The Carmine Caption-Writing Contest

Another warm and sunny autumn day outside, but indoors we're looking pretty war-ravaged after a night of scuola sickness, kindergarten cough and five-year-old fever.

"That stupid cat'll never notice me behind this clover..."

Alternative captions in the comments box, pur-lease! Go on, give us a laugh!

Motherhood means... No. 18

It must be the phase of the moon, or perhaps the changing weather, but somehow this week, I'm beseiged and beset by little ones looking for love. Cats, kits, chicks, and kids have all sidled up to me in the last few days looking for some seriouser than usual hugs...

...and it came to me this morning that motherhood means being okay with the fact that the term "Love Machine" now means something different to what it meant in the mid-70s...

Saying it with flowers

A misty start to Wednesday. Ten degrees at 8:30am. A sunny outdoor lunchtime followed, ominously, by an overcast afternoon.

Every day, Cannobio's kindergarten kids are greeted by one special friend, who inscribes her welcome - salve - with flowers.

Can anyone tell me the name of the sculptor?

Quote of the week No. 29 : Affair of the heart

Fourteen degrees at 8:30am. Blue skies and a gentle breeze.

After yesterday's fifth birthday celebrations (in which a horde of pint-sized pirates descended on Cannobio's Oratorio in search of treasure, chocolate cake and mischief), I walked back up the hill by starlight, hand-in-hand with my first-born at the precise anniversary of his birth. And I truly felt the resonance of this sentiment :

Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.

Elizabeth Stone (1801-1883) English writer and historian.

My autumn rose

Wednesday's rain brought slightly warmer weather. Yesterday, two little ducks at legs eleven. Warm enough to continue eating lunch outdoors in the blessed sunshine.

A rose for my little big guy. Happy birthday, darling.

Nature making art No. 3 : pomegranates

One of the things I love about Carmine Superiore is that every so often someone slips quietly through our narrow front door and leaves a little gift.

And I don't mean a cat looking for a quiet corner in which to do its private business...

On the old wooden bench - itself a gift - I have found great wheels of heavy dark bread from Franconia, a bottle of Pinot Noir from Bavaria, cheese from Hinterrhein, just beyond the San Bernardino tunnel, and fizz from Alsace. There have been walnuts fresh from F's tree and khakis from E's. Heaps of ripe plums and bags of bitter salad. And many times I have found magically-appearing Swiss chocolate for the children.

On Sunday, there were pomegranates. And the ghost of Vermeer shuffled his feet in a shadowy corner.

Autumn mist

Nine degrees and holding at 8:30am. The early mist finally resolved into rain, and by nightfall had resolved into mists again, threading through the woods and clinging to the chiesa like phantoms. All Souls is just around the corner.

Fiera degli allevatori

A less chilly 9° this morning at 8.30am. Probably something to do with the overcast skies. The mist over the lake today alternately concealed and revealed great flocks of tiny birds skimming and swirling their way south.

As a child living in leafy Warwickshire, a highlight of the school summer term was always The Royal Show, a livestock show that attracted the most beautiful cattle and horses from all over the UK, a plethora of rural craftsmen, and displays of equine and other country skills.

Oh yes, and the Royal Family.

As a teenager, The Royal Show stopped being a fun day out of the classroom and became a source of income, as I was there summer after summer in black pencil skirt, white blouse and sensible shoes, eagerly supplementing my pocket money by doling out fizz to blue-bloods.

Sadly, after 160 shows, The Royal Show is no more. A sign of the times, I guess, that the English no longer find it profitable to celebrate rural life, and the Royals are too busy pretending not to be royal to have time to swan around in open carriages and watch their nearest and dearest win the show jumping (again). I'm sad especially that the children from the nearby cities have lost such a grand opportunity to learn about what goes on beyond the suburbs. And that local people have lost a valuable source of seasonal work.

Sunday : To Traffiume, and Cannobio's fourth annual livestock fair. We saw piebald horses and and fed the Thelwell ponies. We saw some lovely cows and fell in love with a herd of beautiful black-faced Suffolks. We made the acquaintance of the tallest and most regal mule ever, and the tiniest of goats, no bigger than a Carmine cat, but smelling just as strong as its full-size cousins.

We tasted local cheese, local wine, local salami and, from the ladies of the Valle Cannobina in their traditional heavy pleated skirts and shawls, some delicious slivers of traditional torta.

Blokes in big boots stood around in knots, growling impenetrable dialect at each other. The women ditto, some minus the big boots. The children threaded their way through the crowds from one fold to another with hands full of the greenery most likely to give their chosen recipient-animal colic. The mayor, various members of the comunal giunta, and local vets ditto. All minus the greenery.

And of course, no autumn celebration in Piemonte is complete without the volunteers of the Croce Rossa building a big fire and roasting large quantities of chestnuts, and the chaps from the local band oom-paahing away somewhere nearby.

It was a great day out for children and adults alike, and I for one hope that it grows and attracts more breeders and particularly more local producers and artisans year on year.

And who needs the blue-bloods anyway?

Stuck!

You'd think they'd learn : one door for eggs, one door for cleaning out and one door for chickens. This is the egg door...

10° below

Today's morning temperature is a solid 10° below the temperature at the same time last year.

And I felt that familiar winter sensation at the tips of my fingers as I took cold, wet laundry out of the washing machine in the outdoor lean-to we use as a utility room.

Mathilda is burning a full month before she's normally roused from her summer slumbers, a broken thermometer in the first load of firewoood.

Don't know about you, but I'm having a shivery premonition about this winter...

Book Notes No. 27: The Widows of Eastwick, John Updike

Four degrees at 8:30am. Twenty-two degrees at 3pm. Sunshine

No-one who read Updike's 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick, or, indeed, saw the extremely successful 1987 movie adaptation, can fail to recall his bewitching coven of 1960s belles (played marvellously by Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer).

His sequel, set more than three decades after the end of the first book, sees the trio older (nay, aged), widowed and looking for answers. They pass their time, as fairly wealthy American widows will, travelling the world, but finding nothing of substance at the Pyramids or on cruise ships, until one of them suggests a return to Eastwick. In this old Rhode Island seaside town they find shadows of former loves, lingering traces of their evil deeds, and people who remember them. And some of those do not wish them well.

Just as the first book saw Updike developing his female characters for the first time in his writing career, so The Widows of Eastwick is notable as a delicate and gently humorous portrayal of womanhood past its prime, of widowhood, of the darkening fears of age and the search for contentment and some sort of resolution.

I loved The Witches of Eastwick when it first arrived on the scene. And being a big fan of Jack Nicholson et al., I loved the movie too. With this sequel, Updike didn't let me down. And I think he won't let you down either.

Status : see below

This morning I have serious doubts about the digital thermometer I glimpse fleetingly as I speed across Cannobio's annoying cobblestones kindergarten-bound. Today it said - wait for it - FOUR degrees. Surely it can't be? A quick triangulation with the digital thermometer on the computerized signboard announcing Cannobio as The Prettiest Medieval Town On The Lake, confirms it. Yes, a drop of NINE degrees on two days ago. That north-westerly did more than strip the bark off the trees.

Still, the sun's shining and the lake is glittering, and as long it's not raining hard enough to make a mudslide of the mulattiera, I'm not complaining.

However...

And it really is "a beauty, a badass, the mother of them all...".

Ho-hum.

PS Just imagine, at the tender age of 13 I (and all my girlfriends) thought Eric Stewart was the best thing in blue jeans...

Next door

Eleven degrees at 8:30am. Bright sunshine. After 24 hours of tantrum, the gales that kept us awake last night, that wrenched branches from trees, that shredded the stately leaves of ornamental banana plants and skewed road signs are reduced to a bit of stamping about and the occasional angry outburst. Reminds me of a four-year-old I know.

Door in rustic style, Carmine Superiore

Atmospherics

We've lost five degrees on the 8:30am temperature in the last few days - only 13° this morning, and the sprogs complaining of cold ears.

Chilly, windy, and with unusual atmospherics for our morning walk down.

Black as Hades over the Alps, but shining like angels' wings over the mountains of Lombardy, where the sun rises. A squall sends a shower of chestnut leaves jetting out across the lake, catching the sunshine and for AJ, immersed in his piratical world, showering down like so many gilded pieces of eight.

And a shimmering rainbow straddles the Valle Cannobina, making even the most weekend-jaded Monday-morning-double-espresso drinker leap from his seat to take a look.

Sunday

After Friday's day of torrential rain, and Saturday's day of will-it-won't-it, Sunday has dawned golden and blue, with some very happy windsurfers sharing the waters of Lago Maggiore with some pretty energetic white horses.

The hunt mustered up in the expectant blackness of 5am and have disappeared into the woods to see if they can bring home some fat and juicy wild boar or, if not, some fat and juicy porcini mushrooms (permesso permitting). Or failing that, some long, thin Stan-Laurel chiodini mushrooms, which are just as tasty.

You have to like autumn, if only for its wild food.

Anyone for a Pironi?

Short, sharp rainstorm at 2am. That's that then (as my grandmother would have said).

'Graffiti', Hotel Pironi, one of Cannobio's most famous hotels,
housed in a Renaissance-period palazzo.

Teeter totter

This week we've been waiting at the crossroads. We've been vacillating. We look first one way, back the way we've come. Back towards summer with its hot temperatures, sudden outbursts of thunder and lightning, echoing laughter and muttering streams descending. Or forward towards the serenity of winter, muffling blankets of snow, measured conversations, more logs on the fire and audacious plans hatching.

One moment there is hot sunshine, the next we are overcast and there are glowering thunderheads squatting in the distance.

Rain is always threatening, but none actually arrives.

Sweaters in the morning are discarded by afternoon.

Our doors and windows are open, then closed. Open, then closed. Open, then closed.

We teeter on the edge of autumn, and it feels as if the first raindrop will topple us over.

Quote of the Week No. 28 : On things presidential

Sixteen degrees at 9am. An overcast start has been blasted into a bright, bright sunshiney day.

Here in the house on The Rock we don't read the newspapers. First, what with the children, the chickens, the garden, the logging operations, the huntin' (of which more soon), the job and the still unfinished house, we don't have time. And second, having done my internship as a cub photojournalist at The Sunday Times, I believe I have a privileged view of what sells newspapers, and it isn't always the whole, unmitigated truth. So why bother?

Instead, we get our news and commentary either from BBC Radio 4, The Economist or from Chairman Bill.

This week, Chairman Bill tells me that Tony Blair, ex-Prime Minister of Great Britain, and ex-leader of New Labour, is addicted to pole position and has his eyes on the top spot in Europe, President of the European Union. Instead of lending his grand socialist statesman's experience and expertise to a beleaguered nation perhaps hit hardest of all its European partners by The Crisis - i.e. the UK - Tony wants to have his Hugh-Grant-little-boy face engraved on coins from here to the borders of Turkey, to whizz about the place in the European equivalent of Airforce One and perhaps be invited to parties at Silvio Berlusconi's mansion (where he might find himself one of those Italian secretaries Silvio mentioned recently). He might even try rebranding the European Union as 'New Europe' and we may soon be thinking of ourselves as 'The Continent of Cool'...

Chairman Bill has noted the strange absence of democratic process in all of this, and I really just wanted to add the words of Douglas Adams, always an astute political commentator, even from beyond the grave : "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."

Ye have been warned!

Castles in the air

Only fifteen degrees today at 8:30am. Overcast. The feeling has changed, meteorologically speaking. Rain on the way.

Four exotic eastern palaces,
the backgrounds to four episodes from the life of St Bartholomew.
Fresco detail, the arched ceiling of the Chiesa di San Gottardo, Carmine Superiore.

Sunrise : above and below

Morning view.

The ridge above Maccagno, Lombardy, with the lake a seeming abyss below.

Reported conversations No. 15 : flora or fauna?

Bright sunshine again, but there's a fairly determined cool wind blowing. Could mean a change coming. Let's hope not. I like having the windows and doors open in October! And s*d worrying about global warming...

Planting tulip bulbs the other day, with B. an able little helper, dibber in one hand, bulb in the other.

Mama : So now we make a hole with the dibber...
B : (makes the hole) There you go!
Mama : ... and we put the bulb in with his nose pointing towards the sky...
B : (puts the bulb in the hole) There you go!
Mama : ... now we cover him up gently, tuck him up in his bed...
B : (pushes the soil over the hole) Cover him up!
Mama : ... just like Mama puts B to bed and tucks her in...
B : (stops what she's doing and looks up) Mama, I don't want to go to bed!
Mama : Well, if you don't sleep properly you won't grow.
B : But Mama, I don't want to grow up to be a flower, I want to grow up to be a little girl!

This morning's lake view was dove grey at 8am. Eighteen degrees at 8:30 and blue skies by midday.

White rabbits!