This week we helped Erminia and her family harvest their grapes. This is one of the milestones of the rural year marking the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. The family has a small vineyard and we have helped with the harvest ever since we first arrived here six years ago. In the first year we had only just moved in and it felt like a great honour to be invited. Back then the event was overseen by Old Paolo, Erminia’s husband. He died two years ago and since then the responsibility of deciding when the grapes will be brought in has fallen to Young Paolo, his grandson, who lives next door to Erminia with his wife Elizabet and baby Domenica. The actual harvesting is the work of a morning for ten or twelve of us, armed with secateurs and plastic bins. The day was overcast but warm. Fortunately there has not yet been too much autumn rain and the ground was dry. The grapes are small, white and sweet and some had already begun to dry out or go mouldy, but all but th...

I come to this place several times a week to go running or to walk Milly. On each occasion I try to spend a few moments taking in the scene and the weather. Every day something is different. On some days the sky is so blue and the sea so serene that you can make out trails in the sea where the faintest puff of wind has disturbed the glassy sheen of the water. On other days the sky is full of racing clouds and my face is blasted by a gale roaring down the Adriatic from far away Venice. This wind is called the “bora” and it sends with it big white capped waves that can be spotted even from this ridge several miles from the coast. If you half close your eyes it is easy to go back in time and imagine this vista over a thousand years ago. Not much has changed, maybe some of the big olive trees down on the coastal plain were little bushes then. The Roman road running through the centre of the plain had already been built as had the little towns clustered long it which still ret...

We returned home to Puglia this week after a fortnight in the UK. We had no plans for the last couple of days of our stay and so we decided to head for Greenwich in South London. This was a homing instinct. Before we left the UK we had a house there in which we had been happy. We stayed in a pub in the middle of Greenwich and on our first morning I ran through Greenwich Park and across Blackheath to look at our old home, "the Lodgehouse". Here is a picture I took of it before we left the UK in 2002. Later I visited it again with Sue, who was keen to poke around outside and peer in the windows while I hovered nervously, not wanting the owners to see us. Over dinner that evening we agreed that it had been good to look up our old haunts and that most of our memories of "the Lodgehouse" were good ones. It looks quite grand, but is in fact ludicrously small, as would be clear if there were a person in the photo to give a sense of scale. Nonetheless we have good re...

This is me and my Dad last week. Sue looked at the two of us and felt she had to take the picture. We were on a two week trip to the UK to see friends and family. Inevitably we spent a couple of days with Dad in Lincoln. He doesn't like going out much these days, but this time he jumped at my suggestion of going for a drive. He decided he wanted to go to a little seaside resort on the Lincolnshire coast. It was a place he had lived for a few years not long after he retired where he used to fish from the beach almost every day, listening to the roar of the North Sea crashing onto the shingle. He has always loved the sea. Looking at the picture now it encapsulates for me an ironic reversal of roles: when I was young my Dad would drag me out of bed to go for a run with him. I was fat and unfit and I hated those runs, my Dad charging ahead, exhorting me to keep going and not to be "a quitter." Dad has always relied a great deal on physical fitness to feel good about...

It's getting towards the end of August and our land is looking parched and tired. When I walk around to inspect the olive trees, dry and brittle weeds snap under my feet and a fine brown dust works its way into my sandals, making my feet itchy. But while everything else wilts under the flaring August sun, our fig trees turn into fruit producing machines. Had I the energy I could drag a bucket of figs back to the house every morning. Six years ago I don't think I'd ever eaten a fresh fig. Now we have ten trees of different varieties and they are like old friends. Some produce an early crop in June, some don't. Most bear green figs but some have a rich dark purple fruit. Some make fat moist figs and others smaller intensely sweet ones. I usually wander around the trees in the morning picking and eating the sun-warmed fruit for breakfast. I break open the fig with my fingers and inspect how moist it is before popping it into my mouth and chewing slowly on the sw...

We finally got it together to go to the beach a couple of days ago. We live on a limestone plateau about one thousand feet above sea level, but it's only a twenty minute drive to the Adriatic. Most days I run or walk along the edge of the plateau and look down across the coastal plain to the sea. In the Winter the sea is often wild and steely grey, with a white fringe at the shoreline as it roars onto the beaches of the deserted little towns and holiday resorts. But in August it is nearly always calm and azure blue, blending at the horizon with an equally blue, equally serene sky. You can practically feel it calling you, "come on down, I am cool, come and lie on the beach next to me, come and jump in." But, it takes a lot to overcome the torpor that descends in August. There is the car to pack, stuff to find, traffic to be negotiated. It all seems too much. We went to our favorite spot, a little resort which has grown up around an old Watch Tower. We rented two s...

It's that time of year when all self-respecting Italian peasants must make tomato sauce. Not the thick acidic stuff that people squeeze onto hamburgers, but the simple tomato pulp or "passata" that is the basis for so many Italian pasta sauces and stews. In the photo Erminia is preparing her boiler, which is sited about ten meters from my bedroom window. In late July and early August there is a fire burning in this thing from about six in the morning, filling our house with the smell of woodsmoke. Erminia is not too fussy about the fuel she uses and this year happily broke up and consigned to the flames an old melamine chest of drawers, which made a thick black sooty mark up the side of her whitewashed kitchen wall and left our house reeking for days of burned plastic. When I went round to investigate, Erminia was crouched over the boiler as black and sweaty as the Chief Stoker on a steamship. "Is it making a smell?" She asked, innocently. "No, it...