I spent three days this week doing something familiar to any foreigner in a strange land – driving around aimlessly looking for stuff. I needed to find a metal worker to make a door for our pizza oven and to track down a source of lime mortar and limewash. My approach was to zig zag around the complex network of winding country lanes of the Val d’Itrea looking for likely workshops and lime kilns. On my second day I finally tracked down the home in the middle of nowhere of the company that made the steel shutters for our doors and windows a few years ago. The company sign looked very faded as I drove off the metalled lane onto the dirt track up to the workshops. As I got closer I noticed a couple of Chinese blokes smoking shiftily in the yard and when I got out of my car and walked into the building I was confronted by two or three banks of Chinese women slaving over sewing machines. “Is Cosimo here?” I said to someone who looked like a supervisor. All I got was a blank and mildly...

While Sue is away working I mostly lead a solitary life. This is fine by me. For some years now I have lived my life in cycles of relative indolence and solitude followed by periods of more intensive activity and social interaction. When I am working or living among a group or have guests to entertain I spend much of my time having real or imaginary conversations with those around me, so that my life becomes a process of rehearsal and performance. I’m pretty good at it, but it takes effort. On my own the conversations go away and I am more free to be myself, whatever that is. During these periods of solitude I get the occasional invitation and because of their rarity they loom large. Last weekend I was invited to a fiftieth birthday party in Martina Franca, a nearby town. Martina is an elegant baroque little place full of narrow limewashed alleys. It is packed with charming and expensively furnished apartments and it was in one such as this that the party was held. Climbing th...

One of the great things about living in Southern Italy is that no matter how grey and horrible the weather is, you know that there is always a bright sunny day not far around the corner. A day where, when you can find a sheltered spot, the sun will warm your bones even in January. The sun has been shining for a few days now and so today the land was dry enough to be rotovated for the first time this year. Timing when to get the rotovator out down here is a real art. If the land is too wet the machine just gets clogged up and you stagger around under the weight of mud on your boots. Leave it too late and the grass will grow too long and you have to chop it down with a brush cutter first, which is more than double the work load. This time I got it just right and my faithful diesel rotovator cut its way through the grassy clumps like a paddle steamer, leaving the earth looking like moist, freshly ground coffee, under the bright blue winter sky. Looking over our patch of land as the s...

I hate January. Our house is a thousand feet above sea level, so even though we are in the South of Italy it is cold and often damp at this time of the year. Right now it is hard to believe that in July and August the land will be dry and baked and the temperature on our terrace will often climb above forty five centigrade. Many local people have a house in the country and an apartment in the town, to which they retreat in the winter. When Sue and I first came here we thought this an eccentric and old-fashioned lifestyle, but the more winters we have spent here the more I can understand why people do it. Apartments are easy to keep warm, there is very little to do on the land at this time of year and if you get bad frost or snow the roads are hazardous as practically no gritting or snow clearance is done. Being of peasant stock Erminia has no apartment in town and she goes into virtual hibernation. The only source of heat she has in her old stone house is the hearth on which she s...

After Milly was put down I felt a really strong need to see Sue, so I booked a flight to Madrid and agreed to meet her here this weekend. She got the train up from Cordoba and we spent a really good couple of days together before I saw her off from Atocha station a few hours ago. I am now back in our hotel room getting ready to return to Italy tomorrow. We’ve seen a lot of art and done a lot of shopping. We’ve also wandered around the flea market and had paella under a strong winter sun in the Plaza Mayor. It’s been fun, despite feeling sad about the death of our little dog. We both understand that if the death of a pet is the worst thing you have to face and you can afford to have a weekend holiday in a beautiful city to talk about it, then actually you can count yourself very, very lucky. Sue has never been here before, but for me this is the third time. I first came in 1987 with my ex-wife Rosemary when the memory of Franco’s dictatorship was still strong and fast jets flew ...

Well I didn't expect my first post of 2011 to be about the death of our little dog Milly. She'd had a troublesome tooth for ages, but on Saturday she started having fits and when our vet investigated on Monday he found a large tumour in her mouth and under her eye and so that was that. She was put to sleep peacefully with me stroking her pelt and now she is buried on our land not far from Chiaro the cat. She turned up on our doorstep in 2 005 covered in ticks and decided that we would be her new owners and we didn't argue. She was about two or three then. I'd never owned a dog before and for the first couple of years she was much more Sue's dog than mine. But as I worked to shake off depression, lose weight and get fit, Milly became my walking and then running companion, braving distances of up to 15 kilometres without complaint and always staying the course. She taught m e a lot about loyalty and affection. She would have laid down her life without question t...

Sue and I met in Cologne for Christmas to be with our friends Thomas and Nicole and their son (and my godson) Joshi. We have been spending Christmas with them on and off since we first met in 2002, when we were cruising through France having given up our jobs and sold our house in the UK. It was, as ever, a traditional German affair with goose and red cabbage and a tree with real candles. The Christmas atmosphere was accentuated by very cold weather and frozen snow carpeting the landscape. Getting there was hard work, especially for Sue, who worked until the 22nd and then set off from Cordoba the next day, catching a train to Malaga and then a plane to Germany, arriving at 3.00am on the 24th after a gruelling bus ride from the airport. I had an easier time travelling from Italy, but still when I got to my first train station in Cologne I felt like an old and confused man as a ticket machine eat four precious euros in change which I had scraped together to get to the stop nearest t...