A new year wish

Three degrees at 8am. Clear skies and bright as usual. It would be nice if we could have plenty of rain (and/or snow) before I have to start schlepping the children up and down the hill again next week.

Anybody listening up there?

Cat news

Mr Orange grew his wings in the night. We're sad, very sad, to see him go.

Two degrees at 8:30am. Overcast with heavy greyish clouds. Snow on the way?

On the brink

Tonight we are waiting. With heavy hearts.

Tonight, one of the Carmine cats is in hospital fighting for his life. Parasites. Viral infection. Anaemia. Cortisone. Antibiotics. And crossed fingers.

Mr Orange (named only a few weeks ago by AJ) is a survivor. Born in 2005 in a litter of four, he was always as a young kitten the most timid. The first to high-tail it back into the wood-pile his mother was using as a nursery. One morning his mother was crying. There was blood on the wood and three kittens gone. Mr Orange was found not far away, but far enough to have escaped whatever animal decimated his family. His mother wept for her kittens for a fortnight, and every mother in Carmine wept to hear her.

Mr Orange spent the following winter in our house with our big tabby tom (his uncle), curled up on top of Mathilda (see November 2007, Ecco Mathilda!) or hogging the baby-changing station (then in the kitchen). But when he came of age, the tom, king of the Carmine cats, saw him off and he became an outlaw. We saw him not at all the following summer and thought that we had lost him. But this autumn he turned up asleep on the hay in the baita close to Palazzo Pollo (where we keep the chickens).

And what a beautiful cat he had become! Sleek and lithe. And tall and elegant. And with emerald green eyes that on a woman would be her passport to international fame and fortune. But despite his long legs and winning ways, he was still outcast.

And today he was sick.

But if tomorrow he is well, he will be welcome to spend the rest of his life in our house, chasing pesky mice around the woodshed, patiently tolerating the children and sleeping, elegantly, on top of Mathilda.

Fingers crossed.

Two degrees at 9:39am. Bright blue skies with wind and occasional white horses on the lake.

A day out

A clear day at Lago Maggiore, with the thermometer reading four degrees at 8:30am (although it feels much, much colder). Further south, among the rice fields of Vercelli there is a rising mist, and just north of the Po an all out fog (is it always like that?).

Our twin destinations were the Duomo at Casale Monferrato in hot pursuit of traces of the Knights-Templar, and the Nuova Capelleta winery in Vignale Monferrato for some bio-dynamic barbera.

Both destinations recommended. The wine also.

Carmine quotes No. 6 : On heating with wood

One degree at 8:30am. Frost. Clear skies and bright sunshine.

Today...is tree-felling day, and the growl of Emmanuele Ferrari's chainsaw (see November 2007, Carmine quotes No. 1 : Weather forecast) is echoing off Carmine's ancient walls.

Hereabouts they have a saying about heating with wood :

"Wood heats three times : once when you cut the tree down, once when you split the logs and once when you burn the firewood."

And heating with wood prevents us being held to ransom by the electricity and gas suppliers. That makes me feel very warm.

Three-and-a-half degrees at 9am. Thick mist over the lake, obscuring Switzerland from view. Damp.

Christmas greetings

One degree at 9am. A bright, clear Christmas Day turning misty towards sunset.

Here's a Christmas View from Carmine Superiore. Merry Christmas all!

s.Messa di Natale

One degree at 8am. Bright sunshine. Clear skies. No wind. Today in the woods the first white crocuses and mauve periwinkle are blooming. For lunch we eat the first of the wild chives. With pasta.

Thanks to everyone who made yesterday's s.Messa di Natale such a lovely occasion. Those who cleaned, those who decorated, those who brought pannetone and he who made the mulled wine. Most of all, thanks to those who came, packed our little church and the ristoro afterwards beyond capacity. It was good to have your company.

Carmine quotes No. 5 : On feeding the brats

Three degrees at 8:30am. Overcast and still.

Mette, Danish survivor of an 8-week visit to Carmine Superiore (just finishing) with her two children and grandparents various in a house with an outdoor shower and a single stufa that barely works.

"I've heard that you have to offer a child a new food ten times before he decides he wants to try it. So how come you have to offer the same child bon-bons only once?"

Christmas cleaning

Three degrees at 8:30am. Sunshine and clear skies. The breeze has become more noticeable overnight.

I have to admit I've had my head in the sand. Yes, yes, I'm ashamed to say it. I've been involved in hectic displacement activity for at least the last three weeks : frantic craft activities with the children, lots of reading Christmas stories and researching Christmas traditions, several bouts of Christmas shopping, and much to-do surrounding the kindergarten Christmas festa...

But the time has come to face the truth.

The time has come to clean the house. (Mama reaches for a brown paper bag and blows into it.) There's a lot to do and only a small window of opportunity before I find another excuse not to.

Standing in the middle of a rather dishevelled bathroom, inspiration comes to me. It must have been Fay Weldon who once wrote : "The cleaner the house, the angrier the woman in it". So, I reason, all I have to do is get angry and the house cleans itself. Rather (but not quite) like The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Rather more like Samantha in Bewitched.

Now the English are world-famous for not allowing themselves to get angry. And I'm no exception. The steam may be coming out of my ears but I'm still smiling a polite smile and offering tea. It may not be easy, but I think it's worth a try...

Positioning myself in front of the toilet, I stand feet apart, arms akimbo, and try for an angry frown. The toilet squats impassively in the corner and doesn't move - it doesn't even flush itself. Hmmm.

I start to mutter under my breath, approaching the sinks menacingly. Nothing. Not even a drip. Okay...

Now I'm trying really hard. I close my eyes, still my mind, concentrate, concentrate. I combine my hardest Paddington hard stare with some choice Old Norse(1). My words ring around the stone walls. I do it again for effect. As the echo dies I open my eyes into the shocked silence. I look around, flushed and embarrassed at having made such a scene (even though I'm alone), but I'm deeply disappointed to see not even the slightest flurry of dust to denote the dressing table might be dusting itself. Nothing doing. Nothing at all. Niente.

Defeated, I gaze up at the basket of dusty cleaning products hung from a nail in a ceiling beam away from 3-year-old hands. As I'm reaching for them, I suddenly have more inspiration.

Where's that 3-year-old and his side-kick? Either: a.) they'll provide me with a reason to get really angry in a very un-English way and I may at last prove Ms Weldon right; b.) they'll provide me with an excuse to abandon the idea of cleaning altogether; or c.) and best of all, I can teach them to do it for me. And with a bit of luck Mamma can close that window of opportunity and go make a cup of tea.

***

(1) Old Norse? Of course! As the language that provided English with its most effective and least printable swear words. Interestingly, Old Norse also supplied English with the word 'angry'.

Three degrees at 8:30am. Sunshine and clear skies.

Do I miss minus seven with pea-soup?

Do I hell!

Talking Italian No. 3 : Seen in the windy city

One degree above this morning at 8:30am. Sunshine, frost, clear skies. That little breath of wind is still niggling away, though.

Amid the tinsel and the baubles in Verbania's borgo this week, mobile phone provider Wind is exhorting the customers of other networks to change to them.

We are asked, in their immortal words to :

"Passa a Wind!"

Mmmm - I think I'll pass-a a by.

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

Carmine quotes No. 4 : In vino veritas

One degree below at 8:30am. More sunshine, more clear skies and just the whisper of a wind.

AJ, age 3, hugging the neck of the recently-opened cremant bottle :

“When you need some more…"

(pauses significantly and looks around, gauging the level of attention in the room, then finds he’s lost his thread, is momentarily cast down, but then manages to finish importantly)

"...you need some more!”

Minus two at 8:30am. Frost. Clear skies and bright sunshine.

It could turn out to be a two-Mathilda day...

Carmine quotes No. 3 : On staying fit

Minus one at 9am. Frosty and cloudy with a technicolor sunrise. The chickens are deeply disgruntled - what kind of a hotel is this anyway? Their water is frozen.

Signora Cesarina. Ninety-something, with, as Ezio says, the mind of a 20-year-old. Tiny and stooped. Bright-eyed as a blackbird. Still keeps her goat and her chickens, and a guinea pig free-range in the stable to keep away foxes. Still walks up to the woods to collect goat food and kindling. And wildflowers.

"If you walk, you'll keep walking...If you sit, you'll just sit."

Three wise men, some friends and a Christmas tree

Zero degrees at 8:30am. Clear blue skies and frost. What happened to the threatening clouds and sleet of yesterday? Perhaps they were simply to remind us what beautiful weather we're having.

Today seemed like a good day to put up the Christmas tree.

Drum roll please

Two degrees at 8:30am. Lots of low-lying cloud mingled with wood smoke. And trying very hard to SNOW.

Thank-you to everyone who commented on the parenting dilemma I outlined in November (Parenting problem - can you help?), either publicly or privately by email.

You may remember that AJ refuses to eat anything at lunchtime at kindergarten. We pay, he says nay (actually, he says "Niente! Solo pane!"). My quandary was whether I should feed him a pseudo-lunch at home or on the way home after kindergarten, or whether I should make the little hard-head wait until supper-time (a tantrum-filled ten hours since breakfast).

The overwhelming response was to ignore his lunchtime mule-act and feed him whatever he wants when he wants it. I in fact decided to feed him a late lunch any time until 3pm so as not to spoil his appetite for the supper I hoped he would find delicious.

Now it's time for that drum roll.

Yesterday, AJ ate pasta al pomodoro at kindergarten. And everyone, including children from three separate classes, kitchen staff and teachers of other groups in other parts of the building, came running to tell me. AJ was the centre of an enormous, Italian, round of applause and not a few kisses. And you know, if I didn't know better, I could have sworn someone was throwing roses...

Signs are also that he is starting to expand his repertoire at home. He has added three new foods to the menu in the last week. His list of yes-foods is now about a dozen strong if you count three different kinds of fried potato and all the fruit you can throw at him (and boy do I want to sometimes). And this morning he demanded three times the usual quantity of porridge, a food that until today was a definite "no, no, No!".

Walking with him back up the hill yesterday afternoon, I discovered a fairly unfamiliar emotion bubbling up inside - elation. The topic of conversation in between bouts of "Old MacDonald had a farm..."? The fact that now AJ ate something at kindergarten, Babbo Natale, the Italian Father Christmas, will be hitching his reindeer to the chimney pots of Carmine Superiore after all.

Four degrees at 8:30am. A virtual carbon copy of yesterday except a couple of degrees colder and the word noioso (which my trusty Pocket Larousse tells me means 'annoying') has firmly established itself in my vocabulary.

Six degrees at 8:30am. Blinding bright sunshine and not a cloud in sight, but the breeze is becoming, in Ezio's words, "noioso".

Roses everywhere are blooming. Most especially our Nostalgia, St Swithin and Gertrude Jekyll. It's December. Can this be right?

A trout in the milk

Six degrees at 8:30am. Bright but blustery with white horses.

Consider this evidence : a bloody carcass surrounded by nine hens and one rather shaken cockerel all surrounded by a seemingly impregnable fortress.

Conclusion to which we jumped : the vicious chicks did away with their small companion in a fit of cannibalism.

Consider this evidence : a ruckus in the chicken coop and a bloody-beaked hawk leering over a dead chuck. Chase ensues during which chicken-keeper is viciously pecked by desperate hawk before it spies the open pollaio door and skims majestically away whooping with relief.

Conclusion to which we now must jump : it was thee 'awk wot dun it, me lud.

Hindsight research reveals that hawks are known to search for gaps in the wire, and unlike most birds, they are not scared of going into confined spaces (i.e. the coop) in pursuit of a chicken dinner for one. Shame we didn't know - the skies around Carmine are frequently visited by raptors of all sorts.

Palazzo Pollo has now been fortified - and the slingshot has been re-strung. We thought of hiring a young boy in a loincloth to act as chicken herd but decided he might get a bit parky sitting on a pile of wood aimlessly playing his flute all day.

Sorry to the girl who lost her life because we jumped to the wrong conclusion. At least she's now in the fridge awaiting cryogenic storage and we'll do our best to do justice to her when the time comes.

And sorry to the hens I previously likened to a bunch of over-educated British schoolgirls. It was uncalled for.

As Henry David Thoreau wrote : "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." But the lesson is that it's never strong enough to convict.

Book Notes No.2 : The Story of Christmas by Jane Ray

Four degrees at 8am. Clear skies and a slight breeze.

In the reading chair in our kitchen, huddled next to Mathilda the stufa in maiolica (see Ecco Mathilda, November 2007), AJ and B are fighting over The Story of Christmas by Jane Ray.

Jane Ray’s illustrations (Chagall meets Diego Rivera meets the masters of medieval illumination) combine with text drawn from the always-resonant King James version of the Bible to tell the Christmas story, starting with the Annunciation (that’s in March, remember) and finishing with the return of the holy family to Nazareth after their flight to Egypt.

This is really a stunning book, and if you’re stuck for a Christmas present, this could be it. The reading age is 4-8 years, but the illustrations are crammed with things to look at and talk about – animals, birds, fabulous patterns, figures doing everyday things in the background – and this means that reading it to a younger child (say, from eighteen months) becomes a voyage of fantastical discovery.

Somehow, Ray has managed to imbue her illustrations with a sense of depth, and a weight of meaning that seems rare among illustrators for children, but not out of place. And don’t get me onto the subject of the colours – just think of the vital glow of vitreous enamels.

Buy it. Read it every Advent, and I think you and your children will find something new in it every year. Get the hardback edition (sadly out of print but available on the second-hand market) - I don't think our paperback will last another year of such enthusiastic reading!

Reference: The Story of Christmas, Jane Ray, Orchard Paperbacks 1994, ISBN-13 978-1852139179

Three degrees at 8am. Breezy with clear skies. Frost.

Sickness always makes for brevity, I've found. And today 75% of the population of this house is sick.

Seven degrees at 9am. Overcast and feeling wintry.

A quick shufti around the neigbourhood reveals the hazel catkins are already on the trees and the winter magnolia is in bud. There are also signs of last year's bulbs already nosing their way above the soil.

Immaculate misconception

An unbelievable nine degrees at 7am. Sunny but very windy.

Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a public holiday in Italy, although you wouldn’t know it. Not many people here are taking a day off from the worship of Mammon in the Festival of the Runup to Christmas to remember something else.

AJ and B were both christened amid the frescos in the beautiful Romanesque church of St Gottardo here in Carmine Superiore, and in return for that great privilege I believe I promised to ensure that they learned something about Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. So I’ve been doing a bit of digging for information about those feast days we in the Church of England don’t celebrate and the Catholic dogma I never heard anything about when I was a church-goin’ proto-adolescent with a crush on the vicar.

What I discovered was a shocker (to Anglican me, at least).

No, a trilogy of shockers.

Shock No. 1 : the Immaculate Conception doesn’t refer to the conception of Jesus or relate to the Virgin Birth in the way I (and some parts of the British media, it seems) thought it did. If you think about it, it stands to reason. It’s just over a fortnight from Immaculate Conception to Christmas…which would make Mary's pregnancy the shortest in history (just think, no sooner have you done the pregnancy test than you’re in the birthing pool swearing at your husband).

The conception of Jesus is, of course, celebrated at Annunciation (25 March), when that slick old Gabriel, God’s Mercury, flashed Mary his archangelic fleur de lys. Let’s do the calculation that even the most challenged Conservative MP can do..oh yes, that’s exactly nine months before Christmas (der…).

Shock No. 2 : The conception in question is termed Immaculate not because St Anne was particularly tidy around the house, or, indeed, because she and husband St Joachim were virgins when they conceived Mary (that’s too far fetched even for me).

It was Immaculate because Mary is said to have been, from the very moment of her conception, free of Original Sin. How can that be when we’re all said to be tainted by the goings on in the Garden? Well, apparently God knew that Mary was going to agree to become the mother of Jesus, and Jesus’ death on the Cross redeemed her sins even before she was born, a kind of back-dated redemption applied on a one-time only basis.

(Imagine for a moment being able to do that for your kids. At the moment of conception you could put their names down, not for the local private school, but for everlasting grace and a glorious assumption when the time comes. I wonder which catchment area you’d need to live in…)

Shock No. 3 : The Immaculate Conception is not only a Catholic dogma, an idea, it is also, in some unfathomable way, a personage. As a personage, the Immaculate Conception is the Patron(ess?) of no less a country than the United States of America.

But do the Americans close their shops, shopping malls, markets and tv shopping channels on December 8th in order to spend their day celebrating their patronal festival? Dear readers in the US, I await your answer.

In the meantime, enjoy your shopping this Feast of the Immaculate Conception, but don’t forget, without Mary the Immaculate there ain't no Christmas.


Image : Saint Anne conceiving the Virgin Mary, Jean Bellegambe, Douai, Musée de la Chartreuse, found on the Women for Faith and Family website www.wf-f.org

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

The unkindness of girls

Four degrees at 8am. Overcast and still.

One of our chickens is dead.

Dead as a parrot.

I'm afraid to say.

In the absence of evidence pointing to any other hypothesis we are supposing that she, being noticeably smaller than the others in her peer group, was bullied to death by her sisters.

Now I went to an all-girls grammar school and I think I understand something about the savagery of the all-girl environment, but I never realised our little feathered screwballs could be so malicious.

Anybody out there know anything about chickens? Is this normal, or are we doing something horribly and fatally wrong?

The Feast of St Nicholas

Two degrees at 8am and a stunningly sunny day.

Last night, AJ hung up the largest homemade woolly sock he could find (in the absence of anything as sophisticated as a stocking). This morning it bulged with packages of edible goodies wrapped in strange shapes - nuts and fruit, chocolate and sweets. Mama closed her eyes at breakfast time and said a quick prayer for the protection of his little belly.

Cognizant of the possibility that one day our children will feel themselves lost between three cultures, not to mention three languages, we thought it might be a good idea to introduce them to traditions from their three 'countries-of-reference' - England, Germany and Italy.

The Christmas period in our house thus becomes a particularly busy time, when the children are lavished with presents and good things to eat not once but three times - on St Nicholas' Day (that's today), on Christmas Day, and on Epiphany. Any ideas I may have involving the systematic bribery of my children using Winnie-the-Pooh jelly sweets as the currency of corruption fly out of the window for a whole month.

It seems the Italians don't celebrate the generosity of St Nicholas, the one-time Bishop of Myra, on his saint's day, even though he is buried and has his main shrine in Bari, southern Italy. (Had the Italians been quicker to jump on the Santa Claus bandwagon we might now perhaps be sending Christmas lists to the Med. rather than to the North Pole.) Instead, after the New Year, figures of old hags start appearing on rooftops and in shop windows, and on Epiphany, La Befana (named for a childish corruption of Epiphania) brings piles of gifts.

What I want to know is what happened to St. Nick's faithful assistant, Black Pete (the original golliwog?), who, I'm told, always figured in stories of the saint. Has he fallen victim to political correctness? Or do German, Dutch and Belgian children still remember him as well?

Cat commotion

Six degrees at 8am. A pretty nondescript sort of day so I won't try to describe it.

Missing cat located this morning stuck on a precarious ledge made of stacked terracotta roof tiles (visible in the picture just below the shuttered ristoro window). Heroic rescue followed, involving an ancient lopsided and worryingly worm-eaten wooden ladder, a handful of leftover beefburger, and a certain number of tiles crashing to the ground. B. meantime involved herself with the food put out for a roving dog.

The cat ate like a hog (while B. ate like a dog), and seems fine except for a slight limp, a marked reluctance to jump and an equally marked desire to cuddle.

Talking Italian No. 2 : It does what it says on the tin

It's actually Tuesday, 4 December : six degrees at 8am and white-horse windy. A spiteful little rain shower accompanied our happy band on the morning descent for kindergarten, but now we're blessed once more with sunshine. Powdery snow on the hills on the south side of Valle Cannobina.

In Italian, it seems that some objects are named according to what they do. A verb shmushed together with a noun is a familiar form. Asciugamano, for example, is a dries-the-hand, a towel. Likewise, an asciugacapelli is a dries-the-hair, a hair-dryer. And the marketing men have chosen to call Italian kitchen paper towel asciugatutto, which is perfectly pertinent, I guess - tutto means everything.

Then there is the good old aspiropolvere, the sucks-up-dust, the vacuum cleaner – much abused in this house in the days of builders’ dust everywhere. In fact, I managed to kill stone dead three vacuum cleaners in the course of a single year (one, a delicate pink item, clearly unsuited to the rigors of a house in mid-renovation, caught fire in spectacular fashion one day in my frenzy to clean up prior to the arrival of our first house guests). After the third was laid to rest (vacuum cleaner, not house guest) we bought an aspirotutto, a sucks-up-everything - a dustbin with a motor and a tube attached. And it does, really, suck up everything, including stray corks, socks and teddy bears. I haven’t tried small children yet, but there’s always the possibility if they continue to find switching it off in mid-vacuum entertaining…

Indoors, there are the tagliaunghie (cuts-the-nails), the tagliacarte (cuts-the-paper) and the object lying undisturbed in the dust on the mantelpiece since M. (supposedly) gave up smoking, the tagliasigari (cuts-the-cigars).

Outdoors, we find the taglialegna (cuts-the-wood), the tagliaboschi (cuts-the-woods) and the tagliafili (not a son chopper, but a cuts-the-wire). Venture beyond the tranquil confines of Carmine Superiore as far afield as Milan (God-help-me) and you will need to take care lest you fall prey to a tagliaborse (cuts-the-purse), the Italian pickpocket.

But what if people also had such labels? What if, in the immortal words of the Ronseal adverts, we all did what it says on our tin?

AJ would of course be labelled mangianiente – eats-nothing (see November 2007, Parenting Problem - can you help?).

And B would likewise be labelled mangiatutto – eats-everything.

M. would have a wide variety of labels and none of them would do him justice, although perhaps cucinatutto (cooks-everything) would be a good start, and portatutto (carries-everything) would run a close second.

And Mama?

Well, she would have a great big label on her saying puliscepoupou (pulire = to clean). And, what with AJ's newfound love of hotching his full potty around the kitchen, B and her teething tummy, the chickens and the un-house-trainable housecats, you can be sure she spends most of her time doing exactly what it says on the tin.

Tell me, though, what would it say on YOUR tin?

References: http://www.ronseal.com/

First primulas

Monday, 3 December : fifteen-and-a-half degrees at 11am in the sun. It's warmer outside in a puddle of sunshine than it is in the bathroom. Angry storm clouds could this morning be seen welling up over the Alps and tumbling down the Valle Cannobina like boiling porridge, only to be transformed into pretty white puffballs as they reached the lake. Like us, even the weather is enchanted by the beauty of Lago Maggiore.

The first primulas are in flower.

Five degrees at 9am, but surely it can't be so warm? Bright blue skies with wisps of mist clinging to the mountains. I think there may have been a frost, but mercifully today I wasn't awake early enough to see it.

Cold. The kind of mild cold that makes your skin tingle and presages colder to come. Hazy sunshine.

The Christmas crowds are starting to gather. Better get the shopping done and hi-tail it back to the tranquility of our medieval citadel.