We went to Umbria last weekend to see our good friends Carole and Kevin.  Summer has arrived with a vengeance in the South and it was a hot drive north up the motorway that runs along the Adriatic coast.  Finally we turned left and wound our way up into the Appenines, to the small hill town of Nocera Umbra in the mountainous heartland of Italy.  We stayed in an apartment in an old farmhouse outside the town and this was the view from our window. Carole and Kevin have recently returned to their town house here after an absence of fourteen years.  They bought the place in the late 80s and then were forced out when a series of earthquakes in September 1997 made most of the old town centre uninhabitable.  Now they are the first people to move back to their street, surrounded by scaffolding and building work and a network of improvised water pipes and electricity cables. The restoration of Nocera Umbra following the quakes is a very Italian story of graft and ine...

Funny how the mind works. It was hot and sunny when I set off for my run this morning. On the way back, sweat dripping off my forehead, my MP3 player ran out of podcasts and flipped on to John Martyn's album "Grace and Danger". Suddenly I was back in Doha where I first heard it in April 2009. He recorded the album in 1980 as a way of dealing with the break up of his marriage. It was so raw that Island Records didn't want to release it. It was the album I should have listened to when my marriage broke up in 1989. I had decided to walk from Sue's apartment to the "Oasis" leisure club in the height of the midday sun. I took my MP3 player and selected "Grace and Danger", which I had just downloaded, to keep me company. I was well covered up, but even so I could feel the odd patch of exposed skin stinging with the intensity of the sun's rays. During my hour or so out on the streets I was the only person I saw actually walking. By the ...

The seasons in Puglia are incredibly distinct and when the Summer arrives it's like God, or Silvio Berlusconi, has flipped a switch. The switch got flipped this week, sending the temperatures above 30 centigrade and making us realise that olive pruning can be postponed no longer. Actually Erminia has been dropping hints for weeks. Until three years ago her husband, old Paolo, would come over to supervise. This involved me holding the ladder while he wobbled at the top of it, pruning, swigging wine and farting by turns or (infinitely preferable) me at the top of the ladder while Paolo hollered instructions and poked me with a long stick from below - "taglia! (cut) "lascia!" (leave). The old bugger's been dead a while now, but those words still ring in my ears while I am pruning. Now we are left to our own devices as Erminia's arthritic hips means she no longer ventures far into our fields either. Every part of the Mediterranean has its own pruning techniq...