As we enter the last week in August I can feel the summer slip away like sand through the fingers.  Feragosto has come and gone and on Sunday our neighbours returned to their apartment in Bari after three weeks in the country.  Erminia refers to them dismissively as "u barese", the people from Bari, foreigners. Yesterday evening she stumped round, plastic bucket in hand, intent on collecting figs from the Bari people's neglected trees.  There's this one tree that has fruit that's especially good for drying she tells me.  I remark that I can see she has lost weight.  Actually she looks fitter and seems more mobile.  "Yes" she says with a frown, "I don't feel like eating anything.  I don't like this heat, it's bad and my brain is tired.  Know what I had to eat last night?  Bread and figs!"  Then she said "when I feel like this I used to go round to see Yanni."  Another frown as she shrugs petulantly. Suddenly, I feel v...

Our friend Rosemary came to visit last week so I've been doing the tourist rounds, finishing yesterday with a trip to Matera, the ancient town in Basilicata often used as a set for biblical epics because of its resemblance to old Jerusalem we are told.  It is quite a sight, a vast collection of medieval stone houses carved into a bowl of rock and criss-crossed with alleys and stairs.  It does look like my idea of the Holy Land, especially in August, as the surrounding country is empty, dry and dusty, the houses are made of sandstone and the Sun is pitylessly hot. Actually I was reluctant to go, I think because the last time I visited, several years back, I was feeling very depressed and so the place is associated for me with bad thoughts.  In the end I was glad we went, it is very beautiful, Rosemary loved it and I amused myself taking pictures of old doors. I waved Rosemary goodbye at Bari Airport earlier today, so now I'm back on my own in our little corner of...

I've been meaning to buy a smartphone for years and finally got myself a second hand iphone on e-bay when I was in the UK a few weeks ago.  Apart from anything else I was curious to see why so many owners seem to find them more interesting than real life.  I'm proud of the fact that it's second hand, it makes me feel less of a victim of consumerism knowing I picked it up at about a third of the price of a new one and without having to enter into a hire purchase agreement thinly disguised as a mobile 'phone contract. Four weeks later I'm attached to it like a baby to its mother's teet.  I use it for my shopping lists and I'm downloading an app a day to regulate my diet, provide me with a fitness programme and all manner of other useful things that I had no idea I couldn't do without.  I even take it running so it can tell me where I've been and how many calories I burned.  At night I go to bed with it playing me to sleep with BBC Radio 4. Now ...

Lying on the couch last night watching TV I was alarmed to see a figure flit across the terrace and rushed out to investigate to find Elisabet had popped round from next door to invite me to Mimingo's sixty second birthday party.  I had just eaten but thought "what the hell" I should be a good neighbour and look in. It was, as ever, an enjoyable and entirely undemanding evening.  I played hide and seek with the little ones, Domenica and Leandra, then sat down with the family and a few friends to eat and drink some home-made wine.  Mimingo's son Georgio showed me his growing collection of tatoos and everyone asked after Sue.  To be honest much of the animated conversation was in local dialect and entirely incomprehensible.  But I'm used to letting words wash over me and glean what meaning I can whilst nodding and smiling sagely. Erminia sat quietly on the sofa for most of the evening, preoccupied I suspect with the fierce pain in her arthritic hip, but ...

I visited our old friends Carole and Kevin in Nocera Umbra last weekend.  There must be hundreds of such hill towns in Italy that would not be out of place nestled in the background landscape of the Mona Lisa.  Their street plans are all similar, spiraling around a strategic hill like hunkered down snails, dark, introvert and defensive. This one got a nasty shake in an earthquake in 1997 and is still getting itself back together.  A massive renovation is now finally creeping towards completion and wandering round the pristine but largely empty streets the place seemed like a symbol for Italy as a whole.  There is so much beauty here and history mixed up with so much ugliness.  A lot of the town has been beautifully restored, but there is plenty of jerry building and incompetence as well, so that after fourteen years there is still no clear end in sight and only a fraction of the former inhabitants have moved back despite the injection of millions of euros of ...

A few days ago I was in the check in queue at Heathrow with Sue for a flight to Kuala Lumpur.  It was good to see so many Malaysians in all their different shapes, styles and sizes, from bald jowly Chinese taxi drivers to slim and elegant Malay ladies with their close fitting baju kabayas.  Also slightly unnerving to be waiting for a flight with an "MH" prefix after the mysterious disappearance of MH 370.  After half an hour of shuffling along I kissed Sue goodbye and left her to her journey, which will end in Miri in Borneo, where she has a year long contract with the British Council. Sue only had a couple of weeks notice of the job and so it has yet again been a rush to pack and organise our lives.  This time I will remain based in Europe, mainly so that we don't have the headache of getting our house out of mothballs on our return for the second time in as many years.  Last week was spent travelling between Uxbridge and Lincoln seeing our parents....

Dear Ellis, I'm writing this for you, in case years from now you type your name into a search engine, assuming that search engines and the internet are still around  and that the pages of this blog will have survived on a server somewhere. My name is Doug and I conducted the ceremony on 12th April 2014 when your mum and dad gave you your name.  It was my first ceremony.  That's me in the picture below holding my script for the service in the gardens of the Castello di Semivicoli while we were all waiting to go into the little chapel where the naming took place. Your mum asked me to conduct the service because she knew me and that I'd trained as a humanist celebrant.  Actually I've only trained to carry out funerals and yours was my first service of any sort.  I hope to go on to do lots more, but who knows.  Humanists don't believe in a god or an afterlife, but they do believe in humankind and that we are all responsible for living in harmony and mak...