I've bought a camera to replace the one I left on the train several weeks back.  It's a sophisticated Sony that I got after hours of research on Ebay and is a perfect match for the lenses and accessories left over from the old one.  It has a "panorama" feature, which I used to take this picture of Dobson's Quay, the neighbouring pizzeria and the River Trent. The autumn colours here are amazing and after my morning run I went out with my camera to capture them.  The landscape is covered with these fabulous dead leaves picking out the trees in gold and giving them golden shadows. Then I walked to the market and found there's a stall there selling second hand camera equipment and I bought an old Minolta 50mm prime lens from this man (I used the lens which I was testing) for a mere £30.  It's called a "prime" as it has a fixed focal length, i.e. you can't zoom it, which makes it simple and fast to focus and 50mm is the "classic...

I arrived in the UK last Tuesday on the latest of my bouncings between Locorotondo and Newark.  Ostensibly I'm here to do a wedding and go to the BHA Celebrant's Conference.  The wedding was yesterday in a pub in Lincoln and was lovely and the Conference is next weekend.  I have a few meetings in between.  Actually, I feel sad to be here.  Sue has been having very painful dental work, which from her perspective feels like it's been going on forever and has put her life on hold with no immediate prospect of it finishing and I want to be at home in Italy with her.  We were planning to go to India for a couple of months in December and January, but this may have to be delayed or postponed. Although I have a fair bit to do I feel strangely at a loose end, waiting for things to happen and stuff to arrive.  I feel I should be phoning friends, but something in me keeps putting this off until tomorrow.  It's the same with this blog.  Ever since dad...

I decided it was time to take the reference to my dad's memorial service off the home page of my blog.  Instead, I've put the text of the ceremony, plus a few pictures, into a blog post dated 14th March 2015, the date of the memorial. As I was doing it I got to thinking that this was yet another stage in moving on from his death and that by consigning the text to the back pages of my blog I was conducting a kind of burial.  There is such a vast amount of stuff on the world wide web now that most of it is effectively buried, because the population of readers is so small compared to the volume of reading material. I think this point is often lost in the debate about how we live in a surveillance society.  There may be a CCTV camera on practically every street corner in the UK, but if there is no one monitoring them except maybe a bored and over-worked security guard nodding off in a control room, then what does it matter?  I suppose the answer to that is it depen...

Last Sunday Sue booked us on a guided walk among the olive trees near Ostuni, starting near the sixteenth century Masseria D'Agnano (opposite).  Discretely beautiful and in a fabulous location on the edge of the Murghe, it's being renovated.  The perfect hideaway for a Russian billionaire perhaps, or for me if I had the money. Our guide was a young local man who is a member of  a group devoted to the preservation of the ancient olive groves of the coastal plain, some of which he confirmed are thousands of years old.  Looking out over the trees below, he came up with the interesting insight that these were the oilfields of the Roman Empire, oil which was prized not primarily for cooking, but for keeping Rome lit at night. Later he took us to this cave, which his group had cleared and where everyone took this shot.  I tried to resist but sometimes you just have to add to your collection of pictures framed by cavemouths and the view was great, looking out...

It's my last chance to write a blog post in August.  It's been a busy old month, dominated by hot but changeable weather, with strong winds wooshing through our pine tree and making doors bang and curtains fly in an unsettling manner.  The last couple of days have by contrast been hot and still like August in Puglia should be. Sue's sister Julie and her daughters Grace and Alice and son Joe with girlfriend Rachel came in late July and left on 3rd August.  While they were here we celebrated mine, Sue and Mimingo's birthdays along with the Convertini family with a barbecue on our terrace.  Towards the end of their stay there was the added excitement of Rachel discovering she'd lost her passport on the outward journey, resulting in her having to get a coach to Rome to get emergency papers from the British Consulate. While they were here we all got a lot of entertainment from the antics of two kittens who had been born somewhere near our terrace sometime in June....

After my Saturday run Sue and I got the train to Brighton and met up with Keith's sister Brenda and Jane, Alison and Graham, her old colleagues from Hargrave Park, where Sue first met Keith.  During brunch Brenda gave us each a small pot of Keith's ashes to do with as we wished and confirmed her intention to scatter a larger pot on the beach, Brighton being one of his favourite haunts. After brunch we wandered around the Lanes and Sue and I reminded ourselves why we like Brighton so much - a slightly louche London-on-sea, pretentious but able to take the piss out of itself and home, bless it, of Britain's first green MP.  It doesn't deserve to be stuck in the UK really, it should have itself towed into the middle of the English Channel and begin a new life as a cool version of Jersey.  I bought a pair of Doc Martins with part of Uccello's the Battle of San Romano printed on them, which seemed the right thing to do.  Then we made our way to the seafront, scrunchi...

Sue came over from Italy last weekend for a get-together in Brighton in memory of our friend Keith Ramptahal.  We stayed in Littlehampton in a tired B&B and on Saturday I went for a run along the coast to Angmering-on-sea. It was a very English scene on which to reflect about "Brexit" and this very peculiar little country that I come from.  There was a strong breeze behind me as I ran past neat semi-detached houses, across meadowlands and into secluded private housing estates.  Lots of tidy white people were walking their dogs plus the odd man in a cheap tracksuit nursing a can of strong cider. The return run was hard work in the face of the wind and I began to resent it as I plodded on with a forward lean.  Bloody wind, bloody Littlehampton, bloody country, bloody brexit.