Thirteen degrees at 9am. Misty with more hazy sunshine.

Nature making art No. 1 : petals on water

Nineteen degrees at 9am. Oh, the clocks have sprung forward. Make that nineteen degrees at 10am. Now all day I'll be behindhand with everything. The weather is not much of this and not much of that, with hazy sunshine.

Looking for small flowers with which to brighten up the house this afternoon, we found fallen camellias making art in the old stone lavanderia. These pictures remind me of the waterscapes of artist and friend Danielle Eubank.

Eighteen degrees at 8:30am. Bright and windy.

The wild cherry and the peach trees are in blossom. There's a yellow wagtail wagging its tail on the terrace and a very pregnant Mama cat begging for terza collazione in the pantry. In palazzo pollo, the male chicks are trying out their first croaky crows.

Ernst

Warm and sunny with a businesslike breeze. Blue skies with sunshine sparkling on the lake.

Today in Germany they're saying goodbye to Ernst, the grandfather of my children. He left us so suddenly and it's hard to believe we'll never be seeing him again.

And yet he's everywhere in this house. His Wellington boots are by the door and his slippers are in the dressing room waiting for him to visit us again. In the drawer here there's a catapult he made for AJ out of a metal bottle closure, a rubber band and a piece of wood. In the freezer there are still supplies of his famous sauerkraut. And hanging from a hook in the kitchen, is his left-handed potato peeler.

And he's in my hands when I peel an apple in one spiral like he showed me or when I chop an onion into tiny perfect cubes.

And of course he's in the smile of my daughter, which so closely resembles his, and he's there in my husband, whom he helped to make and then gave to me to love.

Perhaps this is what it means to be a ghost.

Doing the Theory

Cold and dreary. The air is full of unrained rain, weighing heavy like unshed tears.

Today's small success at the Italian Ministry of Transport in Domodossola has been overshadowed by this week's very bad news. No cremant de Bourgogne for me tonight. Just a cup of tea and bed after a very long day towing two fractious children almost to the Simplon Pass and back.

Still, I just want to describe the scene of this morning's driving theory exam. B is in the waiting room 'reading' Il Mio Primo Dizionario Illustrato to a group of adoring office workers and driving instructors. Mama is in the examination room with the examiner, an ebullient woman in black velvet much given to laughing, a black Brazilian with peroxide corn-rows and an almost impossible-to-decipher accent (also taking the exam), and AJ sitting quiet as a mouse behind me with a single teardrop on his cheek to betray the fact that he screamed the place down when I tried to step into the examination room without him.

The exam itself ranks as possibly the best exam experience I've ever had. Not so much an exam as an animated conversation in pidgin Italian about various signs and what to do in various road-related situations, punctuated by as much laughter as you can get into 15 minutes in the absence of Willie Rushton and Humphrey Littleton.

AJ seems to think it was all good fun. Tomorrow, he says, he would like to take an exam. So that he can fly a helicopter, heroically putting out forest fires and rescuing hapless walkers in the mountains, before flying home for pizza and Fireman Sam.

His version of life sounds good to me.

Motherhood means...No. 4

A very changeable day. Started cold, middled hot and ended windy (again).


Motherhood means...

...having the opportunity to ponder the imponderables of human existence, like...why the baby wipes are always in the other room.

Feast of the Annunciation

Twelve degrees at 9am. Blustery and changeable. Sleet and snow earlier. Feeling shivery.

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrating old Gabriel's visit to Mary. Here's the fresco depicting the Annunciation from the Chiesa di San Gottardo here in Carmine Superiore.

Wouldn't life be so much more magical if instead of getting the news of impending motherhood from a little plastic stick covered in pee-pee, all mothers-to-be were visited by an angel conjuring flowers out of the air...?

PS Has anyone spotted Yulia Tymoshenko in this picture? Or is it just my imagination?

Growing up

Eighteen degrees in the sun at 1pm. Blustery wind and patchy sunshine. Feels unsettled. Carmine Superiore has about 75% occupancy today, with the continuing Easter stayers. There are also plenty of visitors stomping about.

There are some moments in life when it seems we are forced to grow up. Having been a passenger all my life, I'm suddenly confronted with being a car driver and all the responsibility that entails. With the keys in my hand and the children in the back I feel very grown-up (even though I don't yet quite have the licence), and it's quite scary.

Sometimes, as for us this week, several things happen all at once : a parent dies, perhaps, or someone or something comes along to change our way of life. And we wake up one morning in the certain knowledge that we have left behind the last vestiges of childhood. Now the luxury of dependency passes from us to someone else, and we find ourselves with their safety and their well-being in our hands.

Life changes and life moves on.

Easter Day

Six degrees at 8am. SNOW overnight; windy with patchy clouds. Thunderstorm during the night.

Happy Easter to All

In the great Easter egg hunt of life, I wish you
special places filled with delicious treasure, good companions to share it with
and not a drop of rain to make your yellow ribbons droop.

Good Friday activities

Today the weather is blustery with patches of sun.

Yesterday's weather was dry enough to paint almost all the benches on the mulattiera.

Thanks to everyone who turned out to help : Wolfram, Klaus, Tatiana, Oliver, Lukas, Marc and Michael. And thanks to Fausto for hauling the paint up. Now the benches are good for another couple of years!

Spring chicken

Yesterday I missed posting. The weather started warm and sunny with a wind. We had lunch outside for the first time this year. Later things got much, much colder.

Today is the first day of spring.

And here's a spring chicken :

San Giuseppe

Today is San Giuseppe – St Joseph’s Day. Of course, St Joseph was the husband of Mary, and foster father to Jesus, and a carpenter (apparently, though, he may also have been a stonemason).

He’s not only patron saint of carpenters and cabinet makers, as one might expect, but also of house hunters (I guess because of his search for “room at the inn”). His patronage also covers, unsurprisingly, expectant mothers, unborn children, families and married people. And travellers, immigrants and emigrants. And Sicily.

St Joseph’s Day is also in Italy the Festa del Papa’.

Happy Father’s Day to both the fathers in my life.

Reference: Image from Catholic Forum http://saints.sqpn.com/ (unknown artist)

Reported conversations No. 6

Twenty-six degrees in the sun at 10am. Clear skies and white-horse-windy.

In the bathroom last night...

Mama (getting out the hairdryer and plugging it in) : Come on AJ, time to dry your hair.
AJ : No!
Mama (picking him up and putting him on a chair so that he can see in the mirror) : What do you mean, no!
AJ : (to the mirror) No dry hair! No!
Mama (brandishing the hairdryer and switching it on) : Well, you can't go to bed with wet hair...
AJ : (best grimace to the mirror) No, dry hair! No, no, NO!
Mama (switching off the hairdryer and using her best Reasonable Mama voice) : But why not?
AJ : (looks directly at Mama) You'll blow my hair away and then it'll be like Opa's...

A milestone for Mama

Twenty degrees at 10am, sunny with patchy clouds and a bit of a wind.

Carmine is fuller today than it was before the weekend, with people arriving for the Easter break, and we are starting to see more day visitors tramping through the woods and hiking up the hill. It's nice to see a little more human life up here.

Today I drove the children to kindergarten, with a large P showing in the rear windscreen and M. riding a rather nervous shotgun.

It may not sound like much to you, but for me it's a milestone.

Damp day

Eleven degrees at 9am. Everything is dripping with last night's rain, and the mist is drifting in shreds up the valleys.

Here's a Sunday view from the bathroom window :

Plant pot problem

Twelve degrees at 8am. Blue skies with thin veils of mist over the lake and Lombardy.

As you must know by now Carmine sits on an outcrop of rock looking east towards Lombardy across Lago Maggiore. My most frequent lament is that there is no road big enough or even enough for motor vehicles. So what comes up usually doesn't go down again.

When we first took over this house it was full of the previous owners' possessions. This included furniture and pictures, cooking implements and tools. Straw-filled mattresses, handmade crockery, eiderdowns and quilts. A chest of drawers and a linen chest were full of handmade bedlinen, tablecloths, a few clothes - all put away interleaved with soaps and lavender so that even after a decade undisturbed you could use anything straight out of the drawer.

Most things we found here we've done our best to preserve. And this includes objects we like and some we don't. And some we positively hate.

Among the treasures we found were four enormous reconstituted concrete planters. There are a number of them dotted around people's gardens and terraces in Carmine - someone at some point must have been offered a job lot and somehow got them up here.

How they got them up here is a mystery, though. It takes two big men to shift them, even when they're empty. So much physical effort for so little beauty!

And here's your problem for today. I want these ugly-wugly 1970s vexations-to-my-spirit out of my life. For good. I can't carry them down and take them to the dump because I can't carry them. I can't smash them to smithereens and bury the pieces because they're indestructible. I took a sledge hammer to this one last year and despite my best fair-ground swings left not so much as a dent on it. I can't burn them because they're fire retardant.

I'd welcome your suggestions on how to dispose of these appalling objects once and for all.

The younger generation are catching up

Eleven degrees at 8am with patchy sunshine. It's magnolia time, and I feel that 'P' word coming on again...

Today I received an email from one of my oldest friends, who lives in the glorious Wiltshire countryside not far from Bath in the UK. He let drop that the eldest of his nephews and nieces are now 30. When I'd picked myself up from the floor, comforted the cat who was terrified by my strangled gurgles of disbelief and was finally sipping at an emergency cup of tea, I started to think over my options. They seem to me to be three-fold. Either, I:

a.) enter a phase of the most profound denial, expunge all memory of former times in Wiltshire from my mind and never engage in such dangerous email banter with old friends again; or

b.) have a fully-blown mid-life crisis including buying lots of very expensive, very unsuitable clothes, flirting with young men on the bus and dyeing my hair Goth black to get rid of the grey ; or

c.) go plant some lettuces.

Where's me trowel?

Twelve degrees at 8am. Sunny, and after a wind-battered night, there's just a warm breeze.

Twenty-eight degrees at midday.

Basta freni

Nine degrees at 8am - am I right in thinking that average temperatures have risen quite a lot recently? Mixed blue skies and cloud with sunshine at present.

This week I'm taking an hour's driving instruction every day. The children are once more with their German grandparents and I'm on my honour to make use of every moment of child-free time to "forward this project" as they might say in big business.

My instructor and I are having a blast. Well, actually, he's having a blast. For the princely sum of €28 an hour he sits in the passenger seat wearing Gadaffi-effect mirrored sunglasses and blasts me. He doesn't stop blasting me for a moment. If I hear "Basta frenare ... basta freni ... basta... basta ... BASTA!" one more time, I'll die laughing. Basta frenare means 'get off the brake'. It's a cultural thing you know - in England I was taught to brake for junctions and roundabouts, here it's, well, different.

For 60 fun-filled minutes we pootle along at something more than the local speed limit of 50 klicks an hour, waving at policemen, tooting his friends and laughing about the pedestrians I've just narrowly missed in the tiny, winding, cobbled streets of Intra's vecchio borgo.

In the last few weeks on the road and in the classroom at the scuola guida, I've come to understand far more profoundly than ever before that driving habits are cultural. For example, English tourists driving hire cars with Italian plates instantly give their nationality away simply by indicating when leaving a roundabout. Other nationalities might, to give another example, slow down as they approach an amber light, but if Italian blood pulses hotly in your veins you will speed up to get through before the change to red.

Here, this desperation to beat the lights has been formalised into something called the onda verde, or green wave (a bit like a Mexican wave but with greater practical application). Signs appear on the side of the road giving the speed at which you have to be travelling to get through the tedious series of traffic lights ahead of you. Without stopping. Sometimes you have to be going scarily fast, and the existence of this advice (do 80klicks+ and the traffic lights will be with you) is faintly worrying.

It reminds me of very late nights on the Marylebone Road - a huge inner city dual carriageway in London - where silly young people who thought they were immortal would try to drive the whole length of the road in a battered Triumph Herald without hitting a single red or amber. If you wanted synchronised green all along, you had to be doing a thoroughly illegal and very stupid 90-100 miles an hour. I have to say though, that this was (omigod) 25 years ago, and there was nothing but us on the Marylebone Road at oh-God hundred hours - today the Marylebone Road is gridlocked 24/7.

Back to the subject. I'm told by my antacid-popping instructor that if you're going straight backwards, there's no need to stop for traffic coming up behind you. They'll stop if they can't get around you .... Oh, and you're a disgrace if you use the handbrake EVER, unless you're parked somewhere dark and quiet and don't want your tryst to be interrupted by a runaway car.

Here's a quick vocabulary roundup for would-be learner drivers in Italy:

Divieto di sosta = no parking (except when there's an R in the name of the month, the Pope's on the tv and/or Italy is without effective government)

Divieto di fermata = no stopping (except when there's an R in the name of the month, the Pope's on tv, Italy is without effective government and/or you've just seen a gorgeous girl you want to get to know better)

Limite massimo di velocita' = speed limit : 50 in towns, 90 on main roads, 110 on dual carriageways and 130 on motorways, double it for males aged between 18 and 26 in red cars with the sun roof open, especially if the gorgeous girl is now in the passenger seat

Dare la precedenza a destra = give way to the right and confuse the hell out of Louise who can't tell her destra from her sinistra even on a high-progesterone day

Senso vietato = no entry (one way street), unless the street happens to have your favourite bar in it, in which case entering it in reverse gear is fine as long as you resist the urge to check out of the back window while you're doing it

Fermarsi e dare precedenza = Stop and give way, unless you're doing 50km/h in third and have forgotten to brake/change down because you were busy checking your lipstick. In which case, lean on the clacson and go for broke (that's broke, not brake).

Happy driving!




The other parts of the story :

Learning to drive in Italy No. 1
Learning to drive : denouement
Learning to drive : epilogue

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

After the rain

Five degrees at 8am. The sky is miraculously clear with bright sunshine. The Alps are glittering purest white and so are the mountains behind Maccagno and Cannobio. All things, things natural as well as things human, look better in the sunshine.

San Gottardo in the mist

Seven degrees at 8am and raining.

Visibility on The Rock is down to about 100 metres.

Woodshed door, Carmine Superiore

Today's weather is overcast, cold and windy.

The cat sat on Mathilda

Five degrees at 8am. Cold and windy but again with bright sunshine. All those wishing to start sowing their early salad are on their knees praying for rain.

There's a rather disgruntled one-year-old female tabby lying on top of Mathilda with stitches in her belly. This year there will be fewer kittens among the feral population than previously feared.

Of things yellow

Eight degrees at 8:30am. Bright sunshine, scudding clouds and strong wind. The forsythia is in bloom.

Yesterday the chicks went out into their new quarters in Palazzo Pollo, cordoned off from their parents for the time being. Last night's sudden drop in temperature was some cause for concern, but the fabulous five seem to have weathered their first night in the great outdoors well. It wasn't long before our enormous Bionda piemontese cockerel jumped the cordon to take a closer look at his third round of progeny, and professed himself content with an enormous crow that sent the little ones scurrying for cover.

Well, wouldn't you run for the hills if your father was 10 times your size with a vicious beak, spurs the size of your wing and capable of making a noise that wakes all the sleepers in a 2-km radius? Oh, and seven wives...

Motherhood means...No. 3

Eleven degrees at 8:30am. Bright and sunny with cotton-wool clouds and a light breeze.


Motherhood means...

...having a thousand suggestions for baby-product manufacturers to make their products useable.

Go on, ask me, Pampers, about the nappy packaging that you need a carving knife to open (the other hand holding down a squirmy, poopy 10-kilo toddler).

Ask me, Johnson & Johnson, about no-more-tears shampoo that becomes so viscous that it won't come out of the bottle in temperatures below twelve degrees Celsius.

Drop me a line, Tommee Tippee, and I'll drop you a hundred about how ludicrous it is that the lids of your overpriced sippy cups have a lifetime of 2 months and the cups themselves last about 20 years.

Call me up, all you makers of baby back-carriers, and discover that there are mothers under the national average for height who are capable of carrying a 10-kilo toddler, and so the straps need to be adjustable just that little bit shorter to stop my back breaking under the badly positioned load.

Just get me started.

Carmine quotes No. 7 : On unseasonally warm weather

Thirty-six degrees at midday in the sun (today you can do the maths). No Mathilda today either.

Signora Anna on the weather :

"This weather's good only for bugs."

The overworked doctor's receptionist waggles her eyebrows in agreement.

Fruit trees

As the midday bells sounded from across the lake today, the temperature in the sun was thirty-eight degrees. Yes, you read that right. Three-eight degrees Celsius. That would be, now let me see, (add 40, multiply by nine-fifths and subtract 40) 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. No Mathilda today!

With last night's wind, the mist and fog of recent weeks has been blown away and the day was crystal clear.

This weekend we've been planting trees. Three in total. Actually, two trees and one bush. A Williams pear, a Smile of Spring plum (what a wonderful name) and a pomegranate.

The blurb on the plum-tree label provided one of those unexpected moments of pure eroticism that gardening occasionally bestows :

Smile of Spring plum : This roundish fruit, with slightly pointed ends, has a firm, transparent, light yellow pruinose skin and a very deliquescent, juicy and sugary yellowish-white pulp...

Who writes this stuff? Whoever it is, I can't wait until late-June to find out whether there is anything behind the springtime smile.

In the meantime, the apricot tree has started to blossom and is already busy with bees :

Chick bulletin + 21 days

Seven degrees at 8am. Overcast and still in Carmine Superiore this morning.

The chicks are now 21 days old. They've been out of the egg as long as they were in it. The speed of their development continues to astound.

Here's another picture of Alpha (at least I think it's Alpha). He now has a tail, well-defined wing feathers, visible ears and wattles. And, as you've probably already spotted, there's nothing wrong with his digestion.

He also seems to have got over his agoraphobia. If this picture is a little blurry I apologise, but it was the best I could do with a rapidly moving Alpha in the short window of opportunity I had before I was forced to move rapidly myself - downstairs to prevent Number One Son committing sororicide.