DVD Notes : Of trains, cranes and dinosaurs

One degree at 8am and frosty. Clear skies. The distant snow-tipped Alps are bathed in pink.

We don’t have tv in Carmine Superiore. But this year we have discovered the DVD (played on my cranky old Inspiron 500m) as a great way to hypnotise the children. Most of the DVDs we own are in English, and almost all of them are sent by Grandma from the UK. They’re all second-hand; Grandma combs the charity shops and car boot sales with the same efficiency as a shame-faced mother picking nits from her children’s hair.

To succeed in our house, a children’s programme needs a.) to keep the two little angels quiet, enabling Mama to feed them, wash them, put on their shoes and clean their teeth all without the little eyes becoming unglued from the screen; b.) to teach numbers and the alphabet, problem solving in physics and mechanics, conflict resolution and the basics of nutritional science, all in the same 20-minute slot; and c.) to help Mama’s day start out right with a decent soundtrack, especially when heard for the millionth time (this week).

So, which children’s entertainment offerings make the grade in the house on the hill?

The scale is 1-7 where 1 is ‘this DVD is so bad it’ll get hidden in the back of the wardrobe until next summer, when it’ll be used to keep the birds off the grapes’ and 7 is ‘this DVD is so great Mama might even be watching secretly while Pappi is away on business’. For ratings of less than 1, use your imagination (as that grinning American dinosaur would say (and I don’t mean George W. Bush)).

Barney

“Anything can happen,
Anything can be,
Anything can happen
In the
land of makebelieve…”

Wasn’t that George W. Bush’s campaign song in 2000?
Mama rating : 2; she can’t stand purple.

Angelina Ballerina
Myomorphic balletic ambition meets incidental music from the soundtrack of Myst (remember?), bringing a slightly sinister undertone to the chintz, the squeaky voices and the heinous headgear.
Mama rating : 5

Fireman Sam
Nightmares are made of how closely Naughty Norman Pryce resembles No.1 son. Hide the matches.
Mama rating : 4

Hi5
Spot the brain cell, shoot the songwriter.
Mama rating : 1

Ready to Learn : Diggers and Dumpers
Don’t allow this DVD in your home more than ten minutes. Give it away to the next birthday boy in your diary – do anything to avoid playing it to your kids. The soundtrack alone is enough to curdle the milk in the fridge, but, like crack, it will hook a young, vulnerable mind in seconds. ITV should be ashamed to put its name on such dross.
Mama rating : ABSOLUTE ZERO

Rosie and Jim
Thrill-seeker Ragdoll Rosie leads naïve boyfriend Jim astray. Tootle’s so busy tootling on his tootler it’s surprising he doesn’t crash the boat.
Mama rating : 4

Thomas and Friends
A grim tale of shunting-yard violence, unquantified carbon emissions and obesity at the top. Interesting to note that a series dreamt up in the post-WWII period to teach children the value of unthinking industriousness and unquestioning respect for people in top hats has become so successful in the post-millennium period….
Mama rating : 6, because we like the songs

The Wiggles
Four cute Ozzie blokes in colourful T-shirts wiggling their hips and pumping pom-poms. Mama’s doing the Wiggle Groove, and so are the kids.
Mama rating : 7

Tractor Tom
Smart-arse tractor saves the day again and again and (yawn) again. Keep your eye on the sheep – they’re groovy.
Mama rating : 4

Bob the Builder
A job finished in every episode plus a woman working on the building crew. Clearly, no-one at Hit Entertainment has had the builders in recently.
Mama rating : 3

Kipper
Last of the Summer Wine for pint-sized dog lovers. Groovy soundtrack designed to chill even the most hair-raising Monday morning.
Mama rating : 6

Gardener’s World (oh yes)
The children soak up hot tips from the BBC’s best gardeners. I fantasize that the stray coppers I thrust into AJ’s piggy bank from time to time will one day add up to enough to buy a day of Monty Don consultation on my pile of builder’s rubble and unidentified Italian invasives.
Mama rating : 7

Five degrees at 8am. Everything is bright and sunny. Especially after a good night's sleep.

November 28, 2007 : God knows what the temperature is. After 40 hours with no sleep nursing a child with bronchospasm, the 10 hours I got last night seem faintly inadequate.

November 27, 2007 : Four degrees at 8am. Blue skies and bright sunshine starting to appear through the autumn mists.

Carmine quotes No.2 : Mind your language

Seven degrees at 8am and an extraordinary eighteen degrees at 1pm. That's 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit to you Brits. A blustery but warm wind is making white horses. 


Mama : (mutters to herself as she finally drags herself, a parcel, a shopping bag and two children round the last curve of the hill and strides into the final straight) "And now I've got to go and feed the bloody chickens..."

AJ : (mutters to himself as he rounds the curve, sits down for his 11th rest-stop of the climb and sees the cat waiting for him) "And now I've got to go and feed my bloody girl-cat..."

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Ten degrees at 9am (okay, okay, it's Sunday - supposed to be a day of rest, don't ya'know). Sun and clouds in roughly equal measures.

November 24, 2007 : Eight degrees at 8am - noticeably warmer. The rain stopped sometime in the night but the Carmine Superiore scene is today entirely informed by water-on-the-move.

Calendar boy

Four degrees at 8am with a vindictive little breeze that chafes at wet little fingers. Raining solidly (if rain can be said to be in any way solid, which I guess it can't). Wedges of cloud packed in a long and slow-moving traffic jam down the lake. The rivers are running fast and streams have appeared where no streams were yesterday, particularly the two busily eroding the mud floor of the chicken coop.

In Cannobio, the newsagents are full of 2008 calendars. By far the most numerous are the baby animals calendars – saccharin Anne Geddes-style shots of puppies in teapots, kittens wearing tartan, foals and their knobbly knees starting to walk while the afterbirth’s still wet behind their ears. These are closely followed by the fully-grown animals: thoroughbred racehorses, pedigree dogs, yawn yawn.

Diametrically opposed, but only a couple of centimetres away in the newsagent’s display are the pin-up calendars, in which category calendars of naked females with pumped-up breasts and screaming-wall-of-terror smiles jostle side-by-side with calendars of naked males with pumped-up pecs and disdainful smirks.

There seems to be no law here in Italy about where the pin-up category can be displayed, and so we find them propped up on the floor where my 16-month-old daughter can admire them. Perhaps they'd sell more calendars if they placed the baby animals at toddler height and the pecs at overworked mama height. Just a thought.

Then there are the religious calendars. Padre Pio, he of the extraordinary stigmata, is right out there in front along with Pope John Paul II. Pope Benedict XVI, however, is a curious absence. Perhaps as Pope one’s work contract with God disallows calendar contracts until you’re on the fast-track to sainthood (in the case of PJP) or have just got there (in the case of PP).

Taking second place after these megastars of small town life are the teenie stars of the pop world - boy bands and girlie groups, singers and instrumentalists. And of course the football teams. Juventus, AC Milan, and the never-to-be-forgotten victorious World Cup Italia team, all designer stubble and stocky legs. These are all grouped into anthologies – no single band or individual star is important enough to carry a calendar monograph like PP and PJP, it seems.

But in a category all of his own, I spy one further personality seemingly important enough to carry a monograph. I double take at the Benito Mussolini Calendar 2008 and after the smelling salts have done their work I begin to wonder what the sales figures might be for a sleepy north-Italian town 63 years after this particular pin-up’s (don’t even think about the pun) demise.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Arrival

Four degrees at 8am. Low cloud lowering over the lake.

RAIN!

(At last.)

And snow on higher ground across the water.

Beautiful and confused

November 21, 2007 : A sultry six degrees at 8am. Misty over the mountains. Ezio arrives carrying his red tartan umbrella, so we are officially in expectation of precipitation...

On the mulatierra up to Carmine Superiore there is a variegated camellia and a deep pink azalea, both wholeheartedly in bloom. Like some people I once knew, they are beautiful, but perhaps a trifle confused?

Parenting problem - can you help?

November 20, 2007 : Four degrees at 8am. Overcast. Waiting.

Help!

I have a problem – maybe you can help.

At AJ’s asilo (kindergarten) it’s compulsory for the children to stay for lunch. The idea is, apparently, to teach the little ones that they should eat what they are offered, and, of course, to ensure that every child gets at least one nutritionally balanced meal every school day. Packed lunch? No, no signora.

The service is not free. We paid a whopping 95€ for the month of October. And if your child is in the asilo at 10:30am, the meal goes on the bill whether he eats it or not.

And herein lies the rub. AJ eats nothing at the asilo. Perhaps a yogurt occasionally, or some fruit, or a slice of pizza (his favourite). Days and days go by and the what-your-child-ate-today chart exhibits a row of humiliating No’s alonsgide the self-congratulatory Si’s of the other children. Even if he’s hungry-hungry (and he must be hungry because breakfast finishes at 7:30am and lunch isn’t until midday), he eats nothing.

As soon as we arrive to collect him, though, he starts asking for food. At home he’s picky but when he likes something he’ll “stuff his face”, as he so delicately puts it.

Here’s my dilemma.

Do I refuse to feed him at 2:30pm when we get home in an effort to make him understand that he must eat what he’s offered and at the right times? (And suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous, hunger-induced temper tantrums all afternoon.)

Or

Do I feed him one of the shortlist (very short list) of foods he likes whenever he’s hungry and hope that at some point he’ll become more comfortable at the asilo away from his Mama and among all those people who speak a strange language, and will start to eat with the other kids?

Would you vote hardline Victorian or would you feed him and be damned?

I await your brilliant parenting ideas, tips and advice.

Reported conversations No. 2

November 19, 2007 : One degree at 8am, frosty and still. The sky is shrouded in pleated cotton wool.

Ezio Geninazzi, lifelong Carmine Superiore resident, 74 going on 24, with a strength and agility that always astound me, and a memory for dates, numbers and Italian World Cup performances that puts mine to shame.

Mama (in execrable Italian as usual) : "Do you think it'll snow?"
Ezio (looking at the sky and in perfect Italian) : "A little, but on the mountains a lot."
Mama (in even worse Italian) : "How do you know?"
Ezio (in very concise Italian) : "Sky".

I am filled with neo-Romantic admiration for my neighbour's ability to predict the weather by looking at the sky, when I realise he didn't say cielo, but Sky, and my neo-Romantic bubble bursts in a sprinkling of soggy snow flakes.

Cat and mouse

November 18, 2007 : Two degrees at 8am. Frost. Bright sunshine and the lake (mostly) as smooth as glass. A perfect day for boating.

I’m very behind with the ironing.

And I mean very behind.

I’m so behind with the ironing that a mouse has made her nest in the full ironing basket.

Now I’m not one to pass a buck, but I’d like to know what the cat’s been doing between meals…

First frost

Two degrees at 8am. Tiny pockets of frost to be seen all round Carmine Superiore. The nasturtiums are finally wilting, but the khaki fruit and the Brussels sprouts should now be ready to eat.

Ecco Mathilda!

Today Mathilda is burning!

Now before you get any strange ideas about autumn burnings of Catholic effigies in thinly-veiled pagan rituals, let me explain that Mathilda is a wood-fired oven. The nearest thing to central heating we have. Having said that, the first time we light Mathilda each year does perhaps amount to something of a pagan ritual, ushering in the colder months with much careful preparation of cut firewood and kindling, much organisation of firelighters and matches out of reach of little hands. Much oohing and aahing over the creeping warmth.

When we first came to Carmine Superiore, the house was in fact two houses. It had been owned by two sides of the same family, the last inhabitants being Luigi Zaccheo and Ezio Geninazzi. There were two kitchens, and we decided to turn Ezio’s kitchen into a sitting room and Luigi’s kitchen was to remain in use as our kitchen.

The only heating equipment in the place (apart from two open hearths) was an ancient 1930s-brown Zoppas wood-fired stove. It stood in one corner of Luigi’s kitchen, and its exhaust pipe crossed the entire room lengthwise before being stuffed into a hole hacked into the front of the otherwise stately chimney breast. It smoked from all its joints, gave little heat and ate up all the oxygen in the room.

Evidently, something had to change.

Summers at the Lake are mostly hot, and the house acts like an old church, chilling the warm air as it passes the three-foot stone walls, making life, especially in torrid July, bearable. But winters can be unhappy. While they say that Lake Maggiore and its immediate environs can be thought of as the northernmost tip of Africa, and while all around one sees various species of palm and cactus thriving among the firs and the chestnuts, winter in a stone house without heating really isn’t a laughing matter. When we first stayed in Carmine in winter (not in this house, but renting a neighbour’s), the water in the lavatory froze. Our first winter in our own house, a shirt of mine famously froze five minutes after hanging it to dry in the makeshift shower we’d rigged in the lean-to lavatory. I had showered there only 10 minutes before.

Our first decision was, for the time being, not to heat the bedrooms. We were supplied with four bed-flasks – flat oval, copper flasks to fill with hot water and put in the bed – and that was that. Speed dressing and undressing became a necessity and then a sport accompanied by hysterical giggling when the going got really tough. Unhappily, some of our visitors didn’t find it so funny, and one or two of them haven’t spoken to us since they experienced a Carmine winter first hand.

Our next decision was not to rely on electricity. In line with the thinking that we should try to build in low running costs, electricity for heating seemed too expensive. Gas was not an option – we didn’t fancy lugging 50-kg gas bottles (gaily termed bombolline) up the hill more than once a year – and despite the contunuing rumours, it seemed as if the gas company was unlikely to go to the expense of connecting us to the municipal gas supply until the end of the next century. Four years and one village petition on and the gas company is still curiously silent on the subject. I can’t imagine why.

Our solution was to use wood (of which there is an abundance right here on our doorstep, if you can be bothered to cut and dry it) as our main fuel. We started to look for wood-burning systems that would ideally use the wood efficiently, heat more than one room at a time and require as little tending as possible (my fire-tending pattern being erratic if I have something else to do and positively absent-minded at certain times of the month).

The stufa in maiolica was the best solution we lit upon. It’s essentially a wood-fired storage heater. Made of clay bricks, it’s built into or against an internal wall. About 2.5 metres tall, our stufa was inserted between Luigi’s and Ezio’s kitchens. On the side of Luigi’s kitchen, it is about 80 centimetres wide, making a tall, thin shape (suggesting, to me at least, the name Mathilda). On the side of Ezio’s kitchen, where it is the only heating aparatus apart from the fireplace, it expands to a width of 2 metres. On both sides, the edifice is topped with huge grey granite slabs (to match the roof, we thought). At the foot of the tower on the side of Luigi’s kitchen, a black ironwork door opens into the firebox.

The deal is to make a large and hot fire that rages for an hour or so, using about 12kg of wood chopped very finely. When the fire dies down, the door to the firebox is closed, and the hot air makes its way up the tower, through a labyrinth of flues, heating the many clay bricks as it goes. Over the next few hours, the oven walls become gradually hotter, radiating a gentle heat not unlike the warmth of the sun. Slowly, the tower cools down again, and after 12 or 24 hours, depending on the temperature, a new fire is laid, starting the process all over again. I like to think of it as Mathilda breathing.

Mathilda is designed to create a background glow, raising the base temperature of the room, so that it is closer to comfortable, further away from bloody freezing. It’s never stuffy, and there is little chance of poisoning from fumes, so the effect is better for the inhabitants. The other advantage is that you have to make the fire only once or twice a day, rather than having to constantly tend a wood-burning stove like a pot-belly or a furnace.

M. began researching maiolica ovens in the winter of 2002-3 when he moved into Carmine and realised exactly how cold it could be, even during a relatively mild winter, and especially without his compagna to keep him warm at night. He eventually found a supplier he was happy with. He liked the look of the preventivo, and liked the look of the man.

We realised that we would require helicopter services to transport the materials, and so timed the building of Mathilda to coincide with the building of the roof, in October.

In September, Oreste Ferrari, our most dedicated builder, swung his sledge hammer and his by then familiar “Madonna!” cry rang out. After no more than a few swipes at the wall, his face appeared, covered in plaster-dust, grinning.

“Ho fatto disastro!” A favourite saying of his. Our Oreste, not so much a builder as a one-man demolition squad, even with a brutal hangover, which was often.

Our very first, very game guests, Ilse and Jan, leant us their elbow-grease to carry away the rubble. After that, we lived with a hole in the wall for several weeks. It’s interesting how unsettling it can be to live on one side of a hole, where everything is hunky-dory and fairly civilized, but to be able to look over your companion's shoulder at supper, through the hole in the wall and to discern in the half-light piles of old concrete, discarded buckets, and a layer of builder’s grime everywhere. It’s rather like looking through a mirror into some insane world where the ghosts of all the unpaid builders in history (starting with the builders of the pyramids) are able to take revenge. Eventually we covered up this dreadful vision of hell with an old curtain (70s trendy, a donation from our neighbour Gunhilt, and while being mighty useful, was itself a vision of textile design hell). When the weather started to turn colder, and the wind started whipping across the supper table, we plugged the gap with the enormous cardboard box in which Edna, our wood-fired cooking stove had arrived (another item with many uses and very much worth preserving, all renovators take note).

Eventually, everything came together. The helicopter scythed over the ridge behind Carmine, the fumistas puffed up the hill, the materials landed in a storm of rotor blades, and soon we were the proud owners of an elegant stufa in maiolica, plastered white in rustico style (as the Italians commented, disdainfully – like many cultures, they seem to have abandoned knobbly-wobbly walls when breeze blocks were invented).

At this moment, surveying the new heart of our home, we are delighted.

Two problems.

We are deflated.

Mathilda is wet. When new, stufe in maiolica contain some 150 litres of water, we are informed. We would need to wait at least two weeks for it to dry before lighting it.

And she is also what you might call sottosviluppata - under-developed. She has a flue, but it isn’t connected to a chimney, because we as yet have no roof. So we wait. Because as soon as the old roof is torn off (that in itself a fortnight’s work), the heavens open and it starts to rain.We wait through the workdays with dreadful weather and the weekend days when the sun shines with ironic abandon. Eventually, as the roof is completed, the flue is connected to a lovely copper pipe and we feel the excitement rising.

We survey the work again. There is now a very smart matt black tubo exiting the granite slab on top of Mathilda, penetrating the kitchen ceiling and making a somewhat startling appearance through the floor of the bedroom above. 70s clunk meets millennium city warehouse sleek. From there it continues upwards, through the ceiling, narrowly missing a major beam, and through the floor of the sottotetto, the attic. Here it does a dog-leg to avoid the main beam of the new roof, and at the same time joins the tubo for the Zoppas – our lovely ancient brown Zoppas, miraculously ascended to the heights for use in some glorious future when we get around to populating the upper rooms.

This is where it all goes wrong.

There is no dog-leg.

Signor Cattaneo, our diabolical plumber (diabolical because he reminds me of no-one more than Robert de Niro as Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987), has ordered one from the local fabbro, and it won’t be here until the very last minute, you can lay bets on it. Still, he has rigged a stop-gap ensemble resembling one of those flexi-tubes that come with some tumble-dryers – the things that are used to conduct the moisture-laden air out of the nearest window, and that, we are told, should do the trick. Instead of being happily reassured I find myself wondering what hapless housewife will find herself with a new tumble dryer frustratingly minus its flexi-tube, having borne it home from Cattaneo’s shop full of jubilant expectation.

The man who installed Mathilda is a square nice-looking fellow by the name of Ferro. For a week he dropped his kids off at school and then made the 90-minute journey from Oleggio to Carmine Superiore to build our stufa. In comparison to our butch, burly roofers and muratori, Ferro and his nameless colleague, in their pink-and-turquoise fleeces, gilt half-moon spectacles and hush puppies, appeared almost housewifely. Together they spent all day every day bickering over the design and building of Mathilda. The foundation looked like tiramisu; the curved corner bricks were the texture of ice-cream-cones, coloured pink; the smell of the water-cooled brick-cutter, similar to the acrid smell of burning metal, pervaded the whole house, and got about in the village a bit, too.

At the end of the week, Ferro left us with a prescription for Mathilda’s first days, which resembled nothing more than a plan for weaning a child.

Or a formula for raising evil spirits. You know the kind of thing: take the eyes of two frogs, pickle them and bury them for five years under your neighbour’s compost heap…

Which one you perceive it to be depends on your outlook on life.

Or on how cold the weather has turned and how cynical you have become.

First, we were instructed to leave the door to the firebox open for several weeks, so that the clay inside would dry. Not something we did religiously, I am bound to admit.

We were to acquire a supply of good quality wood, dried for 18 months out of doors under a protective cover and for a further 6 months indoors.

Luckily, M., (who would have made a good Blue Peter boy had he been English) had some he had prepared earlier. About 10 years earlier.

The wood must be hewn and chopped to a suitable length, and stacked in a square formation inside the firebox, with the kindling leaning against it in a half-teepee shape.

(It quickly became clear to me that I was going to have to learn the near-culinary skill of producing wood suitable for Mathilda, and, after having completely screwed up my right elbow by trying to wield an axe that was too heavy and too dull, I found something more suitable for a woman of five-foot-nothing and became pretty good at turning majestic acacia trees into julienne strips. And now find this heinously destructive activity a serious relationship-saver. Try it, girls – it works.)

In addition, we were to acquire environmentally-friendly, odour-free, pressed-wood firelighters. Not paraffin firelighters. And we must definitely never use newspaper, or junk mail or proof copies of M’s doctoral thesis, incendiary though some have called it.

The first eight accensione (twice-daily doses, morning and evening, before meals) were to be effected with only half the regular amount of wood – some 5-6kg, a basketful – and leaving the door open to aid drying. For the next eight accensione, we were to step up to the full amount of wood, still leaving the door open. Finally, on the ninth day, the full 12-kg fire would be lit, and when the inferno had passed its zenith, the hermetic door was to be closed and sealed, preserving all that lovely heat.

Thursday night in mid-december. The ambient temperature is hovering around freezing. We have pelted back from Milan, narrowly missing a railway-workers' sciopero, due to start at seven o’clock. Even so, we are affected by what seems like a rather spiteful preliminary action – the train carriages are without light and heat the entire journey. M. conducts what is to my medieval mind a miraculous transatlantic telephone call from the dark of his train seat. Eventually, after a chilly stop-start journey we arrive home feeling fairly miserable, and we make one of those snap decisions - to inaugurate Mathilda.

The fumista has laid the first fire, and I insert the duly-acquired firelighters. I light them just as M. pops a bottle of méthode champenoise. All appears well for a couple of minutes, the flame leaps from the firelighters to the kindling. We sip our wine and sit back in self-congratulatory manner.

And then Mathilda begins to belch. She belches and farts. She coughs and splutters.

Smoke.

Great yellow clouds of poisonous, disgusting woodsmoke. She vomits a stain all across her beautiful, white rustico front.

What to do? We summon up our best chimney-physics. On the assumption that extra oxygen arriving at the mouth of the firebox should encourage the smoke to rise through Mathilda’s internal labyrinth, we open the window. (It also helps us to breathe.)

Still she belches.

M. removes the panel that seals the main chimney, across the room, to provide more oxygen.

Still she vomits.

I open two of the three doors leading out of the kitchen – a cardinal sin in a house where every iota of warm air has been bought with much sweat and occasionally some blood. And still she coughs, splutters, farts and retches. She dribbles streaks of water onto the ironwork of the firebox. She’s still wet.

M. gets on the phone to Ferro. I head upstairs in search of my turbo-charged Italian hairdryer in the hope of being able to at least clear the air a bit – the pall of smoke now has a cloud base of about a metre.

Ferro, he of the hush puppies, informs us that this disgusting behaviour of Mathilda’s is normal for the first accensione. Thanks for telling us, dude.

“The clay’s still wet, and until the stufa is dry, it won’t draw properly.”

“But you said it would take only a fortnight to dry, and it’s been drying now for two months!”
“Si,” he replies patiently, “but don’t you remember that three-week spell when it rained non-stop and you couldn’t see the lake for fog?”

“Oh, yes, that three weeks when the laundry wouldn’t dry – like a monsoon but without the mould…”

“If your washing won’t dry, it stands to reason that your stufa isn’t going to dry. Oh, and by the way, the fetching tumble-drier ensemble in your sottotetto may also have something to do with it…Ciao!”

M.’s face is like thunder. His brows are knit and his jaw juts in what I’ve come to know and fear as his angry face. Then, as we gaze at each other through the haze, I see his angry face become what I’ve come to know and fear as his I-have-a-plan-face.

Then I realise he’s eyeing my hairdryer.

I am evicted from the room. “Take your wine outside!” Lying on his side so that he is below the cloud-base, he begins to dry the stufa’s hair – he aims the hairdryer at the smouldering wood in an effort to bring the fire back to life, bellows-style. I flash in and out from time to time, a wet rag over my mouth, trying to protect what’s left of my lungs after 25 years as a wholehearted smoker, but my eyes are streaming as if I had just peeled and chopped a dozen onions, and rubbed my eyes with chillie-fingers to boot.

“Darling, get out!” Such endearments.

The wrestling match goes first one way and then the other. The fire takes hold, and M. emerges onto the terrazzino with his glass in his hand. Then another gob of smoke bubbles out, and the fire is all but extinguished, and M. is forced to resume drying.

Eventually, eventually, Mathilda starts to warm up, and then the fire takes and holds.

“She goes!” I hear through the distressing pall, and for once I ignore the grammatical infelicity.

We look for any remaining wine with which to celebrate – there isn’t any.

I look for my hairdryer, but find only a white plastic thing, sadly wilted. Melted in the line of duty.

I’d like to say that this is the end of this particular episode. But it isn’t. We lit Mathilda regularly for four or five days as instructed. Like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forrid, some days she was, good, and then she was very, very good. Hardly any smoke at all. And some days she smoked and then she was truly horrid. In fact, she smoked more often than not, and my hairdryer was pressed back into service and we became rather tired of having to open all the doors and windows, and of worrying about whether our clothes were starting to smell like smoked haddock.

So.

Despite really quite liking the background heat that was starting to build up, we screwed up our courage against the cold and resolved not to light Mathilda again until Signor Cattaneo had finished the chimney.

M. called him. When could he come? Tomorrow. Tomorrow came, but it appeared to have left Cattaneo at home. The next day, and the next day. Still no Cattaneo. The days lurched closer and closer to Christmas and Cattaneo’s definite domani’s become provo’s. Christmas is a deadline in anyone’s book, even an Italian plumber’s, believe me, and it seemed that everyone in the neighbourhood wanted their pipework completed before the merriment began. As foreigners, seemingly at the end of every queue, it looked for a while that we would be without Mathilda for the festive season.

Then, on the eve of Christmas Eve, Cattaneo’s wonderful jackrabbit assistant, Ivo, arrived, panting, carrying pipework, short and stocky copper tubes with conical hats on them (reminding me instantly and rather unexpectedly of the Flower-Pot Men), a bucket-load of tools and, oh joy of joys, the dog-leg. He grinned, forced out a quick “ciao” between pants and, as I had come to expect, disappeared onto the roof through the nearest upper-storey window. About an hour later our Lucifer himself arrives, inspects the work and spins off back down the hill. His final words: “There’s nothing more I can do. Light the damn stufa – if it doesn’t work, you must call the fumista! Buone Feste!”

With trembling hands, we build a pile in Mathilda’s firebox, following all the instructions we can remember. We light it and are momentarily jubilant when the fire seems to take first time. But with by-now tedious inevitability the belching soon starts again, and we are truly, heart-breakingly disappointed.

No Mathilda for Christmas.

No Mathilda for Christmas?

M. won’t accept it. He is on the phone to the fumista. For a while. I sidle up, listening. I admire what to me sounds like fluently cutting Italian. Then I realise he's begging.

Christmas Eve, they arrive. Both of our hush-puppied fumistas with their pink-and-turquoise fleeces. They leave their poor families at home during the festive season to answer our plea - I'm impressed. They spend two hours trudging around our house, insulating everything in sight, it seems. Smocked tubes of white fleecy stuff appear wherever there was once a super-cool matt-black iron tubo. So much for style.

We stand in our coats in Luigi’s kitchen, looking up, knowing which room they are in by the bickering, now louder, now softer, now nearer, now further away. Next, Ferro appears in Luigi’s kitchen, and dons a rather worrying pair of surgical gloves. He gets to his knees in front of Mathilda in what at first sight seems like an act of prayer. In one hand is a mirror, in the other a small pair of pliers. No, an act of dentistry. Then, in a trice, he is up to his shoulder in our Mathilda in what can only be an act of veterinary proctology.

A valve, he explains over his shoulder, to be adjusted.

At last, the necessary adjustments complete, I lead the fumistas in procession to the wood shed, where they select the finest julienne strips my axe could produce. In an atmosphere of growing religious awe, they build the pile. Between minor skirmishes between themselves they impart to Michael in rapid and fervent Italian many of the Mysteries of the Maiolica, speaking both at once in their zeal, gesticulating wildly, eyes flashing with the erudition of their chimney-physics.

We hold our breath as Mathilda lights. A small amount of smoke billows out. Uncharitably and over-hastily, I think, “There! I told you so!” But the flame catches and holds, then grows, and my cynicism is overcome by hope and then joy.

Like the three kings, Giacomo, Franco and Wolfram mooch in at that moment, hands in pockets, to behold the miracle, and it’s caffè and grappa all round.

Piano, piano over the next few days and weeks, we light Mathilda, tend her solicitously and gradually she dries. In return she stoically provides a gentle radiant heat, making us more often comfortable and less often bloody freezing.


Heartily recommended : Lino Ferro, details here.
More information : Italy's national association for people who make you feel warm, ASSOCOSMA.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

An ominous one degree at 8am. Thank God for the sun (and gloves).

Happy birthday Mama.

Calling all rain dancers

November 15, 2007 : Four degrees and windy. Little fingers red with cold. Last night the wind gave the north side of the house a good kicking. I feared for the chimneys.

Helicopters in attendance across the water, where another incendio can be seen raging.

Someone do a rain dance, hey?

Cosmos

November 14, 2007 : Bright and breezy. No temperatures today - although in the sun it's warm enough to be without a coat, and the breeze is strong enough to dry the sweat on your back as you heave the children up the hill.

The cosmos are still going strong...

Hat time!

A shivery six degrees at 8am. Cloudy and windy. Hat time!

The house is full of winter hats, hand-knitted bobble hats, fleecy cover-up-the-ears hats, fur-lined Russian hats, fur-trimmed Mama hats. And these cold mornings we do the Carmine hat dance. It goes like this :

Hat on, coat on. Little hand goes up, "Da!", hat on the floor in one swift and seamless gesture of joie-de-vivre (or defiance, depending on how late Mama is). Hat back on, baby heaved into back-carrier. Hat off. Hat extracted from top of artful (but long-dead) flower arrangement, hat back on. Back-carrier heaved onto Mama's back and we head for the door. Through the door, door locked, so far so good.

"Da!" Hat off.

Pick up hat. Oh. Can't reach baby in back-carrier. Back-carrier off. Hat on. Back-carrier heaved on. Off we go, listening out for the giveaway "Da!" the whole journey down the hill.

Reaching the bottom, back-carrier heaved off Mama's back. Little nose red with cold. Little ears red with cold. Damn!

That's another cute hat by those denizens of baby-mode, NEXT, lost to the woods.

I read the other day, on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, that technology has become so cheap that it would be possible to build your own working satellite out of bits foraged from electronic gadgets around the house - communication system from the baby monitor, energy from the computer battery, that kind of thing.

Now I understand that NEXT need to maximise profits and that in order to stay in business they may be forced to economise on such expensive extras as a piece of ribbon to tie a hat onto a baby's head, or, indeed a humble press-stud, function ditto. But surely they could run to a homing device so that at least when my baby hurls her be-pom-pommed baby-pink fleece number with appliqued flowers into outer space, I stand a chance of finding it.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Learning to walk the Carmine way

Twelve degrees at 8am this morning. Bright with a north wind and white horses.

Today B had her first lesson in walking up the hill. She’s now almost 16 months, and has had four months experience of walking, so it’s time to introduce her to the bane and the blessing of all our lives. Here are the rules of the game :

1.) Mama must teach the child to walk the last 400 metres of the mulattiera from the last bench up to the front door of the house. The gradient is an average of one in three.
2.) Mama must encourage the child not to fall over the edges of the path into ravines, streams or nettle-filled terraces.
3.) Mama must help the child to spend less than two hours picking up odd objects, staring rapt through gates into people’s gardens, playing pass the leaf, or caressing slugs, cats, dogs or any other passing wildlife.
4.) Mama must stop the child inserting little hands into gaps in dry stone walls, the habitat of poisonous snakes, and possible nest-site for hornets or bees.
5.) Mama must guide the child up uneven steps, across ‘cobbles’, over baby-foot-sized gaps in the bridge paving, through minefields of loose half-pound stones and away from gutters hidden by fallen leaves.
6.) Mama must ensure the child does not do herself damage by ingesting poisonous berries, animal excrement, slugs, bottle tops or collapsed party balloons.
7.) Mama must not on any account, lose her temper, become comatose with boredom or be otherwise distracted such that the child is allowed to break free and toddle all the way back down to where she saw a pretty flower, about an hour ago.

I try to look on the bright side. AJ learned how to walk up the hill. He now takes only about 45 minutes (when he’s not having a hunger-induced tantrum) and only occasionally falls into a nettle bed.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Carmine quotes No. 1 : Weather forecast

An astounding twenty-one degrees in the sun. Down to my T-shirt in the garden while transplanting the raspberries. The soil is very, very dry, and the lake recedes more every day.

Carmine quotes No.1 : Emanuele Ferrari, twenty-something with frizzy whiskers, a chainsaw in one hand and the other hand permanently in a bandage. Profession : Boscaiolo (woodcutter).

"When the lake is low, we shall have snow...."

We'll see.

Free Rice

In Carmine Superiore this evening, we're playing :

http://www.freerice.com

It involves answering vocabulary questions and for every correct answer, 10 grains of rice are donated by the advertisers to help feed starving people. Apparently, yesterday, players helped donate more than 60 million grains of rice.

No charge, no tedious registration procedure. Just a bit of fun for a good cause, it seems.

Check it out.

Talking Italian No. 1 : I climb, you climb, he climbs, she climbs...

Seventeen degrees in the sun, with a breeze. Very dry.

How come I've lived in Carmine Superiore more than four years now and it's only today that I've learned the meaning of the noun salita and the verb salire...?

Thirteen degrees and white-horses windy, but still with that all-important sun. A great relief after the drizzle, the shivery cold and the glum, chewing-gum skies of North-of-the-Alps.