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...