Coast of many colours

The weather in Carmine today : bright and breezy.

The many-coloured façades on Cannobio's lakeside promenade.

Asthma bulletin

Nine degrees at 8am. Days of rain came to a stomping conclusion last night with thunder and lightning and feline goings-on in the murky darkness. This morning we have relatively clear skies and some blessed sunshine.

Anybody remember this post? Well, yesterday was our fourth check-up with the "doctor-with-the-dolly", the paediatric allergy specialist at the hospital, and PHEW! we passed! Given that he hasn't had a crisis since January, AJ's asthma medication will be stepped down and Mama is patting herself on the back.

So it was all worthwhile :

• Sourcing and dragging up anti-dustmite bedding, washing it religiously at above 60° and airing it frequently in the sunshine
• Sourcing and dragging up a new and desperately expensive Hoover Accenta with newfangled, washable (anti-dustmite) HEPA filter
• Frantic bobbing around with a wet rag and a mop-and-bucket in a deft imitation of Mrs Swabb (Habeas Corpus, York Festival 1985)
• Dead-of-night mercy dashes to our top-secret hideaway high in the Swiss Alps (where dust-mite don't exist), at the first sign of a wheeze
• The blanket ban on cuddly kitties from bedrooms (blanket-bedroom tee-hee)
• Keeping short-stay dogs on the dog shelf and strictly accepted only in the absence of AJ
• Laying down a death sentence for the crime of rolling in the hay
• Exporting AJ to his Oma in Germany at the appearance of even an estimate for dust-producing construction work, let alone the workers themselves
• Camping out on the top bunk when summoned by a cough
• Waging thermo-nuclear-biological-feline warfare against the mice, who seem to have decamped elsewhere, taking their doo-doo and their other nasties with them
• Lurking about in bushes with my medicine cabinet in my handbag when the kindergarten kids go on a field trip - just in case
• And stalking around every morning and evening in a starched white apron, inhaler in one hand, pills in the other and a clipboard under my elbow (to M's obvious delight - strange, strange boy).

Having decades of asthma/allergy nursing experience to call on from Grandma, from AJ's unshakeable kindergarten maestra and from our wonderful family paediatrician has been and remains invaluable. Thank-you all three for your patience, support and reassurance. Asthma, even of such a mild variety as AJ's, can be a scary condition for a Mama to cope with alone, half way up a mountain with no road and in a foreign language.

For his part, M. purchased a lifetime supply of those widgets he puts in his ears so that he had a chance of sleeping through the nighttime rumpus. Well, one of us had to stay sane, I suppose.

The rain it raineth every day...

And now something to take our minds off the rain...the first rose of spring (AJ says this picture "looks like bon-bons"...)

Gertrude Jekyll

The first and last time you'll hear me get soppy about cats

Seven degrees at 8am. Squally. Yes, that's right, squally. Like Yarmouth Whitsun 1967. Don't ask.

The Mama cat seems to have done her disappearing act once again, and may well be holed up somewhere having dropped her 2009 litter. Bad timing, what with the sudden drop of temperature, the rain and all.

Carmine's semi-wild cats are an integral part of life in Carmine. Move into a house here, even for a week, and you'll be conned by a cat into thinking she's your friend before the second day dawns. Stay for a couple of years, be consistent with the Brekkies and the Friday fish-heads, and the Mama cat will be shoving her two-monthers in the small of the back towards your door, whispering, "Believe me, there's this big white thing in her house that's warm as toast - go settle your tush on it for the winter - it's better than a baita". Why she never invites herself in as well I'll never know, but I guess her standoffishness is what's made her such a successful breeder.

I like this kind of cat - the kind who come and go. Who were raised not in a house and sold on to a stranger, brainwashed into believing that the world ends at the apartment picture window and that the oft-absent owner is god. No offence. But I like these cats, the ones who grew up in the woods, who come because they want to and stay because there's something about you that they like (even if it's just the Friday fish-heads and Mathilda).

I like a wild rambler. One who disappears one day and reappears, thinner, three months later when given up for dead, when you're done crying over him and the last thing you expect is to be mugged one misty autumn morning by an ecstatic ball of prodigal-returned tabby joy.

I like our daily escort of three or four felines, the younger pair gamboling and skitting in the long grass, snapping at butterflies, pouncing on lizards, and the older two prowling along sedately with their tails held high, bickering all the way down. And I like it when we trudge back up to find them waiting in the undergrowth to meet us and greet us and guide us (or perhaps cadge a lift home).

I like counting the years of our presence here in Carmine by the successive litters of cats. The twin black cats, one now missing an eye, the other recently 'disappeared'. This Mama cat's first son (she was so proud). Her second litter, which was decimated by the marten. She cried for them for a week, and all of Carmine's mothers cried with her... I like telling the litters as someone from another culture might tell a list of ancestors. I'm hoping it will keep my memory intact, like Ezio's, into old age.

And I love to curl up somewhere warm with a half-wild cat cuddled against my belly. To fall asleep to the rhythm of his purrs and wake up with him stroking my face so exquisitely gently you'd think he was a lover.

Does all this make me the Cat Lady of Carmine?

Cold, misty and raining, raining, raining in a rather determined manner. The kind of rain that sets in and stays...and stays...and stays...

Quote of the week No. 19 : We are what we think

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him."

The Buddha.


PS Still cold. At least it's not raining and there are some sunny intervals.

Wisteria season at Casa Bava

Raining and cold. Ten degrees colder, in fact, than yesterday. Snow overnight on the mountains.

But let's look on the bright side...

The wisteria are in exuberant bloom all over Carmine and beyond.




And this is the most beautiful wisteria of them all, at Casa Bava, Cannobio's most celebrated wine merchant, itself celebrating the arrival of the latest (2007) vintage of its own-label wine, LagoBava.



The Bava family have been selling wine from this beautiful building for more than 100 years. Here you'll learn something about wine in general, and Piemontese wines in particular from the elegant and knowledgeable Bava brothers. And if you're lucky, you'll discover something of the history of Cannobio's fascinating lakefront in this ancient stone labyrinth of a house. You might even want to buy some wine...



Recommended.

Here be dragons

Seventeen degrees and clear skies at ohmigod 7:45am (kids in the car, my first packed lunch packed, noses wiped, teeth cleaned, hair groomed - oh yes, just call me super-Mama). Great weather to spend the morning in the garden, once the maternal anguish of sending the entire kindergarten off on its first full day-trip had passed.

Today is St George's day. In the 15th century, when St George was painted in the sanctuary of our little romanesque church, today would have been as important a feast day as Christmas. Not so in the modern era.

St George's story doesn't have to be retold, but I will anyway just to flex my storytelling muscles.

An itinerant Christian knight, George was wandering about Libya when he came upon a village terrorised by a dragon. It was kept quiet with meals of sheep, but when the sheep ran out, someone had the bright idea to substitute young maidens on the menu (they drew lots for the privelege).

George appeared at the moment when a young woman (some say the local princess herself) was about to be devoured. With a prayer and a swift blow of the lance he slayed the dragon, rescued the fair maid and became one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, the patron saint of England and the inspiration for the Knights of the Garter. Oh, yes, and he then went on to convert the population to his knightly God. The earthly rewards heaped on him by a grateful population he gave to the poor. He then mounted his horse and went quietly on his way ("who was that masked man?...").

Today in the British press, much will probably be made of the fact that the English don't celebrate St George's Day as vigorously as, for instance, the Irish celebrate St Patrick's Day. In the right-wing press it will probably be lamented, as it always is, as another proof of the degradation brought to the English by the multicultural society in which they now live. But I think the fact that our patron's memorial day passes by without our dyeing rivers green, drinking ourselves stupid or painting our faces with poor representations of common plants says much about the English and their saint.

For the English, George represents many of the human qualities we as a nation are said to hold most dear. Courage, chivalry, generosity, modesty, magnanimity and quiet strength applied when and where it matters. We consider ourselves slow to anger but swift and just in acts of retribution. The English, I think, still cherish many of the values of the age of chivalry even though that age may have passed away, and many of us find ourselves regretting its loss in an age more pragmatic.

Enough of George. What about the dragon? Of course, the dragon lies at the heart of English mythology. And dragons lie coiled in our own hearts - all our hearts, and all our lives. Dragons may appear in our lives in the form of unexpected enemies roused by the hunger of jealousy, or as impossible tasks on which our livelihoods depend, or as devastating disaster. And conquering these circumstances, events and situations may turn out to be our life's purpose.

But it's my belief that it's equally important to identify and understand the dragons we have to face inside ourselves, and perhaps even find also the George within us that will liberate us from our own dragon's clutches. It's also possible that, as in Forbidden Planet, that sci-fi classic remake of Shakespeare's The Tempest, the dragon within creates destructive manifestations of itself without...

On this St George's Day, I wish you the courage and the resourcefulness to tackle the dragons in your life, be they human, circumstantial or spiritual. And I wish you opportunities for acts of chivalry be you a knight exalted on his warhorse or the maiden who has drawn the shortest straw...

...And if you're a dragon lurking in a lake today, perhaps in the absence of mutton you might want to open a can of baked beans and shut the hell up...

Pic : St George slays the dragon in a street mural in Brissago, Switzerland.

A smiley day

The day started out at 13° at 8am, rising to 18° by 11. At 3pm, it was all the way up at 28, and the asilo mamas were sporting singlets and shades. The asilo papas thought that was pretty cool and there were smiles on everyone's faces.

Lakefront, Cannobio

Thirteen degrees at 9am. Mostly cloudy. A bit of sun breaking through now and again. But mostly cloudy.

Cannobio, between the moutains and the lake.

Summer term

Grey and wet at 7am. Skies overcast.

All our Easter guests have now finally wended their ways home via airports and alpine passes, leaving us facing our first Monday morning of the summer term. Better get the galoshes out.

The once and future fresco

Sometimes I wonder what the hexty-b-dexty Merlin is doing among the frescoes in the Chiesa di San Gottardo...

Four minus three equals twenty-one

A shockingly low 10°C at 9am as we played truant from kindergarten and blew straight through Cannobio heading for the Swiss border (oh the thrill of it!). Raining hard and solid. The cucumbers are happy, the zucchini are happy, the tomatoes, the basil, the parsley, the radishes, the lettuces and the strawberries are happy. A very soggy Mama, trailing two soggy ducklings wasn't so content.

Behind the scenes in Carmine, a small tragedy has been unfolding. Not one, but three of the four chicks we managed to hatch this year developed clubbed feet. Click here for more. We fear a vitamin B2 deficiency or a genetic defect that comes from breeding fathers with daughters. But we're not experts - any friendly advice or information gladly (and sadly) received.

So we've had for the last few days a young singleton free ranging in the bathroom - at three weeks he's big enough to skip his coop and investigate the big wide world. When anyone comes in for a spot of private business he skitters across the lovely larch floor and bounces on the least mobile pair of feet he can find. From thence to a knee, an arm and eventually a shoulder, where he sits preening himself proudly.

He reminds me of Jonathan/Johanna, our seagull friend, who lived for several years in the kitchen and on the terrace before being sent into the wilderness to terrorise our second round of chicks. Why should that be? Despite M.'s many attempts to teach the seagull to perch on his shoulder, our web-footed friend could never get the hang of perching, so the similarity lies not in that direction. No, it's the fact that Mama has been spending a large proportion of her time skittering across the lovely larch floor with disinfectant wipes in hand, clearing up the chick's private business... and being reminded of this post...Chick doo-doo is, you may be interested to learn, slightly less corrosive and slightly easier to remove than seagull doo-doo. But they're both devastating to a tight schedule of domestic labour.

So, I hear you cry, how does four minus three equal twenty-one? And what does that have to do with the price of eggs?

Well, yesterday afternoon's mission improbable was to find mister-I've-imprinted-on-a-human (aka Singleton) some chums.

First, I thought the answer might lie with the next nearest fluffy things - the cats. In the absence of mice to chase they must surely be bored enough to want to make a new friend. I caught Trouble lying across the bathroom threshold the other day, listening attentively to the chirping beyond. The look of guarded excitement on his young, feline face led me to believe that perhaps the cats were not it.

Sending Singleton packing back to mama-hen wouldn't do either. Singleton's parents wouldn't believe me when I tell them he's theirs, and at this stage would probably peck it to its place in paradise sooner than check its maternity-ward wrist-band.

So off I went in the World's-Most-Battered, with the two sproglets in tow, to a chappie I know in Verbania who had found me what our little yellow friend seemed to be hankering for...

Twenty two-day-old chicks (a euro a piece, poor things) - 12 boys, 8 girls.

A rent-a-crowd.

A porta-party.

And Mama went chirpee-chirpee-cheep-cheep all the way back up the hill.

Last night, Singleton bedded down in the very centre of a mound of warm, fluffy friendliness once more and didn't give my boots (or the disinfectant wipes) a second glance.

Mission accomplished.

Baita

Take the lower path below Carmine and you will find...

Signora Cesarina's baita.

Yesterday...

Yesterday, the temperature recorded in the shade on a south-facing terrazza in Carmine Superiore was 25°C. Warm enough for a sleeveless T-shirt. Warm enough for the children to decide it was time to go under the garden hose in the altogether. Sunny enough for strap marks and sunscreen.

And talking of yesterday, many thanks to everyone who turned up at our beautiful little church in yesterday morning's glorious sunshine to help lift outside all the wooden furniture and give it a healthy dose of anti-woodworm medicine. With so many hands, the job was done in a jiffy, and everything put back shipshape and Bristol fashion in time for a quick aperitivo before we all went our ways for lunch.

After lunch, this family hotfooted it into the garden where we cut the grass (on a slope of one-in-two that's a major operation), planted tomatoes, chilli peppers and cucumbers. Oh yes, and basil, which AJ calls pesto-plant.

And today? Well, today I'll be endeavouring to find a sensible place to plant three zucchini, six strawberries (in a garden already packed with strawberries) and some parsley (in a garden where this year the parsley seeds have germinated where they never before did). And I'm hoping the weather's warm enough again for more sunscreen and two happily naked bottoms.

The cutest butt in Carmine

Fresco detail, Chiesa di San Gottardo, Carmine Superiore

Happy Easter!

And cheers! I'm drinking a glass of fizz for Easter, after a 40-day drought, and it's delicious. I raise my glass to you, my cyber-friends, but in particular to Braja, and to her recovery.

Azaleas

Rain overnight, and the rising sun greeted a warm mist over the lake. Last night we slept with the windows open and the sound of the Carmine's running streams trickling in.

We are awash with places to go, and people to feed, water and bed down.

Meanwhile...

...slowly but surely, the camellias are giving way to the azaleas.

PS Today is the last day of Lent! Click here to know what it means for me.

Springwatch 2009 (again)

A strange, uncomfortable day. An open-window day, but overcast with the occasional drop of rain.

With the fall of the cherry blossom, early spring deepens towards Easter. (Now how did that happen? Only two more months to the long summer holidays!)

Carmine Superiore is almost full, with the usual suspects taking up their usual Eastertime activities - clearing and planting their gardens, doing a spot of light home maintenance, bringing in wood from the forest, hauling provisions up the hill, undertaking pest control, and most importantly settling in for some fairly arduous gossip (of which there is plenty).

And all around us there is four-legged rustling in the woods and meadows. The wild boar are once again causing havoc in the outlying meadows. They dig for bulbs and roots and wallow in any place offering a spot of mud. Moves are afoot to give them a welcome they're not expecting later in the year - more of that later in the year!

Last year's frequent visitor, the lone deer, is more and more often sighted up in Ezio's meadow, visible from the kitchen window. There's something comforting about seeing her gently grazing away up there in the quiet early mornings. I take it as a sign of a good day to come.

Talking of signs, there are signs of the marten everywhere, in the form of little piles of doo-doo ("Don't step in the doo-doo, darling"). The Mama cat, who is at the pity-me-pity-me-and-give-me-fish stage of her spring 2009 pregnancy had better hide her little ones good and proper. Martens usually eat only berries and fruit, but they can wipe out a litter in short order - kitten blood is a marten treat.

Of course, the place is crammed with nests, just out of sight, but noisy with chicks of all kinds. Our own two-week-old bionda piemontese chicks, have mastered pecking about and are now working on flying. I can hear the occasional ping from the bathroom as one of them hits his head on the heating lamp. Unhappily, there are now only three of them. Last night brought a scene of French Revolutionary character, when I discovered one hobbling about on its elbows having developed clubbed feet. It happens. Having determined there was only one thing to be done, M. did it (it takes a Prussian), while Mama wept over her remaining round-and-fluffies.

One animal curiously missing from Carmine this year, though - at least from this particular house - is the mouse. I've seen no mice and not a single solitary sign (read doo-doo) of a mouse since sometime last year, when the combined efforts of the cat and M's chocolate-baited traps put an end to all the scurrying about. Although I did catch last year's girl-kitten practising with a pair of AJ's rolled-up socks the other day, so perhaps she knows something we're just about to find out.

And finally, Mama is looking forward to her Easter glass of crémant on Sunday...

Love and the boys

Eighteen degrees at 10am. Blue skies. One might even say it was hot in the garden this afternoon...

If you have read this post, or, indeed, this post, you'll know that this writer is a dualist at heart. I'm a real sucker for the black-or-white, the either-or, the if-not-then. Happily for me, in my rather chequered experience of men, I've found there are only two kinds. There are those who live life for the love of women and those who would always prefer an evening at the bar with the boys.

The other day for tea we entertained several guests, including two chaps who had both spent some time in Finland. They were happily swapping memories, when the subject of Finnish arose. Both, it seemed, had learned only one phrase in that most remote of languages. The first, recently and very sadly widowed, but still managing a twinkle for a pretty girl, declared in Finnish : "I love you" (I won't try to do it in Finnish, I don't trust Google Translate). The second put down his cup and chocolate cake, dredged his memory and, with a delighted smile came up with : "Two beers, please".

See what I mean?

Quote of the week No. 18 : Advice for writers

"The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."

William Saroyan (1908-1981) American playright and author. Saroyan's writings, mostly about life as an immigrant to the United States, is still in print. Perhaps his most famous is My Name is Aram, which was an international bestseller on publication in 1940. His breakthrough novel, however, was in 1934. Titled The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, it tells the story of a starving young writer ('twas ever thus) trying to keep body and soul together during the Great Depression.

Perhaps in this New Depression, it's due for a revival?






PS 15°C at 8am. Overcast but not raining.

SS Pietà, Cannobio

Fourteen degrees at 8am. Sunny with a warm breeze. Mathilda, the clay oven that heats one-quarter of the house, has been cold for several days now, and it seems that I may today be doing the last wool wash of the season.

Campanile and dome, SS Pietà, Cannobio
And check out that perfect blue sky!

Company in Carmine

Fifteen degrees at 8am, rising to 28 degrees at 4pm. Sunny with a breeze.

Holy Week. And Carmine is starting to fill up with Easter visitors. And by the difficulty in finding a parking space by the kindergarten this morning, so is Cannobio.

It's good to see lights in the houses which have been dark for so long. Good to see the smiling faces of our friends and neighbours once again. Good to be planting the garden and tending week-old chicks that now have their wing-feathers, and great to be looking forward to another Enid Blyton summer.

But our thoughts are also with the people of Abruzzo as they scramble across the debris of their lives.

Knickers to you!

B. (aged two and three-quarters) is head-over heels about knickers!

Yes, this is my third attempt at potty-training my daughter, and I'm hoping the current knicker festival is going to tip us over the edge into success.

We've got all sorts of knickers - blue, green, red, white, yellow and of course pink, pink, pink. Blue-and-pink ones, pinks-and-red ones, white-and-blue ones, pink-and-pink ones. There are dotted ones, spotted ones, striped ones and frilly ones. Knickers with butterflies, with flowers, with little bows, knickers with ice-creams and knickers with dinosaurs (no wait, those are AJ's).

And we are experimenting with getting them on and off, backwards, forwards, on our heads, arms and feet. Sometimes several pairs at once. We wear them with big woolly socks, with Thomas slippers, with blue wellies and sparkly pink wellies. And we are learning to drop them quickly and smoothly before settling on the potty (preferably). And pull them up at the close of business (preferably).

Teddy is wearing them. So is dolly. So is rabbit. And so are Action Man and Spider Man, on whom they look more like streaming Tuareg robes than undies. The toys take tea wearing them. They ride around in the dolly pram wearing them. Sometimes they even find their way to the car and thence to kindergarten (at least they're clean...ish) wearing them. And the favourite book of the assembled company of knicker-sporting cuddlies? Aliens Love Underpants, what else?

B delighted her audience of one yesterday with an impromptu ditty as follows :

"Knickers dirty on the floor,
Knickers dirty on the ... (looks around) ... wall
Knickers dirty ... (a long pause for inspiration) ... up the CHIMNEY!"

(And an armload of colourful cotton is flung into the air with all of a little girl's might in the general direction of the fireplace.)

Knickers have even been the cause of the latest B. disaster. Chasing her ever-patient (ha!) Mama around the kitchen, thwacking her with a pair of yellow butterfly 100% cottons, she tripped and caught her face on a bench. So many people have remarked on the shiner she's currently sporting 2cm from her eye that I'm expecting a visit from the Mama-police any minute now...

I'll try to be polite when they knock on the door, but while this household continues to be gripped in frillies-frenzy, whatever the social services have to say, the answer will always be...

..."knickers"!

Cherry blossom

Grey and raining.

But nothing can obscure the delicate white prettiness of the cherry trees in blossom that are dotted across the wooded slopes behind Carmine.

From 'The Wasteland' (1922)

"April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain... "

I never before realised just how sensual T.S. Eliot could be - I guess I was too busy grappling with the monolith that is Modernism to taste the honey in the poetry. Although I do seem to remember a student friend, 25 years ago, declaiming the lines in the April rain, haloed by a London lamppost, all blond locks and plum-in-the-mouth, trying his luck at literary seduction. He failed. I guess I should have listened harder. Or maybe I'm being unfair to myself. Maybe what it took to come around to the power of these few short and very famous lines was simply to turn 45 (as opposed to 21).

But isn't this wonderful? Those short, pithy images that the mind can't help lingering over. Those genius verbs at the ends of the lines when they should be at the beginnings of the next, pushing the reader onward, just as the new buds push out of the earth. Making us feel slightly short of breath, perhaps. And perhaps evoking his Romantic forebear, Keats, and his ode 'To Autumn'.

Of course, Eliot is talking about mid-life reminiscences (memory and desire), long-unused senses (dull roots), pain to come (the cruelest month)...

Isn't he?

Image courtesy University of Toledo Libraries, USA.