Once a week when I am home I usually take a morning ride to this lighthouse. I have to drop down about 1000 feet off the ridge on which we live, then across the coastal plain to the little resort of Torre Canne. This only takes about half an hour, but it then takes me over an hour to grind my way back up again. During the ride I travel through three different worlds. The limestone plateau called the Murghe, which is a patchwork quilt of little stone houses and small holdings, the plain below, a good five centigrade warmer most of the year and dominated by large estates of majestic olive trees, then the coastal strip, full of camper vans and holiday makers in the Summer season. The climb back is a good antidote to life's petty frustrations such as "will the part I have ordered from the UK to get my motorbike back on the road ever arrive?" I seem to spend a lot of my life waiting for things at the moment, but out on the bike there is just the one hill to climb. From t...

This is my motorbike, gassed up and ready to go to England yesterday morning. I'd been dithering for several days about whether to ride back to the UK for the bike's annual inspection and finally got my act together after Sue and her friend Barbara set off for a weekend in Prague. It was a lovely sunny morning when I set off with the intention of staying in Rimini on Friday evening before tackling the Alps. I took a scenic road to Bari and was tooling along happily when bam, the bike lost all power and glided to halt on the roadside with all the electrics dead. After a desultory attempt to find the problem, with trucks and lorries thundering past within a few inches, I gave it up as a bad job and hitched a lift to the nearest town. I was picked up by the classic Pugliese peasant farmer or "contadino" driving a battered hatchback. "Where are you from then?" "London eh? My son lives in Manchester." "So you've got a place here in Pugli...

Sue's Australian friend Barbara came to stay this week and so we did the sightseeing thing. I'm proud of my adopted home and enjoy showing people around, especially as it allows one to look with fresh eyes at familiar things. Today we went to the "White City" of Ostuni, which sits on the edge of the limestone plateau on which we live, surveying the Adriatic Sea and the coastal plain several hundred feet below. Your man on the left is Saint Oronzo, who stands on a tall column in the town centre. He's the local early Christian martyr and miracle worker credited with saving a nearby town from the plague. Ostuni is a tourist ghetto, but it also has a sleepy southern italian dignity. After wandering around the gift shops we climbed up the hill to the medieval cathedral. Barbara is a catholic and so I guess it had a special resonance for her. I mooched around on my own, playing with my camera, while Sue and Barbara read the guide and peered quizzically at the arte...

Rereading my last post it looks like my attempt to put Dad back in the box of his bungalow. But Dad wouldn’t go back so easily. He said he wanted to return home and he did get discharged there from hospital eventually. But, I wonder if it was what he really wanted or whether he thought it was what he was expected to want. A lot of pressure is put on older people by the caring professions to seek to live an “independent” life. Children as well, I guess, generally want their parents to behave as if they are going to live for ever. The truth is Dad was scared of going home and it was a hard struggle for him when he got there. When you are overweight and have very limited mobility even the floor is a scary place and gravity is your enemy, trying to put you there, unable to get up again, at every opportunity. For a while Dad experimented with simply giving up the fight and on two occasions he got me or his friend Bernie to lower him to the floor, complaining hysterically that his knee...

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...