Sue's dental problems put our planned trip to India for December and January on hold and on 20th December I picked her up from Stansted with the intention of spending Christmas and the New Year in Newark. Just before she arrived I damaged my right knee crawling around the bathroom doing tiling and pipework and we ended up a couple of convalescents, with me hobbling along and Sue often in intense pain from her dental work.  This got so bad that just after Christmas she had to go to a dentist who prescribed her antibiotics to deal with an infection which had flared up. Notwithstanding our health problems we had a remarkably good time chilling out watching TV, going shopping and doing local walks.  On Christmas Day we went for a walk along the River Trent and got chatting to an older man who knew a lot about local history and whose conversation seemed to turn worryingly often to anecdotes about suicide.  Maybe we provided him with a welcome distraction.  He als...

I flew back to Stansted on Saturday night and got the courtesy bus to the Holiday Inn where I crashed for the night. Next morning, lacking the £3 change for the bus ride, I decided to walk back to the airport railway station, just over a mile away. It's not a route designed for pedestrians and I had to edge my way along the side of crash barriers and frost-encrusted embankments navigating by the airport conning tower. I was in a funny mood.  I'd started the day watching Boris Johnson being interviewed by Andrew Marr.  The whole thing had a surreal air, a lop-sided and articulate Marr asking intelligent questions of what looked like a badly-stuffed teddy bear spouting intellectual sounding nonsense interspersed with a constantly repeated tagline - "sturm and drang ... take back control ... blah, blah, blah ... take back control ...".  The one question that I was dying for Andrew Marr to ask was "why do you keep repeating 'take back control'?  Are y...

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 Er...

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 ba...

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. Objec...

I've bought a camera to replace the one I left on the train several weeks back.  It's a sophisticated Sony that I got after hours of research on Ebay and is a perfect match for the lenses and accessories left over from the old one.  It has a "panorama" feature, which I used to take this picture of Dobson's Quay, the neighbouring pizzeria and the River Trent. The autumn colours here are amazing and after my morning run I went out with my camera to capture them.  The landscape is covered with these fabulous dead leaves picking out the trees in gold and giving them golden shadows. Then I walked to the market and found there's a stall there selling second hand camera equipment and I bought an old Minolta 50mm prime lens from this man (I used the lens which I was testing) for a mere £30.  It's called a "prime" as it has a fixed focal length, i.e. you can't zoom it, which makes it simple and fast to focus and 50mm is the "classic...

I arrived in the UK last Tuesday on the latest of my bouncings between Locorotondo and Newark.  Ostensibly I'm here to do a wedding and go to the BHA Celebrant's Conference.  The wedding was yesterday in a pub in Lincoln and was lovely and the Conference is next weekend.  I have a few meetings in between.  Actually, I feel sad to be here.  Sue has been having very painful dental work, which from her perspective feels like it's been going on forever and has put her life on hold with no immediate prospect of it finishing and I want to be at home in Italy with her.  We were planning to go to India for a couple of months in December and January, but this may have to be delayed or postponed. Although I have a fair bit to do I feel strangely at a loose end, waiting for things to happen and stuff to arrive.  I feel I should be phoning friends, but something in me keeps putting this off until tomorrow.  It's the same with this blog.  Ever since dad...

I decided it was time to take the reference to my dad's memorial service off the home page of my blog.  Instead, I've put the text of the ceremony, plus a few pictures, into a blog post dated 14th March 2015, the date of the memorial. As I was doing it I got to thinking that this was yet another stage in moving on from his death and that by consigning the text to the back pages of my blog I was conducting a kind of burial.  There is such a vast amount of stuff on the world wide web now that most of it is effectively buried, because the population of readers is so small compared to the volume of reading material. I think this point is often lost in the debate about how we live in a surveillance society.  There may be a CCTV camera on practically every street corner in the UK, but if there is no one monitoring them except maybe a bored and over-worked security guard nodding off in a control room, then what does it matter?  I suppose the answer to that is it depen...

Last Sunday Sue booked us on a guided walk among the olive trees near Ostuni, starting near the sixteenth century Masseria D'Agnano (opposite).  Discretely beautiful and in a fabulous location on the edge of the Murghe, it's being renovated.  The perfect hideaway for a Russian billionaire perhaps, or for me if I had the money. Our guide was a young local man who is a member of  a group devoted to the preservation of the ancient olive groves of the coastal plain, some of which he confirmed are thousands of years old.  Looking out over the trees below, he came up with the interesting insight that these were the oilfields of the Roman Empire, oil which was prized not primarily for cooking, but for keeping Rome lit at night. Later he took us to this cave, which his group had cleared and where everyone took this shot.  I tried to resist but sometimes you just have to add to your collection of pictures framed by cavemouths and the view was great, looking out...

It's my last chance to write a blog post in August.  It's been a busy old month, dominated by hot but changeable weather, with strong winds wooshing through our pine tree and making doors bang and curtains fly in an unsettling manner.  The last couple of days have by contrast been hot and still like August in Puglia should be. Sue's sister Julie and her daughters Grace and Alice and son Joe with girlfriend Rachel came in late July and left on 3rd August.  While they were here we celebrated mine, Sue and Mimingo's birthdays along with the Convertini family with a barbecue on our terrace.  Towards the end of their stay there was the added excitement of Rachel discovering she'd lost her passport on the outward journey, resulting in her having to get a coach to Rome to get emergency papers from the British Consulate. While they were here we all got a lot of entertainment from the antics of two kittens who had been born somewhere near our terrace sometime in June....

After my Saturday run Sue and I got the train to Brighton and met up with Keith's sister Brenda and Jane, Alison and Graham, her old colleagues from Hargrave Park, where Sue first met Keith.  During brunch Brenda gave us each a small pot of Keith's ashes to do with as we wished and confirmed her intention to scatter a larger pot on the beach, Brighton being one of his favourite haunts. After brunch we wandered around the Lanes and Sue and I reminded ourselves why we like Brighton so much - a slightly louche London-on-sea, pretentious but able to take the piss out of itself and home, bless it, of Britain's first green MP.  It doesn't deserve to be stuck in the UK really, it should have itself towed into the middle of the English Channel and begin a new life as a cool version of Jersey.  I bought a pair of Doc Martins with part of Uccello's the Battle of San Romano printed on them, which seemed the right thing to do.  Then we made our way to the seafront, scrunchi...

Sue came over from Italy last weekend for a get-together in Brighton in memory of our friend Keith Ramptahal.  We stayed in Littlehampton in a tired B&B and on Saturday I went for a run along the coast to Angmering-on-sea. It was a very English scene on which to reflect about "Brexit" and this very peculiar little country that I come from.  There was a strong breeze behind me as I ran past neat semi-detached houses, across meadowlands and into secluded private housing estates.  Lots of tidy white people were walking their dogs plus the odd man in a cheap tracksuit nursing a can of strong cider. The return run was hard work in the face of the wind and I began to resent it as I plodded on with a forward lean.  Bloody wind, bloody Littlehampton, bloody country, bloody brexit.

On EU referendum day I had my first funeral at Boston Crematorium, the English heartland of Brexit, with a higher percentage of people who want Britain out of the EU than anywhere else in the country.  It was a damp, grey morning as I drove from Newark across miles of largely empty farmland.  As I pulled into the car park of a large Asda, the Boston Stump loomed out of the mist.  Driving on through the town I saw rows of neat terraced houses interspersed with Eastern European food stores. The crem. is a grim fifties edifice in some well-kept parkland.  I was shown into the Vestry and later given a quick tour of the chapel and shown the buttons for changing the music and closing the curtains.  I drove back to Newark at lunchtime, and in the afternoon picked up my motorbike from the garage and had a nice chat with the garage owner about bikes and touring and double-checking the bill he even found a mistake and knocked a few quid off.  Then I went to the P...

Sat on plane from Brindisi to Stansted, bored and tired.  Somewhere below through the clouds is a flat bit of France or Germany.  I'm only over for three odd weeks during which I have a funeral, a memorial and a wedding.  Also in two weeks I'm meeting Sue at Stansted so we can go together to a kind of memorial meet up in Brighton for our old friend Keith. Oh and there's the UK referendum on EU membership.  Reading the Guardian the chattering classes are suddenly in a panic as the polls swing towards Brexit from a comfortable remain lead a few weeks ago.  I find all this scary and disorientating.  I had complacently assumed that as the deadline loomed people's fear of change would widen the gap in favour of remain and this may still prove to be the case.  But I'm realising increasingly that there are a lot of angry and dispossessed people out there who pin their anger on immigration and see Brexit as some kind of solution. My reaction to all ...

I took this photo last week lying on our bed in the afternoon in a lovely little hotel in the centre of Peschici, a small port and resort on the tip of the Gargano peninsula in the north of Puglia. Since I got back to Puglia in early May we've been working hard getting our house and land ready for the summer, so we took a break for a few days to relax and recharge our batteries. It's only our second time in the Gargano, the first time being a day trip with Old Paolo and Erminia to St Giovani Rotondo, the centre of the Padre Pio industry not long after we bought the house in 2004. Although further north than our home it actually feels more remote, because it's far from the main autoroutes and regional airports. At the centre of the peninsula is the Foresta Umbra, an ancient woodland of oak, beech and pine to which wolves were reintroduced a few years ago.  We took a stroll in it for a couple of hours, enjoying the shade and the peace and feeling strangely reminde...

It's been a couple of months since we bought our apartment in Newark and I'm beginning to get a handle on the place.  From the windows of our apartment there's a good view of the main town-centre car park next to a bridge over the river Trent.  It's packed during the day and empties out completely after the bars and restaurants have closed around 11pm.  Now sunnier weather has arrived it's become a popular spot for bikers to come for a drink at the pub/barge moored next to the carpark.  I guess many of them are from the nearby city of Nottingham and they make me feel at home here. Also from our windows we can see the massive spire of the church of St Mary Magdalene which was finished in 1350 and is a landmark for miles around.  It's strange to think it's been there for nearly eight hundred years and sometimes one can hear, that most English of sounds, the pealing of church bells, crashing out from its bell chamber. Strange as well to think that at the ...

It's more than six months since I last wrote up my blog. I've thought a lot about why I stopped and it's definitely connected to dad's death and my leaving of my father's house, physically and emotionally.  At one level I never wanted dad to read my blog, but in another way it actually was for him.  I was accounting for my actions to my parents, like I'd done throughout my life.  Do we all do this or am I queer?  An issue I've come to reflect on in a more general sense since dad died. I shall tell the story of the last few months in pictures. In September 2015 I moved from dad's bungalow to temporary digs in Lincoln with Harry and Zack and their delightful dog Oscar, with whom I enjoyed many excellent runs along the banks of the River Witham. In November Sue finished her contract in Borneo and returned to Puglia, where after a gap of some years we finally did our olive harvest together again.  Also that month I completed a Humanist weddings c...