HOT

High summer has arrived and it's hot, hot, hot here in Puglia - pushing forty centigrade on our terrace at lunchtime.  Too hot to do much during the middle of the day except try to sleep.

For a few days we had a sirocco, the wind out of the south that blows from the deserts of North Africa.  Everyone here hates the sirocco - in the winter it brings humid air that feels muggy and unpleasant and breeds mould and in the summer it's like living in a fan oven, cooking the poor tomatoes and aubergines on the vine and making the lettuces wilt and flop onto the parched earth.  The only defence is to shut all the doors and windows in the middle of the day to stop the heat invading the house.  Then all one can do is lie down next to a fan feeling the sweat congeal on one's skin and look anxiously at the thermometer, hoping is doesn't climb above thirty, when things start to get really unbearable.

But now the sirocco has ceased blowing and conditions are hot, still and dry.  Good weather for the beach or for a cycle expedition, post siesta.  Yesterday I rode to Ostuni - the White City, while most people were still asleep.  Very little was stirring in the countryside except the cicadas.  Even in the late afternoon I could feel my knees burning under a sky bleached almost white by the flaring sun which turned the shadows an intense black.  This is the time of year when the South of Italy is most at home with itself, quiet as the grave, brooding in the sultry atmosphere.  In Italian the South of Italy is called the "mezzogiorno", literally the "midday", where nothing happens or ever can.