Sue and I got back to Puglia on 30th October with a list of jobs to get done before the winter, not the least of which was to harvest our olives.  Last year's harvest was one of the worst on record in this part of Puglia, mainly because the olive fly was especially bad, causing most of the olives to drop in high winds before they could be picked.  We had so few olives we didn't even bother to try. This year is much better for everyone, but due to very hot weather in the summer many of our trees still seem to have lost a lot of their crop and we had a struggle to find enough to make up a 200 kilo load to take to the mill.  In the end after three days of scrabbling around our land in the rain and the mud we loaded our old Fiat Punto with about 250 kilos and three days later returned to the frantoio to collect our stainless steel churn or "bidone" containing thirty odd litres of oil. In a good year and with better pruning and management of our trees we could ha...

We're indoors in our house in Contrada Papariello.  The doors are all shut and the house is in darkness with several fans moving the sluggish air around.  It's nearly midday and outside it's 40c, inside the thermometer sticks stubbornly at 30c, day and night.  Only a break in the weather can bring the temperature down.  The caper plant on our stone steps is thriving however on the odd teaspoon of water Sue feeds it.  It's now flowered, giving the plaster Easter Island figure a floral garland that has turned its tight-lipped expression into almost a grin. Yet again months have gone by since I last wrote in this blog.  I've been busy, but also not inclined to write for reasons I can't pin down. Flitting from the UK to Puglia we've now finished decorating and upgrading the flat in Newark.  Now all we need to do is put some furniture in it.  I've done quite a few baby namings and weddings in the UK and to my surprise I'm in demand in Italy too...

We met Carole and Kevin in about 2005 when we were still in the first flush of our Italian adventure and they were running a holiday letting business.  We've always associated them with Italy and were frequent visitors to their trullo complex in Puglia and later to their townhouse in Nocera Umbra, to which they returned after it had been renovated some thirteen years after the earthquake that rendered it uninhabitable in 1997. Now we all find ourselves back in the UK, at least temporarily, and so we went up to see them in Kevin's old home town of Newcastle.  Sue and I both feel at home with Carole and Kevin, in part perhaps because we have a shared sense of adventure and a willingness to do things rather than just dream about them. Although we met in a new context we quickly settled down into our easy friendship, strolling around Lindisfarne and Newcastle, chatting eating and drinking.  On the Friday night we found a Malaysian restaurant in the City Centre which...

The weekend before last we travelled up to Newcastle to see our old friends Carole and Kevin and found ourselves on an outing to Lindisfarne, the Holy Island.  It's the third time I'd been there and the memories of those earlier visits dogged my footsteps as we strolled around the island on a cold and unsettlingly bright winter day. The first time was in the early eighties with my ex-wife Rosemary for a camping holiday in our brand new little Fiat Panda.  Thinking back to the younger me I could hardly bear the thought that I am the same person.  I was so ignorant of myself and my peculiar preoccupations and Rosemary and I were, well, so young and so naive. The second time was in 1993, en route to the Edinburgh Festival with my friend Rob, his wife Vivian and my girlfriend at the time, Annabel.  I was just getting over divorce and a fucked up rebound relationship and was feeling full of myself, little knowing that within the week one of us would be dead in a...

Part of Sue and my experiment with retirement seems to involve impromptu outings.  Thus having a celebrants meeting near Wakefield Sue decided we should spend the weekend there and promptly booked us into the Holiday Inn Express in the city centre. In the event my meeting was cancelled but on Saturday we drove to Wakefield anyway.  At least I now know why it was never on my bucket list, although it would be worth going back to just for the delightful tapas bar we went to that evening. The highlight of our trip was a visit on Sunday to the National Coal Mining Museum, just outside the city.  It's actually located in an old coal mine and includes a guided tour underground.  This was especially resonant for me as reflections on his short time "down the pit" figured so strongly in dad's anecdotes about his past.  The tour helped make real just how dangerous, noisy and unpleasant mining work is and how a gas explosion is an ever present danger which requires co...

Sue's dental problems put our planned trip to India for December and January on hold and on 20th December I picked her up from Stansted with the intention of spending Christmas and the New Year in Newark. Just before she arrived I damaged my right knee crawling around the bathroom doing tiling and pipework and we ended up a couple of convalescents, with me hobbling along and Sue often in intense pain from her dental work.  This got so bad that just after Christmas she had to go to a dentist who prescribed her antibiotics to deal with an infection which had flared up. Notwithstanding our health problems we had a remarkably good time chilling out watching TV, going shopping and doing local walks.  On Christmas Day we went for a walk along the River Trent and got chatting to an older man who knew a lot about local history and whose conversation seemed to turn worryingly often to anecdotes about suicide.  Maybe we provided him with a welcome distraction.  He als...

I flew back to Stansted on Saturday night and got the courtesy bus to the Holiday Inn where I crashed for the night. Next morning, lacking the £3 change for the bus ride, I decided to walk back to the airport railway station, just over a mile away. It's not a route designed for pedestrians and I had to edge my way along the side of crash barriers and frost-encrusted embankments navigating by the airport conning tower. I was in a funny mood.  I'd started the day watching Boris Johnson being interviewed by Andrew Marr.  The whole thing had a surreal air, a lop-sided and articulate Marr asking intelligent questions of what looked like a badly-stuffed teddy bear spouting intellectual sounding nonsense interspersed with a constantly repeated tagline - "sturm and drang ... take back control ... blah, blah, blah ... take back control ...".  The one question that I was dying for Andrew Marr to ask was "why do you keep repeating 'take back control'?  Are y...