Milly stays close to me, her ears standing up, tense and alert. Down below I can see the lights of the little seaside town of Torre Canne ...

Sue leaves for Spain tomorrow. She has a five-month contract at a school in Cordoba in Andalucía. We’ve both been doing stints away from home since I took a four-month contract in London in 2008. We actually both seem to enjoy this lifestyle, where we are together at home for about half our time, with one of us working away and the other at home for the rest of the time. I plan to stay home for most of the five months, doing work on the house and our land, with perhaps four weeks in Spain, where Sue will rent an apartment. Meanwhile the winter is fast approaching here. A couple of nights ago we had our first cold snap and the evening air is now full of the smell of wood smoke. Most restaurants have given up completely on their outside terraces and have retreated indoors. One still sees the occasional tourist in shorts and sandals, which always makes me smile, as they wander around seemingly unconscious of the fact that they are surrounded by people wearing overcoats and ...

I was having a siesta in my bedroom during one of the recent rainstorms when a telltale “plink, plink” reminded me I hadn’t yet done any maintenance on our roof this year. Like most of the local houses ours has a flat roof made of stone blocks. Every year we need to clean and inspect it and look for cracks. So, for the last week Sue and I have been on our knees crawling over the roof and applying various potions and compounds. Each year we try new and more expensive materials hoping that this will obviate the need for a new roof and each year the roof stays watertight for a few weeks before a new “plink, plink” is heard somewhere or there is a sudden outbreak of mould in an unexpected place, sending us back up to look for leaks. And then the summer comes again and bakes everything dry and we forget there is such a thing as winter and then yet again we are taken by surprise by the autumn rains and so it goes around. Still apart from the pain in my back and in my knees, the...

Since moving to the south of Italy I’ve found myself doing and feeling many unexpected things for a Londoner. For example, waiting anxiously for the autumn rains like Gerard Depardieu in “Jean de Florette”. In my case this is less a matter of life and death and more a desire to save a few euros. The thing is, we don’t have mains water and rely on two large rainwater cisterns under our terrace. In the summer we get them topped up by tanker and there is usually a period in October when you’re not sure whether to order another tanker or wait for the rain to come. This year, I hung on and hung on, looking at the sky and dipping the tanks every couple of days with an old poker on the end of a bit of rope. Each time the poker hit the water it made an increasingly echoey “plink” and the last time it hit the bottom of the tank before it was fully submerged. Even the tiny Gecko that lives in that cistern seemed concerned, flitting too and fro and freezing every few seconds to fix ...

Every Friday morning when I am home I go to Locorotondo market. Usually I go on my old motorbike with a plastic crate bungeed to the pillion behind my big topbox. This means I can park close to the action while having lots of space to carry my shopping. At the core of the market are the fruit and vegetable stalls, which are fringed with refrigerated vans selling fresh meat, fish, cheese and charcuterie. There are also a few specialists offering rice, pulses, flour, olives and spices. On a couple of streets which run from the market to the town centre there are vendors of clothes, shoes and general tat. One area is devoted to second hand clothes where you have to jostle with big-boned local women to find a bargain. About half the female population of our area go to market, plus a few blokes and a few tourists. I guess that, like me, most of the tourists were brought up in a supermarket culture and that many find the market a frustrating experience – few of the stallholders spe...

This week we helped Erminia and her family harvest their grapes. This is one of the milestones of the rural year marking the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. The family has a small vineyard and we have helped with the harvest ever since we first arrived here six years ago. In the first year we had only just moved in and it felt like a great honour to be invited. Back then the event was overseen by Old Paolo, Erminia’s husband. He died two years ago and since then the responsibility of deciding when the grapes will be brought in has fallen to Young Paolo, his grandson, who lives next door to Erminia with his wife Elizabet and baby Domenica. The actual harvesting is the work of a morning for ten or twelve of us, armed with secateurs and plastic bins. The day was overcast but warm. Fortunately there has not yet been too much autumn rain and the ground was dry. The grapes are small, white and sweet and some had already begun to dry out or go mouldy, but all but th...

I come to this place several times a week to go running or to walk Milly. On each occasion I try to spend a few moments taking in the scene and the weather. Every day something is different. On some days the sky is so blue and the sea so serene that you can make out trails in the sea where the faintest puff of wind has disturbed the glassy sheen of the water. On other days the sky is full of racing clouds and my face is blasted by a gale roaring down the Adriatic from far away Venice. This wind is called the “bora” and it sends with it big white capped waves that can be spotted even from this ridge several miles from the coast. If you half close your eyes it is easy to go back in time and imagine this vista over a thousand years ago. Not much has changed, maybe some of the big olive trees down on the coastal plain were little bushes then. The Roman road running through the centre of the plain had already been built as had the little towns clustered long it which still ret...

We returned home to Puglia this week after a fortnight in the UK. We had no plans for the last couple of days of our stay and so we decided to head for Greenwich in South London. This was a homing instinct. Before we left the UK we had a house there in which we had been happy. We stayed in a pub in the middle of Greenwich and on our first morning I ran through Greenwich Park and across Blackheath to look at our old home, "the Lodgehouse". Here is a picture I took of it before we left the UK in 2002. Later I visited it again with Sue, who was keen to poke around outside and peer in the windows while I hovered nervously, not wanting the owners to see us. Over dinner that evening we agreed that it had been good to look up our old haunts and that most of our memories of "the Lodgehouse" were good ones. It looks quite grand, but is in fact ludicrously small, as would be clear if there were a person in the photo to give a sense of scale. Nonetheless we have good re...

This is me and my Dad last week. Sue looked at the two of us and felt she had to take the picture. We were on a two week trip to the UK to see friends and family. Inevitably we spent a couple of days with Dad in Lincoln. He doesn't like going out much these days, but this time he jumped at my suggestion of going for a drive. He decided he wanted to go to a little seaside resort on the Lincolnshire coast. It was a place he had lived for a few years not long after he retired where he used to fish from the beach almost every day, listening to the roar of the North Sea crashing onto the shingle. He has always loved the sea. Looking at the picture now it encapsulates for me an ironic reversal of roles: when I was young my Dad would drag me out of bed to go for a run with him. I was fat and unfit and I hated those runs, my Dad charging ahead, exhorting me to keep going and not to be "a quitter." Dad has always relied a great deal on physical fitness to feel good about...

It's getting towards the end of August and our land is looking parched and tired. When I walk around to inspect the olive trees, dry and brittle weeds snap under my feet and a fine brown dust works its way into my sandals, making my feet itchy. But while everything else wilts under the flaring August sun, our fig trees turn into fruit producing machines. Had I the energy I could drag a bucket of figs back to the house every morning. Six years ago I don't think I'd ever eaten a fresh fig. Now we have ten trees of different varieties and they are like old friends. Some produce an early crop in June, some don't. Most bear green figs but some have a rich dark purple fruit. Some make fat moist figs and others smaller intensely sweet ones. I usually wander around the trees in the morning picking and eating the sun-warmed fruit for breakfast. I break open the fig with my fingers and inspect how moist it is before popping it into my mouth and chewing slowly on the sw...

We finally got it together to go to the beach a couple of days ago. We live on a limestone plateau about one thousand feet above sea level, but it's only a twenty minute drive to the Adriatic. Most days I run or walk along the edge of the plateau and look down across the coastal plain to the sea. In the Winter the sea is often wild and steely grey, with a white fringe at the shoreline as it roars onto the beaches of the deserted little towns and holiday resorts. But in August it is nearly always calm and azure blue, blending at the horizon with an equally blue, equally serene sky. You can practically feel it calling you, "come on down, I am cool, come and lie on the beach next to me, come and jump in." But, it takes a lot to overcome the torpor that descends in August. There is the car to pack, stuff to find, traffic to be negotiated. It all seems too much. We went to our favorite spot, a little resort which has grown up around an old Watch Tower. We rented two s...

It's that time of year when all self-respecting Italian peasants must make tomato sauce. Not the thick acidic stuff that people squeeze onto hamburgers, but the simple tomato pulp or "passata" that is the basis for so many Italian pasta sauces and stews. In the photo Erminia is preparing her boiler, which is sited about ten meters from my bedroom window. In late July and early August there is a fire burning in this thing from about six in the morning, filling our house with the smell of woodsmoke. Erminia is not too fussy about the fuel she uses and this year happily broke up and consigned to the flames an old melamine chest of drawers, which made a thick black sooty mark up the side of her whitewashed kitchen wall and left our house reeking for days of burned plastic. When I went round to investigate, Erminia was crouched over the boiler as black and sweaty as the Chief Stoker on a steamship. "Is it making a smell?" She asked, innocently. "No, it...

Returning from a cycle ride this morning I surprised our neighbor Erminia as she walked up our drive. "Docco!" She exclaimed with a broad smile. For Erminia my English name "Doug", ending as it does in a consonant, is profoundly unsatisfying and so I have been "Docco" practically from the moment we met six years ago. Suddenly our dog Milly trots out of the house barking hysterically whilst wagging her tail - her normal reaction to Erminia. This in turns brings Sue onto the terrace fresh from the shower with towels draped around her head and body. "Ciao Erminia" she cries, "how are you?" Erminia stumps her way up the drive with her old walking stick, falls onto a bench and gives her standard reply - "tired!" Erminia is in her eighties and has lived in our little hamlet since she got married more than sixty years ago. Her husband Paolo died a couple of years back, but she is the matriarch of a large family who all live ne...

Sue took this picture last night at a beer festival. A local folk group is playing a highly amplified Pizzica - a traditional dance of Puglia. The band have attitude and perform with a tight, intense rhythm. The dancers are a mix of locals and tourists and mostly they bounce up and down to the insistent beat in a variety of styles. The couple in the foreground are different. They give the impression of having come here solely to dance the Pizzica and to have been dancing it all their lives. Their steps are precise and they are wholly focused on each other and the music. Sometimes their faces nearly touch and their arms intertwine, but they never actually make physical contact. Some other people in the crowd have noticed the nature of their dance and are watching or taking pictures, but the couple are oblivious. They are serving the dance not the spectators. They seem to be tapping into the ancient and ecstatic roots of the Pizzica. This is, at least, the impression they creat...

That's me on the left in 2005. The picture below is me now, with Sue and our neighbour baby Domenica at her baptism party. The new shape is the product of a mysterious wasting disease called "dieting". I can tell that many people who last saw me fat and then see me thin, don't recognise me. Sometimes I see on peoples' faces that puzzled look that says "I'm sure I know this person, but who are they?" But there are other people who don't notice the weight loss at all. Perhaps these are people that see my personality rather than my superficial shape. Or maybe they just register other humans by a few tiny face details which don't change much with weight loss. The attitude of people to my physical shape is influenced by how long they have known me. To a person I have never met before I am a middle-aged man with an unremarkable build. Whereas to people that have known me for a longer time I think I am often seen as an overweight person who ...

Today I am fifty five years old. I got up early, put on my running kit and drove out to the Ridge. The weather was like in this picture, except I didn't take Milly today. I ran fifteen kilometers. It took me eighty six minutes, a personal best by nearly a minute. There was a cool breeze when I began, but by the time I was finished the Sun was high and the temperature was in the middle thirties. I finished with a sprint to the car, my fist in the air shouting "yes!" As I stretched my tired legs the Sun made the sweat on my arms glisten and the breeze began to cool me again. When I get home Sue has tied balloons to our gate. Our builders are working on our new outside kitchen and all three wish me "happy birthday". I go inside and there are three presents on the table. I greet Sue, shower, change and boot up my laptop. I enter my time on a spreadsheet and note that the World record for a man of my age to run fifteen kilometers is 56% of the time I ran t...

My first post to my first blog. Sat at my laptop in my bedroom, the shutters closed to keep out the Sun. Fifty five and still not sure what I want to be when I grow up. I feel like one of an infinite number of monkeys, tap, tap, tapping away. Actually in my case the tapping is very intermittent as I am unsure of my purpose. The photo by the way was taken in Napoli. Sue is at the other end of the house surfing the internet. Milly is no doubt curled up on the tiles in a quiet corner of a quiet room trying not to move. This must be very difficult when all your instincts are telling you to bark at every strange noise and every plaintive yap from the half-rat half-dog that lives up the road. July and August are our dog days too. Neither of us are working at the moment and there is not much to do on our acre of land at the height of the Summer when the olive trees go into stasis and most of the weeds shrivel up and die. It is a time for trips to the beach and partying with friends. ...