At the bus stop

This morning, in Verbania Intra's central market place, three hapless and pale figures waited at a rainy bus stop. Shivering in the wind. Bus after bus passed them by. No-one raised a listless hand to flag one down. Each took his turn wandering to the end of the street and back, then standing on one spot for five minutes before wandering off again. Vans stopped in the bus bay and the three looked askance at one another, then back at the bay, calculating mentally whether it would be possible to draw in a car behind or in front. All let out a sigh of relief when each vehicle moved on.

Eventually, a small Peugeot drew up carefully. The three watchers at the bus stop snapped to attention. A gay figure stepped out of the driver's seat and bobbed off down the street, seemingly in buoyant mood. The man in the front passenger seat beckoned to one of those waiting and he reluctantly climbed into the driver's seat, looking as if he were on the way to the scaffold.

Twenty minutes later the scene was repeated. More gay bobbing from the erstwhile driver, as if delivered from a fate worse than death. More shivering from the watchers at the bus stop.

Twenty minutes after that it was my turn to take my driving test.

And twenty minutes later, as I pulled back into the bus stop, the shadowy figure wedged into the back seat of the car - the man with the craggy jawline, the clip board and the stiff neck - leaned into the front, and handed me my Italian driver's licence before expelling me into the rain.

I bobbed off to catch a bus for Cannobio to make what I hope to be my last kindergarten-run on public transport.



Recommended : Autoscuola Ceno, Cannobio and Verbania. Thanks to Laura for the coaching for the theory test (and putting up with two screaming children in the car all the way back from Domodossola), and to Romano for allowing me to do the hill start the English way (i.e., using the handbrake). Whatever I may have written to make you laugh about my novice driving exploits, these guys are the most professional and most talented driving educators I could have asked for (and I've been through a few). And we never broke the law or endangered anyone's life...your honour.

Also recommended : chill pills containing a near-miraculous mixture of valerian, melissa and hops.


The rest of the story :

Learning to drive in Italy : No. 1
Learning to drive in Italy : No. 2
Learning to drive : epilogue


Home

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

Alto Adige/Sud-Tyrol No. 2

Rain overnight. Damp and warm. More rain threatening.

In the absence of anything of note happening hereabouts, here are some more Alto Adige pictures. In the following, the stove doesn't work, the door handle does, the roof tiles are made of wood and the chicken on the right does, in reality, have a head.

Alto Adige/Sud-Tyrol

Eighteen degrees at 2pm. Overcast. The hygrometer hairs at the nape of my neck suggest it may rain e'er long.

Last Thursday we boarded Pandissima for a weekend's visit to Alto Adige/Sud-Tyrol (anybody know how to do an umlaut?). The trip included two heart-pounding, truck-dodging hours of novice driving on the autostrada to take us up into the heart of the mountains.

Alto Adige/Sud-Tyrol was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until the end of the first world war, when it was handed over to Italy. It became an autonomous province of Italy after the second world war. Both German and Italian are spoken here, although in essence, the region looks north rather than south for its culture, architecture and traditions. All signs are bilingual, and someone at some time or another seems to have been given the interesting job of translating all the original Austrian place names and street names into an Italian version. For example, the village name Unser Frau becomes Madonna in Italian, and a letter addressed to either one would get to the same place, adding, I would imagine, a fair amount of complexity to mail sorting. A second example was Baeckergasse (Baker's Alley), which I saw twinned with the slighly misleading Via Fornaio (Baker Street).

There is also a mysterious local language, called Ladin, which is similar to the Swiss Romansch and which itself seems to have a couple of distinct dialects.

To be recommended is Berghotel Tyrol which is situated in the high Val Senales/Schnalstal. It is the first hotel I've come across as a mother where I haven't had to chase a porter around the place trying to locate the pre-requested cot and have it brought to the room and set up, and where said room was large enough to accommodate two adults and two children with space also for their (always) considerable luggage. The food also was exceptionally good. Extras include a pool, sauna, games room and ski facilities. Plus very sympathetic staff, who immediately went in search of extra blankets when M. developed the fever that went with the stomach-bug (oh yes, we all had it in the end).

Thank-you to our hosts the Weithaler family, for their hospitality, and patience with the mess the children made of the dining room every meal time.

Outings included a visit to the beautiful Trauttmansdorff Castle Gardens, where some thoughtful person had bothered to insert all sorts of strange and wonderful gadgets and play areas for children among the exotic plantings and babbling waterways. This made it possible for everyone in the party, from the 69-year-old gardening enthusiast to the 21-month-old toddler, to find something of interest, and meant that there was almost no whining (from any age group) all morning. Lunch took place in the pretty town of Meran/Merano in a beer garden worthy of a place among Munich's most typical, sending M. into paroxysms of nostalgia.

The following day we walked further up the mountain to the highest cereal-growing farm in the region, at 1952m, where we tried some of the locally made Schnalser-speck, cured bacon. Rich, strong-tasting and delicious! The farmyard full of chickens, cats and lambs proved to be ample diversion for the children.

Strangely (for me, anyway), it is still winter in the mountains. The daffodils are just beginning to flower at c.2000m, an event that took place here in Carmine about a month ago, if not more. Driving back down to the lowlands became an exercise in time travel. The trees gradually greened, and soon the naked pines transmuted into row upon row of espaliered apple trees blossoming white and pink. At Trauttmansdorff Castle, thousands of brightly-coloured tulips danced in the sunshine.

And back here in Carmine the landscape is warm and lush. I've today declared summer, planted the tomatoes, and although it's going to be a little hard on the knobblies for the next couple of weeks, I've put away the long trousers in favour of summer shorts.

Thirty degrees at 11am in the sun on the bathroom windowsill. Bright blue skies with not a cloud in sight. A brisk breeze.

Today I found a moment to plant the second round of lettuce, to the evident interest of a 20-strong group of French walkers. Can't wait for the oleander we planted last year to grow into the envisaged screen. Then I might stop feeling like a circus exhibit whenever I'm in the garden.

Wildlife sighting No. 3

Nineteen degrees at 1pm. Patchy sunshine and windy.

Since Easter we've had a new resident in Carmine - a bird about the size of a sparrow with a pinky-red tail and distinctive white flashes.

I'm informed by my unimpressed husband that it's a redstart, apparently as common as sparrows in Germany. Despite it's being so very unexciting, I'm happy to see our little redstart - any addition to the fauna of the area, or indeed, any return of a creature once abundant here, is welcome.

He/she seems to like cat food. Can this be possible? Or is it coming to the pantry door after the enormous juicy slugs that also gather around the cats' bowl?

Reference : picture by photographer Gerd Rossen, who has a wonderful online archive of wildlife images.

Eleven degrees at 11am. Raining hard and steady. The landscape is starting to look like New Zealand's temperate rainforests, minus the fossilised trees. Here in Carmine no fallen tree has time to fossilise; it's chopped up and hauled into a woodshed before the dust has had time to settle.

In the stars

Sixteen degrees at midday and overcast. Today the weather's still not good enough to warrant a change to what I think of as my 'sunny Carmine' picture, so you're stuck with the 'rainy Carmine' picture for another 24 hours at least.

The dotties are still floppies, and the plants are still potted. Mama is sitting in the kitchen drinking tea and writing lists in an effort to heave life in Carmine back on track after recent ordeals. Today's full moon is in Scorpio (my sign, didn't you guess?), and Saturn, Pluto and the Sun are forming a beautiful golden triangle to bring positive energy and good luck. Watch out world, if you're on my list you're going to get tidied, planted, packed, mended, nursed back to health and generally sorted out...


Horoscope courtesy Susan Miller, possibly the best astrologer I've found since the loss of the late Patrick Walker.

Carmine quotes No. 8 : Il futuro di Carmine

Warmish and damp. As always after heavy rain there are streams everywhere you go in Carmine. The waterfalls are flowing and the pathways are rippling with water. The chickens have taken refuge on top of the chicken coop to keep their dainty little toes out of the mud. The 16 tomato plants, 8 cucumber plants, 4 courgette plants, 4 sweet peppers and lettuces various that I bought during a lull between rainstorms and expected to plant this weekend are languishing still in their pots in what I hope is a sheltered corner of the garden.

This morning I stood in for M. at a meeting with Cannobio's mayor at the town hall, in the impressive Sala Consiliare. At a guess 17th-century, stone walls, gloomy politician portraits, enormous gilt mirrors, regency-striped chairs, oval mahogany table, inlaid wood flooring and twin flags. And a mesmerising view of the lake through French windows. The same room in which M. and I were married, and with the same man presiding.

Anyway.

I was forced by M.'s absence to bring the two recovering-but-still-flushed-and-floppy dotties with me, and as I entered in an undignified flurry of pushchair, waterproofs and wellies, someone said, "Ecco il futuro di Carmine", here is Carmine's future. And that person was more right than he could have imagined.

It's a commonplace that children are the future. Of course they are. We expect them to outlive us, carrying a precious little spark of us with them into the tomorrows we will never see. The way we bring our children up, the values we pass on to them, dictate to a great extent the kind of place the world will be when they are old enough to influence it.

But recently, I've learned that children are the future in another and more immediate way. They embody and represent the future for us. They keep alive in us our belief in a future that can be better, or at least not worse, than the present or the past. They keep alive in us our belief that there can be a future at all, for us as well as for them.

When things get rough, and we want to quit, or when all we want to do is wallow in the past, the children are there with their demands, their needs, their naked desires. They drag us out of the past and propel us into the future simply by demanding that we tend to their needs from moment to moment and anticipate their needs from day to day. Despite everything. Their little bodies are our timepieces - breakfast, sleep, lunch, tea, supper, story, sleep... They carry us along with them minute by selfish minute, hour by selfish hour.

When things get rough, and we want to quit, the "Now, Now, NOW!" on the lips of a three-year-old could be our salvation.

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

Don't read this if you've a weak stomach

Nine degrees at 2pm. Lowering skies threatening more rain.

The wisteria is in flower, but there's no time to enjoy it. I'm too busy keeping an eye on two currently conked-out little forms curled up under blankets in the corner of the kitchen.

The kids have a stomach bug. At least, I think it's a random biological attack rather than my cooking that's responsible this time. And all parents know what those two fateful words mean - sudden gushings, yellow slimy stuff dripping through your fingers, impossibly wet nappies, stained underwear, and foul smells that won't go away even when you've got those carefully selected windtunnel-windows open to create a through-draft. And mound upon mound of bedlinen, towels and assorted cuddly toys to be washed and dried (in 100% humidity weather).

Am I grossing you out? Well, if you can bear to, think all that and then do it again - in stereo. Both children have a stomach bug.

My imagination gags when I try to picture this with triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, sextuplets...

It could be worse, though. I haven't got it.

Yet.

Good to be home

Ten degrees at 11am. Raining. The clouds mingle promiscuously with the woodsmoke from Carmine's chimneys, and the downstairs lavatory stinks.

In the week that we've been away, the grass has grown knee-high, the azaleas have blossomed and the rhubarb has shot up two primaeval-looking flowers. The woods are 80 per cent green now, and in the garden Gertrude Jekyll is shivering on the brink of blooming.

The wild boar have decimated Franco's orchard in their search for dinner.

And the Mama cat is super-thin, having just now dropped this year's spring litter.

Despite everything, it's good to be home.

The Carmine test card

When I was a child, 24-hour tv was a thing of the distant future. No breakfast tv. No daytime trash. No round-the-clock kill-your-child's-concentration Japanese cartoons. No 24/7 pop videos. British tv in the mid-60s started at 3:45pm with the children's programmes, and ended with the National Anthem at about 11:30. I have vague memories of children's morning tv, and I'm sure someone will put me right on this point.

So that you could tune your tv in while there was nothing doing on the screen, the BBC showed a 'test card', a devilishly complicated pattern of lines and colours designed to allow engineers to test reception and get the horizontals horizontal and the verticals vertical. (Anyone remember an engineer coming to the house to tune in the tv? I do! The world would be a different place if they still did it...)

Imprinted on the minds of hundreds of thousands of people who as children fresh-in from school eagerly waited for the tv set to warm up every afternoon is this image of a young girl (the designer's daughter) and a rather sinister-looking chum :

Leaving A View from Carmine Superiore without a test card of some sort has seemed increasingly wrong as the days of my absence have piled up. I'd like to have left a reminder that I haven't gone for good, and that if you're all patient just a little longer, normal service (perhaps even some decent writing, some juicy village gossip and a couple of interesting ideas) may shortly be forthcoming as scheduled. A glass of squash and a couple of garibaldi biscuits are good for whiling away the time, as I remember.

My first thought was a timely, witty and thought-provoking quotation of some sort. Then I remembered Dorothy L. Sayers' famous quote : "A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought". I guess it's true that there's not much original thought going on at all this week, but I don't have to advertise the fact, do I?

On further consideration, I thought that Carmine might be able to provide its own test card :

It's faintly appropriate in that it's the woman AJ sees every day as he begins his post-school walk up the hill (without squash and biscuits)...

So whaddya think?

Baggage

Twenty-five degrees at 1pm. Sunny with a breeze.

Today there is much preparation afoot, turning our thoughts away from our current distress, which is probably no bad thing.

Tomorrow we fly to England, where my heart lies. At O-God hundred hours. What bliss. But any pain will, I feel certain, be mitigated at the other end with the sight of my family's beaming faces and some good Mum's-home-cooking (because however inspired a cook your husband might be, there's nothing like the food you grew up with). Mind you, swapping twenty-five degrees for a promised high of seven degrees isn't what you might call a winning move.

As I work through my ever-extending list of things to find, things to pack and things to forget, it strikes me that once upon a time (when I was a young professional, and the international scene shone with the light of the pearl in my oyster) my packing choices were somewhat different. The Jean Muir or the Armani for the directors' conference (not as grand as it sounds, believe me)? The Chanel or the Jo Mallone for the team meeting? The sequins or the Laura Ashley for the New York post-premier party? And which three novels shall I take to while away those deliciously anonymous airport hours? Whatever the choices, the luggage was always the same : black, rugged, built to last.

These days, with two under-4s in tow, the choices are slightly less...City. Do I prefer the smell of dirty nappy in my handbag or artificially-scented nappy bag? (The answer to that one's not straightforward.) Is there space for a pair of heels among the baggy woollies, baby bodies and thermal vests, or shall I just go all country-in-the-city and stick with the Carmine-hill-walking boots that I'll be leaving home in? Will it be Wiggly Wormies or Chocolate Buttons (and chocolate airliner seats) for the emergency supply of treats? And if I take my newly-arrived copy of Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, do I stand a hope in hell of reading a single word while I'm away?

Funnily enough, the black, rugged, built-to-last luggage is still going strong, despite having had the zip-catch ripped off by a Mexico City baggage handler in the mid-90s, leaving it unlockable. Am I worried about baggage thieves? Not really. Unless you're two feet tall and looking for the hand-me-down washed-to-rags look, it's not worth risking a fake airport ID for.



P.S. Anyone spot the quote?

Twenty degrees at 1pm. Warm and sunny after a cold and overcast start, which saw Mathilda in service first thing (I spoke too soon again). Rain later.

I'm starting to sound like the Shipping Forecast.

Signs of spring

Thirty-four degrees at 1pm. Still windy.

Planted potatoes today, on a kind of reverse psychology basis. Last year M planted 25 kilos of seed potatoes and the yield was about 20 kilos. This year I planted only 5 kilos of seed potatoes on the expectation that they will think themselves all alone in the world and reproduce like crazy. In gardening, ANYthing is worth a try!

And we cut the grass for the first time this year.

It's been a couple of days now since we've fired up Mathilda. Perhaps she's on the way to being put into mothballs for the summer.

Thirty degrees clocked on the bathroom window-sill at 12 midday today. Still blustery.

The north wind doth blow

Ten degrees at 8:30am. Puff-ball clouds in azure skies. Very picturesque.

But the constant north wind. Is. Getting. Annoying.

In fact, all over Cannobio, the wind is being blamed for everything. And everything means everything from gentle dogs growling when they never growled before, to children having a day-long contrary fit, to the onions being slow to shoot in the orto. In fact, if there was milk to curdle, wine to go sour, and tomatoes to blight, it would today be laid at the door of the wind.

So if your hard drive goes down, your phone gets cut off or your car won't start, you know where to point the finger. And if you forget to buy bread, leave the cake in the oven too long or you take a phone call with the bath running and come back to a swimming pool in the bathroom, and the kids are driving you even crazier than normal, it's - not - your - fault.

Just blame the wind.

Chiesa di San Gottardo dates for 2008

Warm and sultry, but with a contradictory breath of wind every so often. Overcast. No temperatures today, I've lost me thermometer.


Here's a list of Carmine festivities for 2008, during which the church will be open and you'll be able to see the beautiful frescoes up close. If you're here on any other day and see me loitering around, feel free to ask for the key.

Sunday April 27, Festa di San Gottardo, the patronal festival Mass at 4pm followed by auction of gifts in aid of the church

Sunday July 27, Festa della Madonna del Carmelo Mass at 4pm followed by auction of gifts in aid of the church

Sunday October 26, All Souls Mass at 3pm

Sunday December 21, Christmas Mass at 3pm

Planting today

Twenty-two degrees at 12 midday. Sunshine and warm but windy at times.

Today we're planting strawberries and mint, and there are 5 kilos of seed potatoes waiting for Mama to get her act together.

Forgive, by the way, any lack of April Fool's jokes, toddler sayings, Carmine wisdom or amusing essays on life in Italy. The reason can be found here. Normal service will be resumed when I remember where I put my stiff upper lip.