Dad had a fall three weeks ago and couldn’t get back up again. He was on the floor for several hours before Sue his cleaner found him, shocked and hypothermic. It was lucky it was her day to come. Dad went to hospital where he has been ever since, recovering and struggling to regain the use of the hand on which he lay. When you reach a certain age and level of frailty it is often a fall which engenders a crisis and another step into the valley from which none of us return. It’s been a blow to his confidence, but this time it looks like he will be able to return home and stay out of long term care, at least for the time being. I’m going to the UK for a few days to help him settle back into his bungalow. With any luck I will be able to summon up enough love and compassion to stop myself from trying to throttle him after the first half hour.

I got up yesterday morning for my constitutional run and decided to make it a “farewell to Cordoba” tour. The sky was grey and bloated with water and as I crossed a bridge over the Guadalquivir the rain began to pour, making my running shirt stick to my chest. The rain stopped as I ran around the cloisters of the cathedral/mosque, watched by a couple of bored security guards. Later I puffed and sweated through the narrow cobbled streets of the old city and up to the running track in the orange grove, before doubling back to Sue’s apartment via Cordoba’s social housing estate. Like everything else about the City the estate has a “toy” quality, social deprivation on a contained and picturesque scale. The balconies are full of washing, old bicycles and caged songbirds, while amongst the oldish cars a dilapidated horse drawn carriage is parked. Outside the “Hunters Bar” there is a knot of not too threatening drunks in stained open-necked shirts and trainers. Now I am back in Italy ...

Sue and I went to Madinat al-Zahra today. It's the site of a great palace complex from where the muslem rulers of Al Andalus governed the south of Spain. As we wandered the terraces and looked out over the valley of the Guadalquivir I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone seeing the same view more than one thousand years ago. I got no further than feeling the brush of white cotton robes against my skin and half hearing an intoned phrase "there is no conqueror but God ... there is no conqueror but God ..." Something I first heard in my head in 1996 walking around the Alhambra, where my memory tells me it is inscribed over and over again in the decoration, "there is no Conqueror but God." In Arabic I'm sure it has a much more poetic lilt. "Allah" is such a soft and seductive sound by contrast to the gutteral and stoccato "God". Now I am fifty five and I know what half a century feels like, one thousand years does not seem so far a...

I'm back in Cordoba visiting Sue. Among the delights of Sim City is a jogging track which snakes for two kilometres around a small orange grove not far from Sue's school. I visited it almost every day when I was here last and now it's like coming back to an old friend. It' s reminiscent of a snakes and ladders board and at almost any time of the day or night it is dotted with a variety of people, including runners, dog walkers and older folks taking a constitutional stroll. Because the grove is actually quite small the track is packed into it in a series of tight curves and sqwiggles which makes it a peculiarly sociable place. Another runner could be a kilometre ahead of you but still only be fifty metres away as the crow flies. I try not to be too competitive but I still get a sense of triumph as I slowly reel in a fellow runner then overtake them. Similarly I do my best not to feel a sense of defeat as a young or not so young athlete lopes past me as I lumber ...

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...