We went to Umbria last weekend to see our good friends Carole and Kevin.  Summer has arrived with a vengeance in the South and it was a hot drive north up the motorway that runs along the Adriatic coast.  Finally we turned left and wound our way up into the Appenines, to the small hill town of Nocera Umbra in the mountainous heartland of Italy.  We stayed in an apartment in an old farmhouse outside the town and this was the view from our window. Carole and Kevin have recently returned to their town house here after an absence of fourteen years.  They bought the place in the late 80s and then were forced out when a series of earthquakes in September 1997 made most of the old town centre uninhabitable.  Now they are the first people to move back to their street, surrounded by scaffolding and building work and a network of improvised water pipes and electricity cables. The restoration of Nocera Umbra following the quakes is a very Italian story of graft and ine...

Funny how the mind works. It was hot and sunny when I set off for my run this morning. On the way back, sweat dripping off my forehead, my MP3 player ran out of podcasts and flipped on to John Martyn's album "Grace and Danger". Suddenly I was back in Doha where I first heard it in April 2009. He recorded the album in 1980 as a way of dealing with the break up of his marriage. It was so raw that Island Records didn't want to release it. It was the album I should have listened to when my marriage broke up in 1989. I had decided to walk from Sue's apartment to the "Oasis" leisure club in the height of the midday sun. I took my MP3 player and selected "Grace and Danger", which I had just downloaded, to keep me company. I was well covered up, but even so I could feel the odd patch of exposed skin stinging with the intensity of the sun's rays. During my hour or so out on the streets I was the only person I saw actually walking. By the ...

The seasons in Puglia are incredibly distinct and when the Summer arrives it's like God, or Silvio Berlusconi, has flipped a switch. The switch got flipped this week, sending the temperatures above 30 centigrade and making us realise that olive pruning can be postponed no longer. Actually Erminia has been dropping hints for weeks. Until three years ago her husband, old Paolo, would come over to supervise. This involved me holding the ladder while he wobbled at the top of it, pruning, swigging wine and farting by turns or (infinitely preferable) me at the top of the ladder while Paolo hollered instructions and poked me with a long stick from below - "taglia! (cut) "lascia!" (leave). The old bugger's been dead a while now, but those words still ring in my ears while I am pruning. Now we are left to our own devices as Erminia's arthritic hips means she no longer ventures far into our fields either. Every part of the Mediterranean has its own pruning techniq...

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...