This is my first time in Sim City. I got here a few days ago after a long drive in the dark from Madrid, finally meeting Sue at the foot of the old Roman bridge in the centre of town at one in the morning, following a series of tired and fractious text messages. Spanish and Italian are close relatives, so although I understand practically nothing of the language it feels familiar at the same time. This feeling of comfort and familiarity is reinforced by the fact that Sue is working here and so has a support network of colleagues. Added to this I now have a lot of experience of being in foreign cultures and so can relax and let it all wash over me, rather than agonise about not understanding things. Looking at the Spanish news North and South Korea are now at war and half of Spain is either flooded or covered in snow or maybe not. Cordoba really is Sim City. It has a broad, meandering river, hills and big hotels. Wide boulevards intersect the City interspersed with ancient and modern br...

Despite being in her middle eighties Erminia still has the enthusiasm of an excitable child when it comes to the olive harvest. “Have you got your oil yet?” she asked me yesterday morning. “No they told me to come back this evening” I replied. It was dark by the time I got to the Mill. It’s a small family affair and at this time of the year they are working flat out and everyone looked tired. There were vehicles of all shapes and sizes parked in the Mill compound and an impatient knot of locals waiting to get their olives weighed. Having already delivered our olives I walked through the throng and into the Mill where you are immediately hit by the powerful odour of fresh olive oil. Inside there are rows of fifty litre stainless steel containers that look like milk churns, each with the owner’s name on it in felt tip or stencil. I could see our two churns had already been filled and weighed so I went to the little office to pay before putting our churns onto a trolley and takin...

The thing I like best about harvesting olives is gathering the olive-laden nets from under the trees. This feels like what I imagine a fishing boat crew experience as they haul in their catch and spill it on the deck. Although you have some idea how much an individual tree has yielded by looking at the carpet of olives on the nets, its only when you heap them together that you really know. Sometimes a quite insignificant tree produces two or three crate loads while a big old brute that you were relying on disappoints. A bit like life I suppose. Erminia started asking me last week when I was planning to harvest the olives. “Next week” I said, “if the weather is OK”. Well the weather was OK, so yesterday I launched myself at our olive grove, armed with our olive harvesting machine – basically a small petrol-driven compressor which powers a pair of vibrating combs on the end of a long aluminium pole. After two days I have gathered four hundred kilos of olives, which I will take to ...

Now the clocks have changed the afternoons are suddenly darker. At four o'clock I realised that I had not yet taken Milly for her walk and that I would need to get a move on if this was to be done before sunset. So we drove out to our favourite spot - the ridge overlooking the coastal plain. When it is not raining I love this time of year. During the summer the land becomes baked and deadened and the intense sunlight bleaches everything. Now the rains have turned the soil a dark chocolate brown from which burst bright green shoots. And the low sun backlights the clouds and accentuates the colours of the dying autumn leaves. When we got to the ridge there was a southerly gale blowing, blasting low clouds over our heads and out towards the Adriatic. All around we could hear the crack of hunter's shotguns and the occasional dog barking. Milly stays close to me, her ears standing up, tense and alert. Down below I can see the lights of the little seaside town of Torre Canne ...

Sue leaves for Spain tomorrow. She has a five-month contract at a school in Cordoba in Andalucía. We’ve both been doing stints away from home since I took a four-month contract in London in 2008. We actually both seem to enjoy this lifestyle, where we are together at home for about half our time, with one of us working away and the other at home for the rest of the time. I plan to stay home for most of the five months, doing work on the house and our land, with perhaps four weeks in Spain, where Sue will rent an apartment. Meanwhile the winter is fast approaching here. A couple of nights ago we had our first cold snap and the evening air is now full of the smell of wood smoke. Most restaurants have given up completely on their outside terraces and have retreated indoors. One still sees the occasional tourist in shorts and sandals, which always makes me smile, as they wander around seemingly unconscious of the fact that they are surrounded by people wearing overcoats and ...

I was having a siesta in my bedroom during one of the recent rainstorms when a telltale “plink, plink” reminded me I hadn’t yet done any maintenance on our roof this year. Like most of the local houses ours has a flat roof made of stone blocks. Every year we need to clean and inspect it and look for cracks. So, for the last week Sue and I have been on our knees crawling over the roof and applying various potions and compounds. Each year we try new and more expensive materials hoping that this will obviate the need for a new roof and each year the roof stays watertight for a few weeks before a new “plink, plink” is heard somewhere or there is a sudden outbreak of mould in an unexpected place, sending us back up to look for leaks. And then the summer comes again and bakes everything dry and we forget there is such a thing as winter and then yet again we are taken by surprise by the autumn rains and so it goes around. Still apart from the pain in my back and in my knees, the...

Since moving to the south of Italy I’ve found myself doing and feeling many unexpected things for a Londoner. For example, waiting anxiously for the autumn rains like Gerard Depardieu in “Jean de Florette”. In my case this is less a matter of life and death and more a desire to save a few euros. The thing is, we don’t have mains water and rely on two large rainwater cisterns under our terrace. In the summer we get them topped up by tanker and there is usually a period in October when you’re not sure whether to order another tanker or wait for the rain to come. This year, I hung on and hung on, looking at the sky and dipping the tanks every couple of days with an old poker on the end of a bit of rope. Each time the poker hit the water it made an increasingly echoey “plink” and the last time it hit the bottom of the tank before it was fully submerged. Even the tiny Gecko that lives in that cistern seemed concerned, flitting too and fro and freezing every few seconds to fix ...