Camellia season

Four degrees at 9am. Misty lower down but with clear blue skies above. There's a mischievous little tang in the air to remind you it's still i giorni della merla so don't get your bikini out yet...

Here's that perfect camellia...

Camellias are a special feature of life at Lago Maggiore. The especially acid soil makes it a perfect place for them. They were first imported into the region from their native China and Japan in the early 19th century, and Verbania became a centre for cultivating them.

Today the flowering season along the lake can be really spectacular, with almost every garden displaying a variety of hybrids. When he moved here permanently in 2002, one of the first things M did was to plant five camellias in the patch of land we hoped to one day call a garden (we're still hoping).

If you cant get enough camellias, there are always several exhibitions and camellia-related events in the Lago Maggiore area. These include an exhibition in a specially-created camellia garden in Locarno, on the Swiss side of the border, in March.

Chick-rearing, day 10 : candling

Four degrees at 8am with thick mist. One of our camellias has produced its first, perfect, flower.

Yesterday was day ten in our chick-rearing endeavours. From day six onwards, it's possible to tell whether the eggs have been fertilised. The technique is called candling, and involves holding a light against the side or end of the egg. A bit like ultrasound without the cold jelly gunk. Click here for a better picture taken by someone who knows one end of his camera from the other (and never forgets to take the lens cap off).

A fertilised egg shows either a network of blood vessels, or, later in the process, a dark mass. Sorry, no waving foetuses, and definitely no knowing whether the little one is male or female until weeks after they're born. Chicken grandparents will have to hedge their bets and buy yellow and white rather than pink or blue.

And the results?

It seems that our cockerel - generally useless at defending his girls - has not been idle with his other duties. All 16 eggs appear to be fertile. Not a single one has been voted out of the Big Brother roundhouse, and they will all be staying in the incubator for the second half of the game.

I giorni della merla

Five-and-a-half degrees at 8:30am. Misty.

The last three days of January are in Italy traditionally considered to be the coldest of winter.

They are known in Italian as i giorni della merla, blackbird days. Why? The simple version of the story goes that once blackbirds were white. One day in a very cold January, a mother blackbird took refuge from the cold with her little ones in a nice, warm chimney. When they emerged on February 1st, they were all black with soot and blackbirds have been, well, black birds ever since.

Now according to the UK Met Office, January is the coldest month of the Milanese year (no figures for Lago Maggiore I'm afraid...I think there's another job opportunity there). The Met Office list an average minimum temperature of -1.9°C and an average maximum of 4.6°C for the month. Now, I clocked 31°C in the sun at 12 midday yesterday (about 80°F), and an only-faintly-less-astonishing 9°C a few minutes after the sun peeped over the mountains across in Lombardy earlier in the morning.

Which sort of skews everything I'd say.

Perhaps in due climate-change course, the blackbirds in these parts will again change their colour. This time from black to tropical turquoise? And I wonder what picturesque little story will be invented to explain the change away...

Again, nine degrees at 8:30am with hazy sunshine and a hairdryer-warm breeze. It's warmer outside the house than inside, and this normally only happens in April, making me feel a vague disquiet...either that or I need some breakfast.

Book Notes No. 3 : The Last Secret of the Temple, Paul Sussman

At 8:30 this morning, the temperature on our little sun-free terrace was nine degrees. Sunny with a breeze.

“The intelligent reader’s answer to The Da
Vinci Code” - Independent

Yes, I’ve finished the trash (see January 2008, Book delivery). Of course it was trash. And of course I liked it. I had to. I don’t want anyone to think I’m not what the Independent might call an intelligent trash reader (flattery will get them everywhere). Here’s a quick roundup for those of you still dithering about whether it’s worth staying up for…

In Egypt’s Valley of the Kings a body is found, kicking off a series of events and discoveries for chain-smoking Egyptian detective Yusuf Khalifa. As he delves deeper into the dead man’s background, Khalifa realises that there is more to the case than at first meets the eye. The story veers from the invasion of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD to the suicide bombings and inter-racial hatred of present-day Israel, in search of an ancient artefact that could send the Middle East up in flames. (Can I have a job writing blurbs, please Mr Bantam Books?)

I did stay up for it, several nights and way past my bedtime, especially after the rather fragmented first part was out of the way. From the moment the various characters meet and start to piece together the mystery bit by bit, the pace starts to hot up, leading to a triple crisis at the end and a superb cliffhanger in the final moments.

I guess this book is different to DVC because of the depth of the background geographical, political, emotional and psychological scenery that goes along with the “explosive” plot, a depth clearly missing from Dan Brown’s massive bestseller.

Or perhaps it just means that all is not as it seems, and therein lie a number of explosions not caused by concealed explosives belts or underground arsenals.

I have two questions for Mr Sussman, though. First, are there really people in the first world who have to look ‘Holocaust’ up on Wikipedia?

And second, what happened to the shepherd?

Worrying symptom

Four degrees at 9am. Sun and clouds and a stiff breeze.

The ongoing kindergarten-plague seems to have a particularly strange symptom - Mama's going doolally.

Last night's supper of braising steak was served with caramel sauce instead of gravy (not bad, as it happens). This morning, after about ten minutes' sleep out of a window-of-opportunity of about 12 hours, Mama treated B's nappy area with Winnie-the-Pooh Berry Blast Training Toothpaste rather than barrier cream (could have been worse - could have been cleaning her teeth). It may have been something to do with the fact that she thought she had contact lenses in, whereas in fact they were clinging to the side of the bathroom sink where they had fallen without Mama noticing.

Let's hope we can get through turning the eggs, feeding the chickens, nursing the brats, booking 500 euros worth of airline tickets and reorganising the kitchen cabinets without further idiocies, reversals or calamities.

AJ the artificial hen

An impossible eleven degrees at 10am and an astonishing 21 degrees in the sun on the other side of the house at 11am (that's 70 degrees F for you Yanks and Brits). There's a strong, warm wind. The tall woman in North Africa has switched on her hairdryer.

Today we have a plague house on our hands. M. and Mama both have flu. B is cranky with flu-to-come. AJ crashed out of asilo with a temperature of 38 on Wednesday, and yesterday it settled at between 37.5 and 38. We thought we might do our bit for climate change, switch off the incubator and get him to sit on the eggs...

Identification needed

Two degrees at 9am. Clear blue skies with mist in the hollows and a jaunty breeze.

The last couple of days, Carmine has been awash with that smell. It arrives on the breeze on special days in mid-winter. It's the smell of things starting to grow. It's a pre-echo of springtime. It's as if a tall woman in North Africa has shaken out a rich azure-coloured rug and the smell of warm sunshine has wafted all the way here.

And as if by magic, a mass of tiny, nameless blue flowers has suddenly appeared.

Anyone know what they're called?

Chick-rearing, day three

Four degrees at 8:30am. Last night we were treated to very strong winds, which slammed into our tall-house-on-the-rock like waves breaking against cliffs. This morning, the atmospherical detritus of the last weeks had disappeared, leaving striking visibility towards the Alps. Bright and sunny.

So far, the eggs have survived in the incubator, which we placed in AJ's winter bedroom. They've survived B's compulsive twiddling of the temperature knob, which caused a major panic and a great deal of headless-chicken behaviour on the adults' part on day two. And they've survived AJ's nocturnal 'protection' ("I'll look after my bow-wow tonight, Mama - and your eggs..."). There might not be anything growing inside them, but for that we'd be blaming the cockerel.

Today we start the grand labour of turning the eggs. Three times a day for days, and days, and days. This is, apparently, so that the growing foetus, if there is one, doesn't adhere to the side of the egg and die. Also, so that each egg is more likely to get the warmth it needs.

What is there to say about turning eggs? Nothing, really. It's about as literarily inspiring as watching cold porridge congealing on the floor.

I guess it's time to go and clean up breakfast.

I'll pass on the politics

Three degrees at 9am. Damp and windy.

Today Carmine straddles a divide. A north-south divide. Not a north-south divide like Italy's, with its prosperous, industrial north and its more agriculturally-based, less affluent south. Not a north-south divide like bitter old Britain's, with its overcrowded, overfed and overresourced south and its gritty, hardworking, roughliving north. And definitely not a north-south divide like Nigeria, with its northern, politically powerful Muslim states and its southern Christian regions. No Muslims here. And beyond regular visits from a group of particularly tenacious Jehovah's Witnesses, and the influx of visitors at holiday periods, real Christians are a bit thin on the ground too.

But stand on Carmine's churchyard this morning with the beautiful Chiesa di San Gottardo beside you, and to the north you will see the Alps shrouded magnificently in a very, very big, black and angry cloud. To the south is sunshine, blue skies, twittering birds and spring flowers. Nothing so tedious as politics.

Feline escort

A lonely one degree at 8:30am this morning. Overcast, with a large body of cloud sailing down the lake, a trail of woodsmoke clinging to its underbelly. Frost

Today we slipped and slid down the hill on patches of frost and mud. We were accompanied, as so often, by an honour guard of cats, today numbering four. At a certain point they organised themselves two either side the path like the monumental lions that guard English manor houses in Hollywood movies and saluted as we slithered onwards.

They added a bit of grace to our otherwise shambolic rush for the bus.

Chick-rearing, day one

Two-and-a-half degrees at 8:30am. Evidence of a frost earlier. Bright sunshine with some clouds to remind you what they look like.

Sixteen eggs passed the sniff test, got a luxurious hydrochloric acid bath and are now nestled in the artificial hen at a constant temperature of 37.5 degrees.

Chick-rearing, day zero

Three-and-a-half degrees at 8am. Bright, clear skies. Today, we heard the first woodpecker, and we saw that the first daffodils are in bud.

Today would be a good day, we thought, to start some baby chicks.

All this week we've been on an egg-free diet, in an effort to collect enough eggs to make it worthwhile. Now I don't mind not eating eggs for a week, but M's risotto alla Milanese is something to blog about and his homemade vanilla ice-cream is famous in three countries. I miss them both. AJ also misses his risotto, which forms about one-third of his pernickety pre-schooler diet, so the first step towards breeding young chickens was to stockpile a fair amount of both.

Apparently you can keep unincubated eggs for about 10 days before they stop being potentially viable and start looking more like the kind of eggs that go with green ham (Sam I am). You just have to hope that you get enough of roughly the same size in 10 days to get things moving. A quick count reveals 19 in the pantry - that should do us.

Our chickens are a breed that don't go broody very often, so we're using the kunstglucke, a German-made 'artificial hen'. 'Incubator' sounds technologically complicated, but it ain't. The kunstglucke is basically a bit of shaped polystyrene, a foam cushion, a heating element and a thermometer.

Now, I know that they're potatoes and not eggs in the incubator. They're there while the incubator comes up to temperature. Yes, of course we'll be replacing them with eggs. This evening.

Watch this space, but don't be surprised if it isn't a bit like watching one of those intense black-and-white movies they show on BBC2 in the afternoons - not much happens for an awfully long time and then suddenly, there's a flurry of incomprehensible activity, quite a lot of shouting, possibly some tears and before you know it the credits are rolling and you're left mooching around the kitchen looking for a cheese and pickle sandwich.

But that's all pleasure to come. For now the burning questions are :

• how many of our eggs will be fertile?


• how many will survive Mama's delicate three-times-a-day turning?


• will the temperature remain what it should be?


• will we get the humidity right?


• will B. get into the room where the incubator is, lift the lid and splatter the contents against the wall?


• if any of the eggs make it to 21 days, who will be the first to hear the chicks cheep for their mamas from inside the eggs and what silly sod will be there cheeping back at them?

Reference : Incubator from Jaeger und Pfrommer.

Three degrees at 8:30am. Sunny and bright. Warm in sheltered spots. Breezy and chilly everywhere else. At 1:30pm the temperature had risen to 15 degrees.

Today, Carmine is replicating itself in shadows.

St Anthony Abbot

Three degrees at 8:30am, with blinding sunshine and a brisk breeze. Clear blue skies above, snow on the hills, including on Monte Giove, and a line of translucent white clouds slowly trekking their way south along the lake. Why have I never seen them trekking north?

Today is the feast day of St Anthony Abbot, a 3rd century AD Egyptian anchorite who is credited with being the father of the monastic tradition (long story). His sister, I read, directed an early community of nuns, but my sources don't even mention her name. I guess I don't have to ask why.

St Anthony is the patron saint of pigs (someone has to be). He takes care of other domestic animals too, but is also, interestingly, the patron saint of butchers (chickens take note). He looks after gravediggers too, and is prayed to for deliverance from all sorts of skin conditions and from the plague.

Another rainy day

Four degrees at 8:30am. Raining. Steadily.

Rain. I don’t mind the rain. It’s good for the garden. It’s good for the barrel-principle wooden bathtub. It’s not quite so good for hill-walking, but then again we’re not made of sugar.

Besides we have a roof. A new roof. A 60-tonne granite piode roof.

In October 2003, though, we didn’t have a roof. At least not on two thirds of the house. The old roof had been stripped away stone by stone, the piode that were intact had been handed down three stories through the house and piled in the ever-narrowing street. The detritus of perhaps hundreds of years had been shovelled down three stories (we’d stripped the floors and ceilings out, leaving only the supporting beams) into a glowering pile in what we called the entrata, but which was really just a covered pile of muck with a door. All over the house, props had sprouted to support the internal cross-beams. In the kitchen, in the bedrooms, in the bathroom. At times the place reminded me of the forest of columns at La Mezquita in Cordoba (but perhaps not quite so geometrical).

Covering the whole lot at night were two massive tarpaulins.

In October 2003, Claudio Porta and his team, experts in building traditional piode roofs, had stripped away the old roof, and what happened next? It started to rain. Work stopped. The tarps were secured over the house, and Porta and the gang sloshed down the hill.

It rained and rained and rained and rained. It didn’t rain at weekends, but then the crew didn’t work at weekends even if they’d not been working during the week. M. and I trudged up and down the hill in our waterproofs. He working in Milan. Me taking Italian lessons, also in Milan.

It rained and rained and rained a bit more. We thought we might use all the timber and building equipment there was lying idly around the house to build an ark, but on reflection decided that getting the blueprints from the man upstairs might be a bit tricky. About as tricky as getting our blueprints for the new roof passed by the local comune's planning office.

One Thursday it was still raining. The woods were saturated, and so were Pandissima’s spark plugs (our rusting old car is the essence of Panda, hence the name). She mumbled and grumbled that morning, but after much coaxing she started and we thought no more of her and her mood swings. Off we went on the 45-minute journey to the train station at Fondotoce, and onto the 8am to Milano Centrale.

It was a long day. Some meeting kept M. late, but I waited for him. I waited in the school’s office after my class. I waited in the café next door. Eventually I waited in the rain on a street corner, pacing up and down, my high-ish heels splashing city-oil-slick rainwater up the backs of my city-slick suit trousers. Finally, he arrived and we ducked into a local takeaway pizza place for a bite. Then we ducked into the Metro and onto the last train home, a dank, fairly frigid affair with rainwater spurting into the carriages through gaps in the doorways and windows. It was nice weather for ducks.

The station at this end was awash. The wind was howling down the valley and spitting great gobs of water out into the Borromean Gulf. The car park was an unlit abyss of water-filled potholes and waves created by cars on their way past us. We ran to Pandissima (why is the car always parked in the furthest corner when it’s raining?), and jumped in with relief.

We paused for a moment, looking at each other in sophomoric delight at being in the dry, then M. turned the key in the ignition.

Several times.

He pulled out the choke and tried again.

He paused for a moment and this time we were looking at each other in dismay. Pandissima, who never liked the rain, was having the car equivalent of PMT.

So in full city regalia, I grabbed my waterproofs, jumped out and started to push. As I touched the car's filthy rear end, water instantly ran up my sleeves, saturating my jacket and my blouse. Don't you just hate that?

Luckily (ha!) the car was in the furthest corner from the station buildings, and the furthest corner happens to be the highest point of the car park’s fairly steep incline.

Pandissima started sulkily. I jumped in sulkily – my high-ish heels were slopping with muddy water and my hair was plastered to my head. Under the dim street lights, little Pandissima trundled through Verbania. The streets were quiet under the thundering downpour. No sign of intelligent life. Only the really stupid people were out that night.

M. put his foot down as we left the city behind and started to manage the many curves of the strada statale to Carmine. Soon, though, he was putting his foot down (carefully) on the brake as we realised that we weren’t so much driving home as aquaplaning, and there was a distinct possibility that we might take a bend the wrong way in the darkness and aquaplane right out onto the lake without noticing, the water was so high. The words 'lake-road, road-lake' ricochetted around my tired mind.

Slowing right down to a crawl, we inched our tentative way back to Carmine Inferiore and parked up. From the car park I could see our boat, Fulmina, dimly outlined where we had left her on the beach below. Fulmina disappearing and reappearing as the waves crashed over her bow filling her full with every wave. Then I saw M. disappearing and reappearing, his yellow waterproofs flapping in the wind as he crashed down the unlit rubble path through brambles and across precarious patches of corrugated iron to get to her.

M. turned the boat over with superhuman effort (considering he’d only eaten a single slice of pizza since lunchtime, and no spinach at all) and in total disregard for his shiny city-shoes and his made-to-measure tweed suit. The boat emptied of gallons of rainwater, he proceeded to drag it as far up the beach as the beach went up and to tie it with double, triple and quadruple knots to a tree.

Coming back up to the car park, he was besmirched and bedraggled and squelching about as much as me. We now turned our faces up to the little church on the outcrop 100m above us. It drifted meaningfully in and out of the low cloud and occasionally disappeared behind a sheet of rain. M. waggled his eyebrows at me somewhat less meaningfully, we took a deep breath in unison and started upwards.

After a couple of minutes it was clear that if the strada statale was awash with water, then the mulattiera (the twisty-turny unpaved remains of a mule track that leads up to Carmine Superiore and home) had become a river. No-one had had a chance to dig out the old gutters that would have directed the water into gulleys, streams and down to the lake. Instead, the water directed itself with some force down the path, at some points cascading down from outcrops, at all points dribbling off the tree branches. We waded up in grim silence. It was gone midnight.

Reaching the forest of scaffolding that was the path directly to our door, I fumbled for the keys and we tumbled into our building site. I reached for the lights. Nothing. As so often during adverse weather, the electricity had gone out.

We shook off our waterproofs and felt for the candles. M. lit a fire in the hearth – the first hint of comfort after a very long day. Slumping down on the twin inglenook benches, we started to unwind with glasses in hand.

In the candlelight quiet that followed, we both listened to the insistent patter of the rain and the thundering of the rivers down the valleys on either side of us.

Drip, drip, drip.

I think we both heard it at the same time.

Drip, drip, drip.

Not outside but inside.

Bloody hell! It was raining inside!

On investigation, every room in the house seemed to have sprung a leak, and some places were becoming muddy with rain. In the makeshift lavatory, a particularly spiteful leak dropped headlong onto me as I took a pee in the darkness. Upstairs, the walls of the room we were hoping to turn into a bathroom were, appropriately, running with water. The cement floor in Ezio’s old kitchen was awash. In Luigi’s kitchen, a stream of water from the ceiling plink, plink, plinked onto one of M.’s large cast iron frying pans and then plop, plop, plopped onto the jar of Nutella that had been there since 1994 (but that’s another story).

Wearily we staggered to our feet and started a tour of the house with flashlights and receptacles of all kinds, locating leaks and placing buckets, potties, saucepans under them. We sopped up puddles and moved bedding to drier spots.

At about 2:30am we were back at the inglenook, with the second bottle, and some bread and cheese. We were exhausted, damp, tired beyond sleep. We stayed up, staring into the fire, until four. Companions in adversity.

When I finally carried my candle up to the dripping bedroom, I sent up two prayers to any of the Carmine gods who might be listening : the first was a prayer of hope that this would prove to be the worst day of our renovating lives; the second was a vote of thanks that we were not, after all, made of sugar.

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

The life and death of chickens : targetted advertising hits a snag

Four degrees at 8:30am. Soggy. And smoggy - the low-lying clouds are dripping with the smoke of Cannobio's many wood-burning stufe.

Another chicken was taken by the damn hawk at the weekend, but at least M was close enough to wrangle the dead bird out of the hawk’s claws, pluck it and have it in the fridge before you could say Chicken Little.

If you’ve been reading a while, you’ll know that we like our chickens a lot, we try to feed them organic, non-medicated feeds, give them a decent place to live, a daily forage in the woods and a quick, fear-free end.

If you’ve been reading a while and have a good memory, you may remember that at one point for a few days this weblog bore the emblem of Google AdSense, which supposedly matches the content of the site with advertisers, and pays the site producer (i.e. me) an unspecified amount per hit (on the advertiser site, not the blog). The idea is that if you’re reading this particular content, you’re more likely to be interested in the advertising the computer matches it with.

What’s the connection? Read on.

The first targetted advertising that appeared on A View from Carmine Superiore was for IVF treatment, I suppose tagging on to the label Mother-over-40. No problem. Next we got something on some cosmetic surgery clinic offering breast implants – I guess after I wrote about breast feeding. Hmmm. Tenuous, but still not a problem.

Finally, I wrote about our beloved chickens. Google AdSense picked up the word chicken and went into overdrive. We were instantly treated to the details of a Dutch company that sells second-hand equipment for the mass slaughter of battery-reared birds – equipment capable of “dealing with” 2,000 plus birds per hour. Nice stuff. Not!

I’m telling you this now because today at scuola materna AJ will be watching a cartoon of the story of Chicken Little. I was searching the Web, hoping to remind myself of how the story goes so that we could do some preparation (rather like reading the synopsis of the Italian opera you’re about to see so that you can at least follow the goings-on if not all the words). And lo and behold there it was again! Beside the description of this well-loved children’s story, we have Ads-by-Google Dutch-Company-Selling-Chicken-Slaughter-Equipment. Hmmm.

Now I know that a computer can only do so much of the work of a human, and differentiating a website that clearly is pro the humane treatment of animals and one that discusses factory farming in a positive light is clearly beyond the program’s coding. It sees the word ‘chicken’, and ‘thousands of cruelly-slaughtered chickens per hour’ is what you get.

Google AdSense? Google NonSense!

I can see only two remedies, one for Google AdSense and one for me. Google could make it a policy to turn away advertisers that may cause offence in easily foreseeable contexts. Like this one. And if that’s unthinkable, Louise could overcome her avarice and turn off Google AdSense.

And that’s just what I did.

Wildlife sighting No. 1

Five degrees at 9:30am. Rainy, overcast and humid.

Cannobio seems to be wallowing damply in post-celebration self-pity. The Mussolini Calendar 2008 (see November 2007, Calendar Boy) and its mate the Storia del Duce Calendar 2008 are lying limp, dog-eared and neglected in a wire bin outside the newsagents. The girlie calendars are nowhere to be seen, perhaps they've been taken inside for fear of making people feel colder.

Over the weekend, Franco has dug out the old drainage channels all along the mulattiera - probably using a zappa (often translated as 'hoe' but really more like the ancient adze). Without Franco it's possible that the path would have washed out. Thanks, Franco. Where would we be without you...?

On the way back from the first asilo run of the day, we caught sight of a large mole skittering along one of the ditches Franco cleared and ducking down a culvert. Pink hands, pink nose, lush brown fur. Probably the same mole that's been devastating the garden over the past year. But a treat to see him nonetheless.

Did you know that a group of moles (God help the garden) is called a 'labour'? And in early English a mole was called, wonderfully, a 'moldywarp'.

Reported conversations No. 4

One degree at 8am. Not raining, but soggy. Overcast and dull.


M : [surveying the kitchen floor] There's a special place in hell for mothers who let their children run around with dry cornflakes in bowls.
Mama : [reaching for the dustpan and brush] Believe me, they make their own hell...

One degree at 8am. Raining, but with tell-tale snow in the frost pockets and clinging to the palm-tree-fronds.

Carmine's semi-wild cats have decided that our pantry is a good place to be on days like this and are experimenting with ways to keep warm. The latest feline solution is making a pile of themselves five cats deep in the laundry hamper. Looks cosy to me...

Book delivery

Three degrees at 8:30am. Its raining bleakly and the clouds have gotten themselves tangled up in the treetops. The lake has assumed a steely grey aspect not unlike the North Sea (but without the 100-foot waves and the container shipping).

But I’m not down.

Today a parcel of new books has arrived. The arrival of a parcel of books always generates much excitement in this kitchen. Tea is made, a parcel knife is located and we all go “ooh” and “aah” when the bubble wrap comes out. We peruse the cover of each book carefully – the blurb, the author biography, the list of ‘Other books by this author’, and most excitingly, the quotes splashed all over the place describing the story, praising the author and generally saying “buy me”.

Today’s delivery is a mixed bag. Some of the books purport to be “Literature” with a capital “L”, worthy of the most serious of readings – emphatically not at eleven at night “’twixt sleep and wake”. And possibly also worthy of being taught on some ex-poly literature course to spotty students, even though they’re always “’twixt sleep and wake”.

The rest? Well, let’s face it, I’m a lover of trash just as much as the next girl, and trash is about as much as I can manage at eleven at night, after 12 hours with two half-pint loons followed by four hours with a bottle of burgundy and the washing up.

Looking at this varied collection of books, it struck me that publishers surely use review quotes not only to persuade you to buy the book but also to say something about whether the book is Literature or just A Damn Good Read (not that the two are mutually exclusive, I hasten to say). Can you tell which of these books falls into which category just from the quotes? ...

Book 1
“The intelligent reader’s answer to XXX (famous book).” Independent

Book 2
“Breathtakingly inventive”. David Mitchell (should I know who he is?)

Book 3
“Intelligent, unusual, and absorbing…” Scotsman

Book 4
Err – I can’t find a review quote anywhere in the book…at all.

And…which of these books would you read first? If you give me an answer soon, I’ll stay off the burgundy and go to bed early whether you choose the trash or not.

Two degrees at 9am. Bright and sunny with frost in the pockets. And a blithe breeze that blows no-one but the warmest-dressed any good...

The long prospect

Three degrees at 8:30am. Damp and overcast. Not a good day to spend wandering around in Cannobio, but that's just what I did (for my sins, many and various).

Cannobio seems to be a town dozing after its seasonal revels. A town sitting in a cafe over a long-drained cup of cappuccino, staring into space.

Up the hill in Carmine, the last of the visiting Carmenitts have left for home and those for whom this is home are settling down behind closed doors for the new term, for the coldest part of the winter and the long prospect towards Easter.

One degree at 8:30am with a frost. Mist over the lake is clearing and it looks like it'll be a bright wood-cutting day.

Reported conversations No. 3

Three-and-a-half degrees at 8:30am. Overcast and damp. Has anyone mentioned to the god of Carmine's weather that the forecast is for sun?


AJ : Mama! Shadows! [Shows Mama the shadows on the wall made by the hanging laundry].

Mama : Oh yes, shadows. Do you know how shadows are made? Well, let me see. Here’s the light bulb and light comes out of it in waves. I know you can’t see the waves, you just have to believe me. Okay, forget the bit about the waves. The light shines on the wall. But if I take this cushion and put it in the way of the light…

[Mama - ‘O’-level physics with an ignominious grade C - proceeds to lecture on light waves, the difference between reflection and refraction, and related issues … ]

Mama : …so you see, that’s how shadows are made.

[Long pause during which Mama looks at AJ and AJ seems lost in thought.]

AJ : Mama…

Mama [expectantly] : Yes, darling?

AJ : My trousers are falling down…

Epiphany

Three-and-a-half degrees at 8:30am. Cloudy with a stiff breeze. Not raining, but dripping (if you know what I mean). And getting brighter by the minute.

Here's the depiction of the Three Kings visiting the child Jesus at Epiphany that's visible on the exterior of the church of San Gottardo here in Carmine Superiore. In case you're not clear which is which, the 13th-century Lombardy artist who painted them added their names - Caspar, Melchior and Balthazaar. I wonder how many Carmine natives of the 13th century were able to read them.

Seagull story

Three degrees at 8:30am. Raining steadily.

The Castelli di Cannero were built by a couple of local ruffians at the start of the 1400s, about the same time that Carmine Superiore got its church. They were constructed on two small islands off the western shore of Lago Maggiore and their ruins can still be seen today from the lakeside road between Carmine and Cannero (or from the Via delle Genti sentiero from Cannero to Cannobio). The islands attract many waterborne visitors in the summer months but before Easter and after September 1st they are usually undisturbed by the (mostly) half-naked sunbathers with their portable barbecues, their boom-boxes and their begged-stolen-or-borrowed flashy motor cruisers.

In spring, the Castelli are invaded instead by a colony of seagulls, who, it has to be said, are just as noisy as their human counterparts with their spectacular aerial displays, their groups of aloof adolescents and tribes of toddling chicks.

It was in June of 2004, that M. and a five-months pregnant proto-Mama took to our boat to pay the Castelli a visit. There we disembarked and lounged around in the sunshine a while (oh halcyon days!) enjoying the absence of our fellow humans and trying not to intrude upon the doings of the birds. Inevitably, M. decided he needed to seek a quiet place for some doings of his own and when he came back he was unusually animated. A fledgling gull hurt among rocks inaccessible from the beach. Our aluminium Canadian instantly transformed itself into a doughty lifeboat and off we went as animal rescue warriors to investigate.

When we reached the spot, the bird was already making its escape by water. One wing was dragging, and it seemed clear that it was useless, for surely the bird would be making its escape by air if it could. When it saw us it started to swim for its little life.

Our hastily-formed plan was for M. to drive the boat close enough for me to reach over the side (despite my five-months bump) and grab the seagull. What might happen next we hadn’t thought through clearly. As we carefully manoeuvered the boat closer and closer to the youngster, a flight of dive-bombing relatives took off screaming from the walls of the Castelli and we were hounded constantly as we tried to reach the gull. Finally I got him, pulled him into the boat with his webbed feet still paddling desperately and flung a beach towel over his head. At once he was calm and quiet. I felt a bit like a policeman smuggling a celebrity criminal out of court to a waiting car as we belted back to Carmine beach as fast as Fulmina the boat could carry us. Fulmina was named ironically. It took a while.

Leaving M. to drag the boat out of the water, I started up from the beach with the gull clutched rather precariously to my bump. Hearing the noise of the road ahead, he started to squirm. In a panic he flexed his good wing. It was surprisingly strong. I lost my grip momentarily. Then his head popped out from under the towel and a beak instantly flashed for my eye. He missed by less than inches. Ungrateful rat-of-the-skies, I thought.

Finally and with much ado, we had him up the hill and into the unrenovated second kitchen of our house (100-year-old cement floor, a long bench, M’s desk, a heinous moss-green 1970s armchair – still, unhappily, there – and a handmade inglenook seat). The young gull skittered under the bench (even he had the good taste to scorn the armchair, initially) and he sat there with his back to us, sulking. Actually, he was probably scared half out of his wits and thought, quite sensibly, that if he couldn’t see us we couldn’t see him.

But we could see him. And as we looked at him it became clear that what might happen next hadn’t been thought through. At all. A long line of questions started to make itself apparent, snaking through our minds : what do baby seagulls eat? are they dangerous? could they harbour germs potentially harmful to the baby? do they need a pond to swim on and how do you stop them pooping all over the floor? And, more to the point, what was the extent of this particular seagull’s injuries and would we be able to find someone at 6pm on a Saturday afternoon to give us some answers?

The answer to the last question was, of course, no, and we had to wait until the following Monday to discover (after several futile phone calls to local vets) that the people we needed were the Corpo Forestale, or, more specifically, their designated veterinarian, one Dr Galligarich, whose office was in Stresa more than 50 clicks away.

And that the Italian word for seagull is gabbiano.

In the meantime, we fed the seagull pieces of choice tinned tuna from outstretched fingers and tried to avoid the worst of the beak. And we named him Jonathan (what else?).

Monday afternoon came after about 45 hours (as it would), and we found ourselves in Dr Galligarich’s waiting room with the seagull in a large cardboard box. We felt slightly out of place with a poodle on one side, an insane kitten-on-acid on the other and a fairly large rottweiler eyeing the box tensely from the furthest corner. Then two uniformed officers of the Corpo Forestale arrived carrying a tiny turtle with a severed leg, and we noticed behind a partition a dozen or more miscellaneous chicks in an incubator, and felt relieved to know we were in the right place.

The good doctor himself turned out to be a lover of all creatures wild and in need of TLC. At home, it transpired, he was currently keeping a marten upstairs, an owl in the study, an aged donkey in the garage, an aviary full of hawks and, to cap it all, a much-celebrated eagle in a hastily-built outhouse. Oh yes, and there was a baby wild boar roaming his driveway (but nothing surprised the postman any more). Dr Galligarich rebroke Jonathan’s wing and strapped it up, although it was already, “a fairly old break that might never mend, so don’t hold your breath”.

“And by the way, it’s probably not a boy but a girl.”

“Oh yes, and don’t worry, they eat anything…”

Over the next few weeks we did hold our breath and tried to stop Jonathan, I mean Johanna pecking away or getting wet the bandages that supposedly immobilised the broken wing and protected the open wound. Problem was, she was determined to bathe at every opportunity – the first being a very small bowl of water put down for a friend’s dog. The second problem was that as soon as she regained some measure of energy, she decided to continue to learn how to fly. Every minute of every day was spent, when not bathing or eating, finding a raised spot, pooping, and then launching off into mid-air before crashing to the ground always on the damaged wing. The heinous 1970s armchair suddenly came into its own as the launch-pad of choice and we supplied a landing pad made of the box that Etna, our wood-fired stove, arrived in (remember I said how useful large cartons can be?). Jonathan, I mean Johanna would hop up onto the hearth, from there onto the inglenook seat, and onto the arm and finally the back of the armchair. She’d poop (as I said), then make a strange squeak before crashing to the ground again. I’d say she was perhaps a year old before the sad news finally sank in : she would never be able to fly. And worse, that she was set to spend the rest of her natural life with us, looking down on the lake from on high, not from the air but from the rock.

So we all settled down to our routine together. I got more and more pregnant. We acquired a kitten who was promptly persecuted by Jonathan, I mean Johanna, oh dammit! the Gabbiano. The bird decided that she did like the 1970s armchair after all and it became her nest for a while.


We dug a deep pool in one of the streams that runs through Carmine, and the bird was to be seen parading to and from her bath once a day, often followed, like the Pied Piper, by a trail of onlookers young and old. The Gabbiano started to become famous. People would knock on our door and ask if we were the ones with a pet seagull, and could they take a photograph. Yes and No was always the answer. Always in that order. And by the way, she wasn’t a pet. A resident, perhaps. An ungrateful lout of a teenager, yes! Pet? Definitely not!

Kitten-baiting was one of her favourite pastimes. A twitching tail carelessly dangling from a chair would be nipped within seconds. Kitten toys (and baby toys, I hasten to add) would be stolen and pecked to destruction. The Gabbiano would even lie in wait for the kitten in order to give him a jolly good peck and then run away, almost, we thought, giggling. The kitten decided the top of Mathilda, our 6-foot-tall wood-burner, was the best place to be.

Through the winter, the bird lived in the outhouse and on the terrace. In the evenings she would come into the kitchen to scrounge anything that might be going, particularly in the way of high-quality Parmesan. It transpired that while most herring gulls eat anything, our herring gull (for herring gull she was) ate almost exclusively fresh fish, and the more expensive the better. Sardines, whitebait and anchovies were her staples, with a little bit of cat fur thrown in whenever she could get hold of the kitten.

After eating, and catching a few tossed wine corks for fun, she would find the widest space in the kitchen from which she could see all four compass points. Satisfied that she had us all covered, she would pull one leg up and tuck it into her breast feathers, then turn her head backwards and tuck it under her wing. We had become her family, and we were on watch, so she could get some shuteye.

AJ was born and the kitten threw up every time he cried (which was a lot). The Gabbiano continued to live in the outhouse and guard the Rock from her perch atop a planter on the terrace. She devastated my patio plants with her pecking and her picking. Visitors to Carmine would stop to stare at her, and I was more than once embarrassed to find myself being photographed in my pyjamas as I came out onto the terrace to say good morning to our celebrity.

Spring came and then summer, and the Gabbiano’s feathers changed to adolescent spotty. She started to make a strangled sort of cry, most frequent when other gulls could be seen wheeling over the lake. Her beak changed colour and became much, much harder. On our daily walks to the stream, her escort, whoever it was, would always carry a stick to fend off tourist dogs (frequently and illegally off the leash). We needn’t have bothered. The Gabbiano became famous that year from Cannobio to Cannero, in Germany, England, France and Italy, for besting several canine intruders, including a very big German shepherd whose over-curious nose she bit and sent him whimpering back to his master (poor, gentle creature).

AJ grew, and after no time at all, it seemed, he was standing with his nose pressed against the fireguard that separated him from the outhouse, and saying his first word, “Nano” – his version of Gabbiano, and a general word for all birds until about his second birthday.

While the Gabbiano no longer tried to fly, she still poo-poo’d. Quite a lot. And cleaning up after her as well as a baby and the chickens was becoming a bit of a bore, so we decided that she was old enough to leave home and take a room in Palazzo Pollo, with the chickens as room-mates. M. dug a very deep pool and connected a supply of fresh bathwater from the nearest stream. She now had 20 times more space and 20 more friends to persecute. She was delighted. A second winter arrived, and we were able to report to Dr Galligarich that she was more healthy and seemingly more contented than ever before. She bathed daily. She ate well. Her broken wing was carried high against her body rather than dragging on the ground. She came out of the run when the chickens did. She fossicked around just like the chickens did. She pecked and squabbled with the best of them. She was undisputed at the top of the pecking order.

But when trouble came and the chickens headed instinctively for the shelter of nearby trees and bushes, the Gabbiano followed her own seagull instincts and turned into a statue. It didn’t help. She was a sitting duck for the hawk that struck her down. M. and AJ were nearby but didn’t make it in time. The last thing she did was to peck M.

Hard.

January 3rd was the first anniversary of her loss, and complete strangers still come to us asking if they can meet Jonathan the famous Carmine gull. Our lives are less glamorous without her, but we are glad that she spent a couple of summers with us, and we are glad to think that she could now be in gull heaven, wheeling and soaring through the skies on perfect wings.

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

Snow disruption Carmine style

Two degrees at 8:30am.

Early snow has turned, disappointingly, to rain enlivened by the odd flurry of snow clearly meant for another locale. But still, the ringing of enormous sledge hammer on hefty wedge has been silenced and the work of splitting and stockpiling wood for the winter of 2009-2010 has been temporarily halted.

Instead we're indoors misguidedly trying to work out how to dismantle an Ikea bunk bed in order to move it into a room above Mathilda so that AJ can benefit from the residual warmth at night. Stupid, stupid idea...

Snow in Carmine

One degree at 9am. Snowing wetly. It's as if some experimental Victorian has trapped Carmine inside a giant grey-painted bell-jar. We are cut off inside a dome of snow clouds. No Switzerland. No Lombardy. No lake.


As people are generally fond of saying : be careful what you wish for (see December 2007, A new year wish). And be careful what you say (see November 2007, Carmine quotes No. 1).

Here comes the snow...

Four degrees at 8:30am with an ominous folded-cotton-wool sky. Carmine's flags are barely stirring. Watch this space...

New year greetings

One degree at 8:30am. Sunshine and some hazy clouds.

The picture below was taken close to Carmine Superiore on New Year's Day 2002, the day we made the decision to buy our house here. The tree is no longer upright, but after six years work, the house, we hope, will be standing for a good few years yet.


Happy New Year. Whatever your goal for 2008, I hope it brings you solid ground to build on, pleasing materials to work with and the health and vitality to enjoy the results.