BUON NATALE E SERENO ANNO NUOVO A TUTTI
     Merry Christmas and have a peaceful New Year to all

Do ensure you have an ample supply of wine to toast all your absent friends and family. Let's just hope there aren't too many absent or you might end up on the floor!!

Whoever you are, wherever you are are, have a cracking Christmas and New Year.

L'uomo chi fa and La D

Ciao, mantenere la fede

Chickens do not make good spies ... continuing the spy theme stated last week

Following the olive picking, the next job was to prune. Now in the past we have always waited till February or March to do the pruning, but this year we have seen many people pruning as they pick, so we thought we would do the same. The other thing that has had an impact on our decision was that we have had loads of what we call “sproutings”. These are new growths on the trunk and limbs of the tress. Often a few together. They grow rapidly and get in the way of picking as well of course as taken away goodness that would otherwise go to the berries. We have had this the last two years and have been wondering whether it has anything to do with our pruning effectively in Spring when the sap is rising. Anyway, we’ll have to wait and see.

So, there we were chatting away, snipping and sawing and getting our lovely olive trees into better and better “goblet” shapes. We let the chickens out as they are all laying now and love to poddle about the middle garden where most of the olive trees are. They followed us about from tree to tree, which made me think that they would be bloody useless as spies. They are so obvious. Why did that thought come into my mind? I have no idea.

I said to La D, “Darling. Do you think that chickens would make good spies?”

I can’t really describe the look she gave me. She stopped pruning, slowly lowered her pruning arm and had this look of utter disbelief in her face.

“What are you talking about Luomochifa? Of course they wouldn’t make good spies they’re chickens. How could they possibly use all those gadgets that Q comes up with? Let alone drive those super cars and boats and go scuba diving. Can you imagine a chicken with a diving mask on and a little oxygen bottle on their back? No of course you can’t you moron. Get on with the job Luomochifa. Now.”

Her witty response really threw me. She’s playing me at my own game,…. and winning!! She shouldn’t be having these wild, surrealistic thoughts. Damn.

Just then I looked around for our potential chicken spies only to see that they had disappeared. What did it mean? Could they understand what we were saying and decided to show us that there might be a future section in MI6 just for chickens?

Where were they? Suddenly out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of brown amongst the bamboo. I looked harder and sure enough there were the three of them clucking and scratching about round the bottoms of the bamboo, looking very nonchalant, I thought. Just a quick glimpse over in our direction every now and then. I think they might be leading us on a bit, making themselves out to be more stupid than they really are. But then again ……..

See what I mean? What do you think?

Snow

We have had some snow and very cold weather like a lot of Northern Europe. It was quite funny the other morning I went down to let the chickens out and there was about 10cms of snow. I opened the coop hatch and tried to put the steps up so the chicks to get down and as usual they were onto the steps before I had attached them to the coop. The first one rushed down and stopped abruptly at the end as she just noticed that there was all this white stuff where the ground should be. The second one bowled down the steps and bashed into the first one. The third one did the same and crashed into the second. The upshot was they all fell off the steps and onto the snow. They were very taken aback. It was very amusing. It looked like a chicken pile up.

Ciao, mantenere la fede

The third chicken is laying. I repeat, the third chicken is laying

No it’s not some sort of code that spies might use when they meet their contact. It is a fact. Our last chicken has started to lay at long last. She is laying consistently since last Saturday. Brilliant. Of course we are now coming to the stage where we have too many eggs for ourselves and we can give some away to neighbours and friends. But that’s good.

Since they are all laying we have now let the chicks come out into the middle garden. They really love it. There is loads to explore and lots of green things, as well as insect, for them to feed on.

It has taken some while. About six months. But there we are.

Breezy

We went out to do some shopping yesterday and every time we got out of the car the wind would start to gust. Funny because it wasn’t the least bit windy when we left the house. As we drove back and turned into our lane the trees were swaying and the leaves were swirling all around the place. We got back to house to find the little greenhouse had disappeared! We found it eventually. There were broken pots and plants and soil spoils all over the place. The bottom of the stairs was covered in about 4 inches of leaves – at one point Bertie thought they would make a good bed, see picture.

Bertie on a bed of leaves. Doesn’t sound too appetising thank goodness!

Large pieces of corrugated iron had been blown across the garden. There were also a couple of corrugated iron sheets that we had used in the walls of the chicken pen that had become detached and were flapping about in the wind. It was terrible. It was aright mess.

Of course there was no point in trying to tidy up in those winds as you’d just be, literally, pissing into the wind. And you know what happens then!

Fortunately the gazebo frame was standing nice and rigid and erect. Good, I thought. Because we haven’t got the top on, the frame is so thin, the wind should just blow round it.

A little while later, La D popped her head round the door and said, “Luomochifa. What was that you telling me about the gazebo frame? About how resilient it is in the wind. Well that’s a load of b******s my old mucker (she does love to put on a bit of a mockney accent now and again) because it’s now lying all twisted and torn.”

I rushed to the window and gazed down on the unedifying spectacle.

“What a mess,” I said

“Are these things really meant to last more than a season?” La D asked in a bored fashion. “We do seem to get through them Luomochifa.”

“We do, my darling. We do.” I replied. However, there is a little bit of an upside in this and that is that the cover was very thin and didn’t provide much protection from the sunlight, whereas the previous one did. So next year we will have to get one with a little more protection. Besides I was bored with this one anyway. So there.

Weather

V strange. Yesterday in the massive breeze, our little outside temperature guage registered, wait for it. Are you ready? 25.5°C. 9th December.  25° plus? Can hardly believe it. It felt so warm. Tomorrow’s forecast is about 3°.

Weird

Christmas

Still nicely understated here compared to the UK. Just about to see the Christmas “thing” get really underway now. Very lovely.

Ciao, mantenere la fede

The olive oil is in!

We managed to get all our olives picked by Thursday lunchtime. Dodging the showers and morning dews was a bit precarious. Mustn't pick them when wet. Nipped up to the olificio and was greeted with no activity whatsoever. Oops, we thought. Are we too late for pressing?
Wasn't really a problem. At the end of the picking and pressing season, it is normal for them to group customers pickings as it costs quite a bit of money to run the presses, so they don't want to have to gear things up just for one customer a few hundred kilos of olives. So we arranged to go back yesterday afternoon about 3:30 to tie in with some other customers he had already arranged.
When we arrived there again yesterday, we met one of our neighbours along with one of his grandsons who has some learning difficulties. He had been picking since the beginning of November and he told us that this last lot brought his total up to 3500 kilos!!! That's about 650-700 litres. That's a lot of oil. We expect they must either give some away or sell it.
He was the customer ahead of us. When it was his turn, they poured all his olives into the hopper and the process was started. After a while the miller asked us to bring ours in and put in onto the scales. 212 kilos, minus the weight of the boxes, 14 kilos, gave us a grand total of 198 kilos, about 30 kilos more than the last time. Excellent.
I was busy looking at all the fantastic machinery at the mill when La D tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Should he be doing that?" and pointed at our neighbour's grandson who had just tipped one of our boxes of olives - about 20 kilos worth - into the hopper on top of his grandfather's berries.
Fortunately one of the mill workers also saw this and stopped the lad from putting any more of our berries into the hopper. The man looked at us and shrugged his shoulders. He then spoke with the capo and together they took our empty box and disappeared outside for a few minutes and returned with a full box! No idea where he kept his secret stash of olives but thank goodness he had one. So we were back to full weight.
The grandfather apologised for the boy who looked very embarrassed. We said not to worry. What else could we have said? The poor lad didn't know he wasn't helping.
Soon it was our turn to empty all our olives into the beast. They get taken up a conveyor from the hopper. They are then vibrated as they pass through a blower which gets rid of any stray leaves. From there they go into a great macerator and get mulched up. The mill has two of these so each customer gets only the oil from their own berries.  Whilst this is going on the previous customer is getting his oil at the end of the production.
The colour of freshly pressed olives is a fantastic sight. It's almost fluorescent green. It's is quite beautiful, at least to our eyes.
We brought our containers over. We had brought a 20 litre jerry can and two 5 litre glass wine flagons. I had bought the second flagon just in case, as I did not expect to get any more than 23-25 litres. The jerry can got filled way past the 20 litre mark, then we went onto the fist glass flagon. That got brimmed. Then onto the second flagon. It was filling up quickly. La D and I couldn't believe it. The capo asked us for another flagon, but we hadn't got one. He rushed off and brought another glass flagon from somewhere in the mill.
 "You'll have to replace this, OK?" he said to me. "Si, si. Grazie mille." I replied. The oil just finished pouring when this third flagon was pretty much up to the brim. We had 37 litres of beautiful greeny-yellow freshly milled olive oil from our own berries.Fan-bloody-tastic! It cost us €40.00. that's €1.10 per litre of "real" Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Wow, were we chuffed to bits.
Now I've just got to get on with the pruning.

Ciao. mantenere la fede. A posto

I can’t believe a month has gone by

Last month has pretty much been all about La D’s mum. La D had to go over again and sort out her mum’s situation. We bought her a one way ticket as she wasn’t going to leave until she had sorted it out.

The long and short of it is that her mum is unable to live at home any more. La D, together with her dad and, with the support of her siblings, have managed to get her out of hospital and into a very lovely nursing home close by.

The processes and protocols that La D had to go through have, to be honest, quite daunting, especially as for more than half the time, all the parties involved seemed to be working on the same objective but with different scripts! Not helpful when you are trying to deal with something like this.

The hospital’s nursing care was not good. La D’s mum was passed around from pillar to post, with no-one really knowing what to do with her. Of course all this time her  physical and mental health was deteriorating as there was little interaction by the various staff. It was a very poor nine weeks for her and for the family.

The nursing home staff are a very different bunch. OK you may say, they only have to deal with people like La D’s mother, but there was nothing stopping the hospital staff to give a little more thought and time to her when she was in their care.

Anyway there is no more to be done.

I flew out a few days ago and we did a bit of family visiting, which was fun. We got back on Sunday leaving a very chilly UK (no snow encountered thank goodness) to return to a cold and very rainy Le Marche. Brrrrrrrrr.

We collected the chickens on the way home from some good friends who looked after them and who gave us a welcoming bowl of soup bread and cheese. Wonderful.

We got unpacked, put the heating on, put the chicks in their pen and then went to collect the Bert.

He was ecstatic to see us, especially La D as he hadn’t seen her for three weeks.

More refreshments were offered to us and gratefully accepted.

Got back home, had a lovely hot meal and glass of wine and then collapsed into bed, pretty pooped. It was going to be a busy day tomorrow too.

Olives

Because of all the goings on in the UK we still have to pick our olives. November is the picking season around here so we are at the end of the picking time.

Well we were out at first light and apart from a quick coffee and some soup and bread for lunch we worked until we couldn’t see the olives dropping onto the net. We had bagged about 140 kilos and reckon there is probably about another 50-60 kilos on the remaining trees. The weather was great. Windy and sunny.

Since Monday evening it has been p***ing down and no more have been picked.

We are hoping that by this afternoon the rain will have cleared off and we can pick the remainder. We really want to get the olives pressed by the end of the week. Here’s hoping…….

Ciao, mantenere la fede

Hunters

The hunters are out again. Lots of bangs and barking dogs. Although the bangs and the barks seem to be less that last year. We commented on this with some friends and they confirmed that this was their thoughts too. They have had some near misses with Italian cacciatore (hunters) in the past and are therefore quite conscious of the apparent lessening of hunting activity.

What was it Oscar Wilde was quoted as saying about those who hunted foxes:

“The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”

Bit different here though with local wild boar being a sought after meat. It is very nice I must say.

Plans, plans, plans

We arranged for a geometra (sort of a house-engineer come designer, come pretty much-everything-else-to-do-with-houses-apart-from-building-them chappie or chappess)  to come round and have a look and a chat about what we would ideally like to end up doing to Casa Grotta.

Very nice bloke. Suffered from a stroke last year, but he can’t be more than mid-forties. Speaks fluent English which of course is fantastic for us.

So we are having some plans drawn up. The next step would be seek planning permission from the comune with the following step being actually to do something. Gulp. The permissions cover things like extending the size of the property (which we aren’t) and change of use of rooms (which we are as we have a very long earth floored room that was used to keep livestock on the ground floor. As we do not intend to continue that tradition we want to have the room as living space. We have to get permission to do that. Odd I know, but that is what you have to do)

You might well ask, “How are you going to pay for all this?” A very good question. Our thinking runs along the lines that if we have a proper, drawn-up plan (which won’t be very expensive at all and is essential to doing anything), and we have the correct permissions from the comune (again which we believe won’t be very expensive), then we will be in a position to start just as soon as we are able to fund some work.

I hasten to add that there is no time limit being put to this.

I am working on a couple of income-generating schemes, such as forging grand masters  (unfortunately I am a lousy painter, especially in oils)  nobbling race horses (I know nothing about horses) and last but not least, major frored and embesselement (difficult to have success with spelling this bad).

Should any of you know of anything that I might turn my hand too with a modicum of success, please do let me know. The more legal the better.

Good Blooper.

Using the word embezzlement just now reminds me a great La D blooper.

We were talking about someone who had really told a very exaggerated tale about his goings on and La D remarked that he had really embezzled his story! I did say to her that I thought the word she meant was embroidered, but she convinced me that embroidered was only a form of needle therapy. I have the puncture marks to prove it!!

La D’s mum

Some change. Still in hospital. Will report later

Ciao, mantenere la fede

Family problems cont’d ….

Poor La D’s mum has not improved much, if at all, since she went into hospital a month ago. The family is, as you would expect, rallying round as best they can to support her and their dad.

La D has been trying to get the hospital to “speak with one voice" as there have been numerous times when one nurse says one thing and the next nurse completely contradicts the first one. It is so frustrating for La D and the rest of the family.

However, La D is doing her famous Freya, Queen of The Valkyries, impression and leading the family into battle. Heads will roll, and not all the way to Valhalla either. She’s guiding the charge from 1200 miles away against obfuscation and lack of progress on her mum’s behalf. She can’t do any more. We’re rooting for you ma.

A disgusting sight

We popped over for coffee yesterday to our friends who took two of the kittens back in September. They also have a pup like Bertie-dog called Lola, and of course this was the real reason we went (no, not really).

You have to drive up a pretty old dirt road before you reach their drive. Just as were about 50 metres from the drive entrance, at the side of the road there was a fully grown Bertie-dog eating a full size sheep. Honestly. The sheep had most of its ribs showing and the dog was pulling bits out of the sheep’s stomach. The dog’s front was covered in blood. It really was disgusting.

We told our friends what we had seen, and they told us that apparently the farmers give the dogs a sheep that has died as food for them. It really is totally weird. Here is a breed of dog whose sole purpose in life is to guard sheep with their life, which is what they do. Then if one of their charges dies, they eat it. It’s almost seems like a form of cannibalism.

Anyway. Lola. What a cutie she is. Not shy at all. Very playful. Very good at sitting and lying down (Bertie doesn’t do lying down!) but not brilliant at coming back yet. She had had all her jabs and stuff so we are going to introduce her to Bertie soon.

Both La D and myself were taken with her coat. It’s still fluffy and she has, what you could say of a human first thing in the morning, “bed hair”.

This morning I unearthed a picture of Bertie taken when he was four months and it’s quite extraordinary. He looked so much like Lola looks now. I probably put this on the blog at the beginning of last year, but here it is again.

Gardening matters

It certainly does. No, what I mean is things to do with the garden. We are getting it ready for the Winter now and putting to bed most of the orti. We have planted some peas, broad beans and last week-end, onions. But we are doing lots of tidying up. Hopefully there will be a bonfire or two with the old vegetation.

The olives are looking good. Most of them are nice and plump and we should be picking around mid-November all being well.

Weather

Up and down. We have been having our coffee breaks and lunch outside apart form the last two days. When the clouds aren’t there, it’s gloriously warm in an Autumnal way if you get my drift. But at nights the heating is needed, as well as the fire in the kitchen. Very pleasant indeed.

Ciao, mantenere la fede