Tecchie trauma

After two days of torrential rain we're shaking our dripping heads and looking foward to breaking up for Easter. Eight-thirty temperatures have been below double digits, meaning that Mathilda, for several weeks now joyously un-lit, has been in service once more - glad there's still wood in the woodshed to light up willy-nilly also in the various hearths and woodburners when we're feeling damp and shivery.

Excuse absence from blogosphere - computer sent to tecchies for minor repairs, returned home after a whole week, pronounced dead-on-arrival. Ho-hum.

In good hands

A bright, sunny spring day in Carmine Superiore, with a nice breeze zipping the windsurfers across the glittering lake below.

Hatching Day has brought us a couple more chicks...there are now a grand total of thirteen honey-coloured fluff-balls dozing under the warming lamp. A more than 50% return (on 21 eggs at the start), and the best we've done since our first year playing this game.

All mothers, I'm sure, understand that when the house falls eerily silent, there's trouble afoot. In the last 24 hours, though, when I've gone upstairs to investigate, I've found not a theft, some wanton destruction or other childish naughtiness, but two rapt faces bent over a tiny, warm life cradled carefully in tiny, cool hands.

Happy days.

Spring : a progress report

After two days of fairly torrential rain, with a whacking storm yesterday afternoon timed precisely to coincide with the kindergarten run, today we have a cloudy day with a noisy wind.

Spring is coming along quite nicely. This week's morning temperatures have been in double digits all the way. The gardens of the Alto Verbano are crowded with shrubs and trees in bloom - mimosa, camelia, magnolia, apricot - underpinned with daffodils, narcisi, primulas, periwinkle and tulips in-the-making. And the gardeners of the Alto Verbano are busy making pretty pictures out of flat beds of brown soil with stripes of variegated green lettuces and other salads.

In the House on the Rock, Jakob!, Lord of Misrule is growing like topsy. After three weeks in our midst, he has turned our (my) world upside down and inside out. There seem to be no limits to his mischievousness and ingenuity, but also to his canine intelligence, and so despite the havoc he has wreaked, we are very pleased with his progress in terms of "sit", "come", "lie down" and "fetch that cat". The cats are not so happy. Their ordered lives, centred on our little terrace, have been invaded by the monster with floppy ears and a large nose, and they have been driven out. Still, after 21 days of confusion now even the outcasts - those who are not allowed to set foot inside the house (order of the Big Tabby) - have discovered where the soup kitchen and sun deck has moved to.

In the bathroom, out of bounds to cats and dog alike, two hours-old chicks are nestling together under the warming lamp. From the incubator we hear chirping, the eggs are shivering occasionally and once in a while new cracks appear, so we hope for at least a couple more as Hatching Day wears on.

For myself? I'm horrified that Easter-with-houseguests is only a week away, the house is a disaster zone, and I've done almost no planting whatsoever. I have a feeling it's going to be one of those years...

  

Confirming intelligence reports

"I'd say that was a D-O-G alright. Better get back to Big Tabby at Cat HQ and let him know.
Boy, is that big hooter ugly!"

Book notes No. 33 : The Angel's Game, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

In the gothic tower of an abandoned Barcelona mansion, David Martín eeks out a living writing trash novels for a barracuda publisher, surrounded by mystery and shadows. At the moment of his darkest despair, he receives a letter from a foreign publisher with a surprising and vaguely sinister proposition. He is to write a book. A special book. A book to win the hearts and minds of millions. Tempted by the promise of wealth, health and much more, Martín begins to write, and in doing so finds himself embroiled in mysterious events that threaten his sanity and his life.


Anyone who has read Carlos Ruiz Zafón's previous novel, The Shadow of the Wind, will recognise in this book many of the characters and characteristics that made the former so compelling. Here is an atmospheric Barcelona, tortured and twisted in the period just before the second world war. Here is the monumental and monstrous Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Here is the Sempere family, dispensing wisdom from their little bookshop. Again the book is a combination of detective thriller and horror story, which slips seamlessly into magical realism and later becomes a heartbreaking love story. 


Under the surface of this magnificently plotted and masterfully paced novel also lies a meditation on the nature of religion and its relationship to literature. In a central conversation with the mysterious and seemingly diabolical publisher, we read : 


"...a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values and rules with which to regulate a culture or society...Everything is a tale, Martín. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated..."


And Martín's own narrative is to lead him to the brink. 


Highly recommended.

Hooray! We're into double figures! Today the temperature at 8:30am was 11°C. Damp and overcast.

Radio 4 at its best

Warm, damp and dripping. It's official! The first day of spring. 


A discovery. Yes, yes, I know. I feel suspiciously like a woman whose husband has been having an affair with the babe across the street for the last 10 years and she's finally found out what everybody else has known since day one. But I don't care if the whole world has known about this for the last millennium. I still want to shout it from the rooftops.

I clicked onto Radio 4 the other day looking for ... something. A spot of impenetrable English comedy, perhaps, or an update on the comings and goings in Ambridge. Anything to make the mountain of washing-up more palatable. And what I found was a mountain of pure gold.

A History of the World in 100 Objects. One hundred 15-minute programmes, each dedicated to a single item in the British Museum, each enabling a piece in the jigsaw of world history to be fitted into place. In the time it takes to make and drink a small pot of PG Tips, I you will hear the Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, tell the story of an object, along with the story that object tells. An Egyptian shoe-label, a panel from the city of Ur, a jade spearhead, a tablet telling the story of the Flood. Each is fascinating not only in itself, but also for what it tells us about the times in which it was made and, in some cases, for the way in which its discovery changed our perception of history.

It's everything Radio 4 does best. Perfect descriptions, excellent history in digestible gobbits, memorable anecdotes (Victorian amateur historians taking their clothes off...), affection for a great British institution, fabulous soundtrack (Jan Garbarek?), and relevance, always, to the present day world. Plus a female announcer with an uncanny resemblance to the Voice of the Guide...?

Fifteen minutes well spent. And I heartily recommend it. All we expats need now is a reliable supply of PG.

Tender young shoots

Tiny, delicate rose leaves, born just this week in Carmine Superiore.

For more images of flowers in close-up, visit Macro Flower Pictures.

The cat telegraph

Warmish - sunnyish. In the last seven days, the children have been home, sick, for six. Mama, also with the 'flu, feels as if she's about to disintegrate in a Lem-Sip flavoured puddle of stress and sleep-deprivation.

"The big tabby up the road says you've got a D-O-G in there... Is that him there with the short tail and droopy ears? No contest!"

Today the weather was officially warmer outside the house than in. Soon it will be window-opening day!

Rainbow flag

Seven degrees at 8:30am, and warm in the sun.

When I first came as a full-time card-carrying resident to Carmine Superiore, the war in Iraq was just beginning. The airwaves were loaded, indeed, overloaded, with claim and counter-claim, Bush and Saddam, WMD real and imaginary.

One of the most potent images in those days was the rainbow flag bearing the word pace, peace. As I travelled to and fro from Carmine to Milan, from Milan to London and back again, I saw dozens of them - colourful, hopeful - draped from buildings ancient and modern, grand and humble. And every time I returned to my new home, I was greeted by Carmine's own contribution to the rainbow protest, hanging from a disused building right on the lake.

As the invasion went ahead and the killing began, the flags continued to flutter in the wind, steadfastly proclaiming a peace that could still be. When Baghdad was taken and Saddam finally executed, most of the flags gradually vanished. Carmine's, though, remained, and as month followed month, year followed year, people continued to die on both sides, and Carmine's flag and the building it flew from became ever more ragged.

Today, this is what you see when you arrive in Carmine Inferiore...

After seven years, Iraq, the cradle of civilisation, lies in tatters, just like Carmine's rainbow flag, and the sadly derelict building it adorns.

For more Window Views from around the world, click here.

Motherhood means ... No. 20

A second beautiful day. Another good day for the continuing job of splitting, stacking and generally cleaning up the trees we cut down three weeks ago.

Motherhood means ...

... abandoning one's usual profound meditations on the meaning of life, the universe and Umberto Eco, and instead wondering why the hell you should have to get out a set of screwdrivers to open the packaging containing a purple plastic horse ...

Spring flowers

Four degrees at 8:30am, and later sunny and warm enough to walk around without a coat and eat lunch outdoors.

The snow has gone ... let's hope until at least next November, and we can get on with the business of the month, which is watching little things grow.

Periwinkle clinging to the living rock beside the sentiero that leads up to Carmine Superiore.

As Gertrude S. Wister once wrote, "The flowers of late winter and early spring occupy places in our hearts well out of proportion to their size".

For more close-ups of flowers, visit Macro Flower Pictures.

Just when I thought...

Two degrees at 8:55am. Sleet. But as the day advances, the sun is battling through the clouds, and the snow line is receding up the hill.

Just when I thought the nappies and the bed-wetting, the vomitting and the table spills were over...

Just when I thought carrying children up and down the hill was a thing of the past...

Just when I thought I might relax the babyproofing and introduce a couple of adult objects into my home - an antique cushion, perhaps, or a rushwork chair...

Just when I thought I might sell the stair gate...

Just when I thought the various members of my household would get along without my having to operate a complex airlock system to separate the scratchers and the biters from those with delicate flesh...

Just when I thought embarrassing smells were a thing of the past...

Just when I thought I might be on top of the laundry, rather than buried beneath it...

Just when I thought it was safe to cancel my membership of Deranged SAHMs Anonymous...

This happened :

He is Loki. He is Indra. He is Nun. He is Enlil. And he is Arawn.

He is Jakob!, Lord of Misrule. His powers of destruction are infinite as the stars in the sky. His command of the forces of chaos is total. His appetite for pandemonium is profound.

You see my point?

La Cinciallegra

One degree at 8:30am and snowing wetly both in Carmine Superiore and Carmine Inferiore. So it wasn't just us after all...Bar Centro lore has the latest snow in this area falling on March 19th. Let's hope this doesn't turn out to be a record-breaking year - if only for the sake of the baby lettuces I planted in an excess of springtime jubilation last Friday.

To La Cinciallegra Agriturismo, a stone's throw from Torino and its shopping delights, in search of La Bionda Piemontese. No, not a latterday Italian screen goddess, but a breed of chicken raised only on a handful of farms in this region, and a breed that we abandoned last year in the search for new blood.

The journey brought us twenty-one hopeful eggs, now in the artificial hen, humming away at 37.5°C (would that I were so warm!).

We were treated to a tour of the agriturismo, which offers rigorously clean and modern facilities, delicious home cooking, great views of the flatlands southeast of Turin and an authentic farm experience. Click here for more.

On the way home we, suprisingly for us, motored straight past Asti and Ghemme and all the delights of the Val Sesia. What! No barbera? No nebbiolo? No lip-smacking gorgonzola? Cellar full? Given it all up for Lent?

No. We had another appointment. An appointment that has turned out to be dramatically life-changing.

And when a brief moment of life-unchanging comes along, when the earth ceases to shift on its axis, when my world stops fluttering around my head in confetti-like shreds, I'll let you in on the secret...

Two degrees at 8:30am. Snow sprinkled on the ground in Carmine Superiore, but not in Carmine Inferiore. Starting to feel victimised...

Everyday beauty

Two degrees at 8:30am. Snowing in Carmine Superiore, dry in Carmine Inferiore. What a difference a hill makes!

Every time I see it I wish all road signage could be as beautiful as this parking sign.
And I feel glad that it is part of my everyday routine.

Hotel del Lago, Carmine Inferiore.

Quote of the week No. 36 : On learning

Six degrees at 8:30am. Sunny, but with a stiff wind sending glittering white horses galloping across the lake, and spray erupting upwards from the harbour walls and cliff sides.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784), the French philosopher and writer, was one of the giants of the Enlightenment, and, together with Jean Le Ronde d'Alembert, compiled what is considered to be the first real encyclopaedia, a project that consumed twenty years of his life. The Encyclopèdie was to enable any person who could read access to knowledge on any subject, and not just those already covered by the universities, and in this sense it was a deeply revolutionary work. It may be no coincidence - although not a simple one - that the French Revolution itself took place only five years after Diderot's death.

As one might imagine, Diderot thought a lot about learning, and where the ordinary person might come by it. But for him simply having access to books and the ability to read them was not enough. For him, information, facts, knowledge needed to be systematised and presented in all its many facets in order for real learning to take place. He wrote :

"The number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes."

Almost three hundred years later, in 2004, the number of new books published in the English language alone was a staggering 450,000 - that's almost a book a minute. And if that's not enough, I wonder what Diderot would have thought about the Internet...

Frontispiece snaffled from Wikipedia.

Des Res

Six degrees at 8:30am and overcast.

Caravan, Carmine Inferiore

For more images of Carmine, Lago Maggiore and beyond, visit The Carmine Superiore Picture Gallery. For more Window Views, click here.

Six degrees at 8:30am, rising to an astonishing, hardly believable, jaw-dropping 25° in the garden at midday.

Carmine's toms have declared spring by spending the last few days ripping hell out of each other. Yesterday I could stand the caterwauling (and, indeed, the sight of bloodied cats) no longer and the Carmine Animal Hospital now has one very contrite fellow in lock-down, waiting for a visit to the vet.

Nature making art No. 5

In my world, it is often Nature, rather than Man, that makes the most beautiful art.

The other day, it seemed to me that this bright-eyed mallard, a resident of Cannobio's Porto Nuovo, couldn't resist stirring up the colours of the water and the reflected boat that so closely mirror his own plumage.

For more art made by Nature, click here. For more beautiful images from around the world, visit MyWorld.

Book notes No. 32 : Revelation, C.J. Sansom

Sunny and dry. Warm, sunny and dry.

Sometimes, a publisher just has to get a book into the reader's hands! Why do I say that? I'll tell you. I would never have picked up C.J. Sansom's Revelation if it was lying in a bookshop, and I never clicked despite Amazon's best efforts to 'recommend' it to me.

Shardlake? Sounds too corny! Revelation? Too Dan Brown! The black, gold and blood-red cover, too murder-in-the-dungeon!

The book finally reached my hands via a houseguest, who had picked it up at an airport book stand and was taking advantage of the Faithful Little Woodburner and a glass of burgundy to rest his weary ski-legs and bury himself for a while in Tudor England (as if medieval Italy wasn't enough!). Having read the blurb, I joined the queue.

The blurb? Here it is : serial killer loose in Tudor London, using the Book of Revelation as his inspiration. Hunchback lawyer-detective Matthew Shardlake, Jewish sidekick Jack Barak and Moorish monk-physician Guy Malton are in pursuit. The Sunday Times called it, "Compulsively gripping" (sounds like a case of diarrhoea), and The Times called it, "The best Shardlake yet" (did I tell you this is one in a long and successful series starring our hunchback lawyer?).

I liked it. It gripped me (though not in a toilet kind of way). The mystery was well-constructed, and it was interesting to be asked to imagine what the Tudor mind might make of the work of a serial killer in a time of religious upheaval, persecution and fanaticism. The action is plotted against a background of immense change and uncertainty, and Sansom, a Tudor scholar-turned-scribbler is clearly at home describing the personal, social and architectural effects of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. And when writing scenes in which supposed heretics are hauled out of their houses (a butcher for selling meat during Lent, a family for owning 'heretical' books) Sansom seems to have gone to 1930s Germany or Stalinist Russia for his inspiration.

I particularly liked Sansom's sketching in of London as a place in the 1540s. I know London well, having lived and worked in central London for more than twenty years, and having had the habit of walking or cycling rather than riding the Tube, I am as familiar with the city's geography and topography as with a favourite pair of gloves. So when Sansom's hero gazes across from Lincoln's Inn to the (then) fields of Long Acre, in my imagination I am doing the same. And when he rides east past the "tumbled stones of the dissolved Blackfriars monastery...across London Bridge and through Southwark..." I am on my way home.

Revelation is a good read. Sansom makes a good job of weaving together a clever murder-mystery with some interesting psychology, and his way of bringing history to life by appealing to the reader's own experience is admirable.

But how does a former scholar square academic seriousness with churning out bestselling murder-mysteries on familiar themes? The gruesome prophecies of Revelation are hardly news to the genre, not least in Hollywood. Well, I suspect a healthy dose of self-irony. When Shardlake is asked what he thinks the murderer will do when he has exhausted this particular chapter of Revelation as an inspiration for murder, he replies, "Find a new theme for murder .... There are plenty in Revelation."

And, if he knows what's good for his royalties, that's exactly what Sansom will be doing right now. And when he's done, I'll click when Amazon 'recommends'.