Life seems on hold as I wait for news from Sue about her dad.  When I awoke this morning I was struck by the profound quiet of Contrada Papariello, punctuated by the very occasional car and, at this time of the year, the odd shotgun going off.  It's been a pleasant day, presided over by a watery sun and this afternoon I set off on my bicycle for a ride along the Acquadotto. The Acquadotto Pugliese is a civil engineering marvel which transports fresh water from Campania on the other side of the Apennines all the way to the far south of Puglia.  It was begun at the beginning of the twentieth century and took decades to complete.  It's still a lifeline for Puglia's population and agriculture, but over the last few years it's also become an increasingly popular linear park and I frequently run or bicycle some of the more attractive local stretches, especially the section starting from the pumping station at Figazzano, a village a few kilometres away which was also Er...

On Friday evening I took the car to a garage in Locorotondo for four new tyres and was told by the mechanic that it would be ready in "un'oretta".  Like any time estimate in Italy this can mean a lot of things, literally it's "approximately an hour", but in reality it could be anything from a half to three hours. I'd come prepared and left the car to stroll around the town with my camera.  Here's me going for a moody shot reflected in the window of a backstreet house. Locorotondo on a late Autumn evening before the restaurants open is as quiet as the grave and I wandered around the side streets trying to capture some of the lonely and slightly sinister atmosphere, a bit like a deserted fairground, which was appropriate as there was a fairground setting up on the outskirts of town, by the football ground advertising "live animals".  I took my godson Joshi to it once and I can still remember the tense and exhausted demeanour of the ba...

I never tire of this view, out over the coastal plain at the little hamlet of La Tufara, ten minutes down the road from our house.  I come here to run and sometimes just to take the air and to think.  There have been so many dramatic changes in the world these last few months, Brexit, the attempted coup and crackdown in Turkey, the siege of Aleppo and now the prospect of President Donald Trump.  I like to look down there and think this view hasn't changed much in a thousand years or so - the same Roman road, the same villas, towns and olive groves.  Sure, it's also seen a lot of change, Hannibal came this way terrorising the locals, then the Normans, followed by Arab raiding parties, then the Germans who were chased up and out of the peninsula by the British and Americans.  Even just a few years ago US fighter jets screamed over this ridge to bomb Serbia not far away cross the Adriatic and yet still the olives get picked each year and milled into oil. Objec...

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...