Children's Day at the carnival

Twelve degrees in the hazy sunshine at 9:30am. A decent temperature still for Day Two of Carnevale Ambrosiano.

Yesterday's Children's Day went off well. About 200 Disney princesses mustered up in Guardian Angel Square, accompanied by assorted toddler cuddly toys and over-excited and over-armed Spidermen. The procession was headed by the Carnival King and Queen (the latter more usually performing the vital role of fish-seller to discerning Cannobiese), the town band and an unidentifiable six-foot-tall purple-plush animal. It proceeded (as processions do) with much disruption of international through-traffic with Switzerland, and very little this year in the way of flying bon-bons - we are, after all, in an economic depression.

There was no sign of the depression, however, in the Grand Carnival Marquee. At first there was no sign of anything, it being so dark inside. But there was very loud music. Rather than thinking about the delicacy of our children's ears, the parents of the paese trundled in without hesitation like Eloi to the Morlock dungeons. There we let the assorted little monsters loose, plied them with Fanta (or Coke, or some other E-filled concoction) to increase their energy levels and stood about drinking coffee, gossiping and fondly gazing at the mayhem that ensued. All to a soundtrack at decibels just above comfort-level that included 'Happy Days', the 'Birdie Song', 'The Maccarena' and Enrique Iglesias (various).

In due course the stage was invaded by posing princesses, the floor was slick with confetti and silly string, the roof of the marquee was populated by balloon elephants, dolphins, motorbikes and horses (with associated toddlers weeping below), and the Spidermen were attempting to pull the tail off an unidentifiable six-foot-tall purple-plush animal.

The kids from Carmine exited shortly afterwards, blinking into the daylight, to a scene not unlike 1970s Beirut on a bad day. The pre-teens were armed with a terrifying amount of gunpowder in the form of firecrackers, and the creative use of aerosol string, shaving foam and paint, had rendered them unidentifiable even to their own mothers (all of whom were, as tradition dictates, absent).

Mama was the only person brave enough to park the car in Guardian Angel Square, perhaps because the attentions of the town's minors would go unnoticed on the World's-Most-Battered Panda. We beat our tactical retreat in good order, and made a Hansel & Gretel trail of confetti all the way up the hill home.

Enquiries as to the welfare of the unidentifiable six-foot-tall purple-plush animal prove inconclusive at this time.

Text copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Springwatch 2009

Three degrees at 9:00am. A beautiful bright and sunny day. Looking good for Children's Day at the Cannobio Carnevale. (Why are we doing carnival when the rest of the world is already on a chocolate-free diet? Click here.)

There! I've said it. That word..."spring".

Ezio, Carmine's timekeeper and oral historian, who remembers every important date in the last 60 or so years, who comes and goes by the ringing of the church bells across the lake in Macagno, always reminds me that spring doesn't actually start until March 21st, but I can't resist a 'spring-is-coming' post.

Carmine's meadows are covered in little flowers - scilla, primula, crocus and the occasional periwinkle. The narcissi are very much in evidence, and for a while now we've been eating sprinkles of wild garlic chives in our winter soups and omelettes. The spring bulbs are starting to show their noses above the soil, and my camellias are finally beginning to unfurl. The glorious variegated camellia at the bottom of the hill near the chapel has been in full bloom for the last few days.

The sun is rising before seven now, and it's still light just after 6pm. The sun bids farewell to Carmine after 2pm. The importance of this to Carmenites (especially we sun-lovers) is clear if you remember that the village faces east, and behind it to the west is a line of hills - the feet of Monte Carza. This means that we are left in the shadows when the sun drops behind the ridge. In mid-winter, this happens at about 1pm. In mid-summer, it happens at about 5pm. Many of our winter-time excursions into the woods south of Carmine are to seek out spots where the sun shines a couple of hours longer than in Carmine. I sometimes miss the evening sun, but I think myself lucky, when I talk to people who live in Traffiume, Cannobio's extension into the Valle Cannobina, which gets not a single ray of sun all winter. When it finally rises high enough to illuminate this part of town, Cannobio is flooded with smiles.

The chickens are also now smiling. And laying. Their annual fallow period came to an end about 10 days ago and now they're laying like crazy. (Anybody want some fresh, organic eggs?) As sometimes happens in politics, there has been a U-turn in our policy towards the bully-boy cockerel. He pecked me once too often and despite having at first elevated him to supreme power, he turned out to be recalcitrant and became the first object of my newly-implemented zero-tolerance attitude towards bullying. He's now in the freezer. The old guard has been taken out of retirement and is once again happily crowing in the coop. His generally pacific view on life enables me to delegate grain-feeding to B, who is the same size.

Staying with the fauna, the last case of cat 'flu seems to have cleared itself up (although the patient seems to have come to like sleeping on the end of my bed and now follows me home in the evenings in order to sidle through the front door and on up the stairs). Last year's female kitten has been safely spayed and her stitches are gradually disappearing. She's also decided she likes being indoors (as well as the rich diet of fish offcuts and rabbit bits to be had at our hearth). The old mother cat is once again pregnant - she was too smart to walk into the trap I patiently baited every day for a fortnight recently, and so has escaped the vet's scalpel for another year. I shortly must gird my loins and take the wonderfully fluffy Trouble (last year's male kitten) to be castrated, otherwise he will be off 'in amore' as they say here. I have more trouble (excuse pun) castrating the males than I do spaying the females, but I guess 'twas ever thus with Mamas and their boys.

Wood-cutting this year has been truncated by bad weather at the waning moon in December (apparently the optimum time to cut for firewood). We're still putting 15 kilos into Mathilda every day, but only once a day. Supplemented with the warmth from Edna (brand name Etna...) the cucina economica (a woodfired oven almost totally unlike an Aga), or from the Charnwood woodburner in the sitting room, and we're cosy. The wood floors seem less than icy to the tootsies now, and the cold water that comes out of the taps direct from the lake seems less cold.

More springtime firsts : at the weekend we saw our first butterflies. Yesterday I saw the first scorpion (where's me scorpion kit?), and today I see that the bees are once again busily in and out of the stone walls of Carmine's houses looking for good places to build. A couple of weeks ago I spotted a bushy-tailed squirrel moving into a tree-hole pecked out by a woodpecker last year, and talking about holes, I see that another of my rugs has fallen victim to the nest-building mice.

Most important of all, though, it seems that as February (the Italian translates as "the fever month") wanes so does the seemingly endless stream of coughs, colds, fevers and stomach upsets that keeps all the kindergarten kids in a limbo of under-the-weather-ness at this time of year. AJ and B haven't been sick for almost a fortnight. And neither has Mama.

Now that can't be bad.

Seventeen degrees at 11:30am and sunny, after a cold, grey and foggy start. What's 17 degrees C in English? Whatever it is, it feels good to me!

The old rectory, Italian style

Four degrees at 8am, and a shockingly wonderful 16 degrees with bright sunshine at the height of the day.

Casa Parrochiale, Cannobio

Today's picture was chosen by AJ (the child who wakes me up at 4:30am because he still wants someone to blow his nose).

The bell-tower on this beautiful building in the heart of Cannobio always reminds me of one of the southern Californian missions.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Reported conversations No. 12 : On babies (yikes!)

Five degrees at 9am. Retina-burningly bright, with a hazy mist over the lake.

Congratulations to S and F on the birth of their third daughter. S's pregnancy was, for AJ, the first part of his human biology education : Birds and Bees Part 1. And it had him thinking.

AJ on Monday : Mama, why don't you have a baby in your tummy?
Mama (thinking fast) : Because ... I don't want another one. I have you two and that makes me happy.

AJ on Tuesday : Mama, I want you to have a baby in your tummy!
Mama (oh, no not again) : Well, darling, a baby's a lot of work...

AJ on Wednesday : Mama, if you don't get a baby in your tummy, I'll stop being your friend!
Mama (sidestepping the issue) : Whether you're my friend or not, I'll always be yours.

AJ on Thursday : Pappa, I want Mama to get a baby in her tummy.
Pappa (towing the line) : Well, we think you two are enough for us.

AJ on Friday : Mama, Pappa, are we going to have baby chicks when spring comes?
Mama & Pappa (glancing at each other) : Yes, AJ, why?
AJ : Then Mama doesn't have to have a baby in her tummy. The chicks are enough for me.

Phew! Now I'm wondering when we will be teaching Birds and Bees Part 2 : Mama, how did the baby get into that lady's tummy?

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Boats

Three degrees at 8:30am. Hazy sunshine.

Boats moored in Cannobio's new harbour

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Today

A beautiful dry, warm, sunny day.

A day for the first butterfly.

A day for the garden and to clear up some fallen trees.

A day for a walk in the woods, to clamber over some rocks and to drink from a mountain spring.

A day to light the fire in the hearth and grill a rabbit.

A day for going to bed tired but happy.

Two degrees at 8:30am. Frost in the places where the sun doesn't shine (if you'll excuse the double entendre). By 9:30 it was warm enough to sit in the sun and gossip for a short a while. Home by 11:30.

Quote of the week No. 17 : On virtual chatter

Cold. Cold. Cold. Sunny. But cold.

When I think of the millions of people who write weblogs, and the millions more who chatter to themselves on Twitter, I think of Adlai Stevenson, the American politician, who wrote :

"The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions."

Stevenson died in 1965, and could never have imagined the virtual cacophany that would break out in the last decade of the 20th century. We all have the legal and political right, and now many of us have the means, to publish our own thoughts and opinions. But amid the millions of voices all busily trying to make sense of the world as they know it, who is there listening to just ours? Tuning in to just our one voice amid the chatter?

And, most important, who out there cares what I have to say anyway?

The long walk home

Three degrees at 8:00am. Patchy sunshine and, just when you thought it was safe to go out, a gusty wind to rattle your very soul.

First steps on the long walk home.

With grateful thanks to Pietro Bergamaschi and the Comune di Cannobio for responding with such speed to a mother's plea for safety net on this particularly dangerous stretch of the mulattiera. The drop on the left is about ten metres sheer onto rock, and until two weeks ago a scene like this one (without Mama guiding the children with a viselike grip and with a wildly beating heart) would have been unthinkable.

For more on that hill, click here

For more on how B learned to walk up that hill, click here

Book notes No. 22 : The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, G.W. Dahlquist

Three degrees at 9:30. Hazy sunshine and a little breeze to keep us all on our toes.

Finally finished! The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, Victorian pseudo-Gothic adventure, door-stopper, sapper of my strength. And patience.

Here's the blurb on the inside front cover:

"Three most unlikely but nevertheless extraordinary heroes become inadvertently involved in the diabolical machinations of a cabal bent upon enslaving thousands through a diabolical 'process'. Miss Temple is a feisty young woman with corkscrew curls who wishes only to learn why her fiance Roger broke off their engagament. Cardinal Chang was asked to kill a man but finding his quarry already dead he is determined to learn who beat him to it and why. And Dr Svenson is chaperone to a dissolute prince who has become involved with some most unsavoury individuals." (Has the Penguin blurb unit decided that the comma is no longer de rigeur, I wonder?)

Sherlock Holmes meets Rider Haggard. A tremendous act of imagination - and stamina - on the part of the author. A rollercoaster of an adventure from end to end. The Guardian called it "a page-turner", the Daily Telegraph called it "a feat of literary imagination", Time Out (that bastion of literary awareness) found it "genuinely exciting and intriguing".

For a while I thought this book had something important to say to me. Apart, that is, from numerous twists and turns, endless close shaves and extraordinary escapes, and endless interior ramblings from our three heroes. I thought I detected musings on the nature of self. I thought I felt an undercurrent of social comment in the descriptions of the supefying effect of the 'glass books' (read 'computers' if you will).

For a while the book shoved me along as I tried to work out where I was in the cavernous and diabolical Harschmort House, or the Escher-esque back corridors of The Ministry. For a long while, I was prepared to suspend disbelief as my male heroes took what to mere mortals would have been a physically intolerable bashing and still came up fighting. For a long while I read and read and read, feeling like I was ensnared in some strange Myst-like story without any idea which part of the landscape to click, what book in the library to choose, how to tune in the secret video message obscured by interference. For a long while I tried to remember the objects each hero was still carrying and which had been discarded in this Victorian version of Dungeons and Dragons. For a surprisingly long while I continued to care about who was dead, who was cunningly alive and who was injured and trailing blood all over the place.

And when I finally reached page 753. Oh yes, seven hundred and fifty pages - while the delightful (and very much shorter) Grazia Deledda languished on the shelf - when I finally reached page 753 I expected, nay required, a reward for my efforts. And I felt my heroes expected, nay required, a reward for their efforts too. (By that time, my heroine for one hadn't had a cup of tea for more than 24 hours, and I felt for her.)

But the reward didn't come. And, dear G.W. Dahlquist, I feel cheated. I feel somehow as if I've been tricked, hoodwinked, taken for a fool. There is obviously a sequel to this book, but this reader in Carmine Superiore won't be buying it.

If you still want to buy this book, click here.

Did somebody mention icicles?

Minus one at first light. Plus three at nine. Bright sunshine. No wind.

Icicles, Carmine Superiore, mid-February 2009

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

The fifth day

Weather continues warm in the bright sunshine and cold enough to make icicles in the shadows and the wind. That wind. It's strong and persistent enough to shred Carmine's flags and make people's eyebrows waggle. Strong enough to make people round here start shaking their heads and counting the days : "il quinto giorno, cavolo!" What cabbages have to do with it, though, I'll really never know.

To whom it may concern

Today, I don't have the foggiest what the temperature is (if you'll excuse a meteorological pun). The thermometer in the sun and out of the continuing wind, tells me 13 degrees. When I load the washing machine in the pantry (which is basically an outhouse with a septic tank below and a swish granite roof on top) my fingers go numb in 13 seconds flat. So who knows! Bright sunshine. This afternoon, the laghetto (the pond, picture here) is frozen solid.

"Bimbo I love you..."

Door, Centro Storico, Cannobio

PS Happy Birthday to WE, my favourite lurker.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Shivering with pleasure

The sun is rising glorious gold over the mountains. The wind that dropped so considerately yesterday morning to enable me a spot of garden construction, got up again in the afternoon and howled all night around the granite eaves and in among the trees. The result? Zero degrees at 8am, and twig debris everywhere.

Nadia's sedums, shivering with pleasure in the winter sunshine.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Today in 2008, No. 2

Three degrees in the shade at 9am. Still windy. Bright sunshine and blue skies. Yesterday afternoon there was a deer in Ezio's garden for the first time since last year's hunt. B will be pleased that her friend the 'goat' has come back. And today I will be working in our garden for the first time this year.

Today in 2008, Ezio was well into his late-winter chores, chores that he's only just beginning this year because of the bad weather. And Mama was extolling the virtues of the humble willow...click here for more.

Quote of the week No. 16 : A writer's work

There's a pretty gusty wind howling around The Rock this morning. It hums in the chimneys and waggles the fences, it batters the flags, and makes the little flowers shiver. I'd say about Beaufort 6. Eleven degrees at 10:30. Okay, okay, I positioned the thermometer in a pool of sunshine on some nice warm stones just outside the bathroom window.

I cheated. So sue me...here's the quote of the week :

Salman Rushdie (b. 1947), controversial Anglo-Indian novelist and thinker. For an angle on his biography click here :

“A writer's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”

I'd better get on with it then...

A distinguished guest

Four degrees at 10am. Grey and drizzly.

I know a woman who always has a sour, disapproving look on her face. Rain or shine...the look is sour. As if she smells something that disagrees with her. As if life has given her a bitter taste in her mouth that won't go away despite any amount of mouthwash. As if, forty years ago on her wedding night her happily-ever-after farted under the quilt, she wrinkled up her delicate virgin's nose and at that moment the wind changed. My father would refer to it as a 'face like a wet week', and we all know what that means right now.

The reason I mention this vexation to the spirit is that the cats of Carmine are this week wearing the self-same expression with whiskers on. They're crowded on the pantry windowsill craning their fluffy little necks to catch a glimpse of something they definitely don't approve of. Wherever I go, I'm preceeded by hissing and growling. Wherever I look there are cats' tails like toilet brushes hanging from the trees, wedged under bramble bushes, dangling from rooftops.

In Cannobio, there is chattering among the gossips in Guardian Angel Square and in the corridors of the scuola materna, and new vocabulary crashes over me at two-minute intervals like verbal labour contractions, as I pass along the town's charming medieval streets. Words like : morde? (vt. does she bite?); guinzaglio (nm. lead); scooper del pooper (n. as in 'you'll be needing one'); and pulce (nf. flea - normally only heard in the plural - as in 'you won't be needing them').

Worst of all, the kitten's place on the sofa as celebrated recently (click here) has been usurped by something altogether more smelly, which snores while I'm trying to read and/or write and gradually inches its way onto my lap as the evening progresses. And the kitten's looking at me like Judas is my second name.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am honoured this week to have Lady Diana as my houseguest. Lady Diana, I'm sure you've guessed is a dog, a 10-year-old German shepherd to be exact. Her name is pronounced the Italian way - Deeeeeanna, and no, she's not staying (somebody get that hard fact through to the cats).

Diana knows Carmine intimately. Her padrone, Bruno, was one of the first friends we made here apart from immediate neighbours and professional colleagues. He made us laugh with his unlikely stories of the enormous fish he and his brothers caught and grilled, the gargantuan wild boar they wrestled to the ground with their bare hands and ate in a single day of culinary debauchery, or the Baroque feasts with which they buckled the knees of the kitchen table back home in Sardinia. He was also always prepared to don a pair of overalls and help us out with a particularly nasty bit of d-i-y plastering, window-mounting or demolition if he dropped in to find us struggling pathetically (in return for one of M's famous Sunday lunches and a luscious bone for Diana).

This week, Bruno is in hospital (good luck, dude), and Her Royal Highness is residing in Sasso Carmine.

As I was saying, Diana is very much at home here, and trots up and down the blessed hill with me and the children (oh yes, the mulattiera's still there, folks, despite the best efforts of the weather to wash it away, click here) as if she didn't really live in an apartment in a place that's named after a brand of moped. She keeps her eye on the stick-in-flight, even when surrounded by gaily clucking chickens, as if gaily clucking chickens were her daily companions. And despite all the rumpus among the feline population, she continues calmly eating her food even though Trouble-the-Intrepid (click here) has also got his nose in the bowl.

Diana is the first dog I've ever had in my care, and despite wishing for one recently (click here), and despite Diana's excellent training and gentle disposition, I think I won't be signing up at the dog refuge after all.

And you know why? It's not the dog hairs on the sofa. Or the scattering of heart-shaped doggy chow on the kitchen floor. Or the fact that I have to carry the cats through the kitchen, spitting and scratching, to get them to where they want to be in the house. Or even the popping in and out of the front door like a demented weather man to see if the whining means she wants to go pee-pee.

No.

It's simple really. You know, not in a million years would I be able to bring myself to go to the local hardware store and ask for a 'scooper del pooper' : Signor Albertella (of whom more shortly) would know for sure I'd finally cracked! And besides, I think Babel Fish Translations made it up.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Them there hills

A bright and breezy Monday morning. Four degrees at 9:30am.

The view north from Carmine :
Lago Maggiore and the foothills of the Alps.

This view sure beats the 1970s tower blocks of Clapham Junction and the grimy City sky as a Monday morning vista.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Sun

Oh Bliss! Sun after so many days of rain! A timid sun, a shall-I-shan't-I sun, a once-was-lost-but-now-is-found sun. But it's good enough for me.

A bare half a degree at 8am. Carmine is damp, misty and chilled to its very bones. And now it's raining again.

Distraction from the rain

Raining, raining, raining and raining. It's not so cold, though.

View from the Cannobio waterfront.

On a calm, dry, clear day - a day totally unlike today.

Quote of the week No. 15 : On winter

Three degrees at 10am with mist and rain drawing a veil between Carmine and the outside world.

"O Winter! ruler of the inverted year, ...

I crown thee king of intimate delights,

Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness,

And all the comforts that the lowly roof

Of undisturb'd Retirement, and the hours

Of long uninterrupted evening, know."

William Cowper (1731 - 1800), English poet and hymn-writer.


These words about sum up the way it is here in the House on the Hill after the children are abed and safely snoozing, the woodburner is blazing, the lights are low and I have by my side a dozing kitten, a glass of Burgundy and a good book.

You know you're getting older when...

... the local charmer tells you you're looking younger every day...


PS Two degrees at 8am, bright blue skies, sharp winter sunshine, but cold in the wind and the shadows.

St Blaise

Two degrees at 8am. Damp and cold. Soggy with slushy snow underfoot.

Today in Carmine, Mama continues to try to minister to sick (and decidedly ungrateful) animals.

In line with my promise to raise my children with some knowledge of the Catholic faith (being an Anglican myself), I've been reading up about saints again. And, coincidentally, I find that today is the memorial day of St Blaise, the Armenian bishop known as a healer of both people and animals. It is said that wild animals came to his cave in the woods of their own accord to be healed when they were sick, but that they would never disturb him while he was at prayer. Sweet. Carmine animals are respectors of neither prayer nor sleep.

And the Romans also had no such compunctions. Blaise was discovered at prayer in his forest retreat by a bunch of Roman hunters looking for animals to use in the games. He was thrown into jail, where, among other things, he healed a child who had a fish bone lodged in her throat (hence the above image). When he did not recant, he was thrown into a lake to drown. He didn't. Instead, he stood on the surface of the water and invited his persecutors to step out onto the waves to prove the power of their gods. They did. And they drowned. This of course didn't stop the Romans, who redoubled their efforts to torture and murder him. I won't give you the details, but it's all pretty bloody, involving as it did an iron wool comb (don't go there).


Blaise is one of a group of Fourteen Holy Helpers who are called upon to help in times of great distress, such as the plague. There's nothing like teamwork when the going gets tough.


He's the patron of vets, animals and workers-with-wool, as well as builders, carvers, stonecutters and construction workers. He is also said to protect against wild beasts, whooping cough, throat diseases and coughs, and so would be particularly useful in this house this winter. You may see him pictured carrying the wool comb I mentioned with a shudder above.

Oh, yes, and he's the protector of Dubrovnik, Croatia. And that reminds me of something I vaguely remember, called a holiday...

Image: http://www.saints.sqpn.com/

Anybody recognise this dude?

Snowing. And snowing. And snowing. The clouds are wreathing their way up the hill, and getting tangled in the trees and around the campanile. Lombardy is shrouded in cotton wool. The temperature has flatlined at zero.

Soldier

15th-century fresco, Chiesa di San Gottardo, Carmine Superiore

I swear I know this bloke! The more I stare at him, the more familiar he becomes. But who, exactly, he reminds me of is always just beyond reach. Perhaps a descendant of the model drinks his morning coffee at Caffe' Centro, Cannobio... If you can also tell me what part he plays in the story of St Bartholomew, I'd be much obliged.

The first of the month

Zero at ten. Snowing - raining - snowing - raining. Gloomy.

Despite not having so much as flipped the cover of January's Nobel Book (see yesterday's post), I'm going to plough on regardless and line up the book I am planning to discuss on February 28 (and hopefully read in between now and then).

The Living and the Dead, Patrick White
The Amazon description has this to say : set in 1930s London, this is a portrayal of the complex ebb and flow of relationships within a family. The ageing Mrs Standish is drawn into secret liaisons; her daughter Eden experiments with left-wing politics; and Elyot, the only son stands aloof.

White, an Australian writer, won the Nobel Prize in 1973, praised "...for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature".

A new continent. I like new continents.