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...