Where have the buzzards gone?

I’m not a birdwatcher. Most of them look and sound much the same to me I have to confess but I was taken this summer by the display of a pair of buzzards which suddenly appeared in the church woods adjacent to our land and which seemed to view our 20 acres as their territory.

The sheer speed with which they hurtled to earth would be enough to terrify even the most hardened pleasure rider and it was a good spectator sport sitting in a chair watching them swoop and climb over the ‘Magic Valley’ as Damaris calls it.

We found them one day sitting in the walnut tree which is not 10 metres from the house – they rarely come that close to humans.

I haven’t seen them now in a couple of weeks which was about when the hunting season began. I daresay some geriatric Rambo clad in his camouflage and armed with a double-barrelled rifle thought that they would look good in his pot. It is easy to imagine them in the ‘Rootin’, tootin’, shootin” shop (Hunting and Fishing) showing off their prizes to other likeminded individuals. Of course, the bounty bag closes abruptly as soon as any ordinary member of the public passes – it wouldn’t do for them to know.

I have to be the last person anyone would call a ‘greenie’ but these people just haven’t caught on. To them, if there are no more buzzards, they will just shoot something else and go on and on until there is nothing but they cannot conceive of that day so they just carry on.

Maybe I’m wrong and the buzzards have just taken a holiday somewhere but I have a horrible feeling that they both ended up with a nasty case of lead-poisoning.

Is bene well?

Just because I don’t speak much Italian (there’s no point when nobody makes the effort to understand you), it doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. What gets me is that most dialogues are so cliched.

If you went to school in the seventies or before then you probably remember the old language-teaching text books we used to have. The content was so heavily-structured that it was almost impossible to read with a straight face, nevermind believe in or learn from. For example, our old French book began with:

“Bonjour, Pierre”, dit Adolphe.

“Bonjour, Adolphe”, dit Pierre.

“Bonjour Pierre et Adolphe”, dit Claude.

“Bonjour Claude”, dit Adolphe.

“Bonjour Claude”, dit Pierre.

But no-one really talks like that, or do they? Well, they do here although it’s more like:

“Ciao, va bene?”

“Ciao, si, va bene. Va bene anche?”

But who the hell is Bennie?

Everything is ‘va bene’. The guy we bought our first Italian house through is a ‘va bene’ addict. I’m not going to say his name but if you know this part of the world, think ‘Shakin’ Stevens’. Anyway, he (not Shakey, that is) can’t say a sentence without ‘Va bene’ in it.

I don’t care what people may say, the reality of it is is that the Italian language is impoverished the way it is spoken. On a more serious note, we had terrible problems specifying the concrete for our swimming pool. We needed it to be a particular grade – ie over 300kg of cement per cubic metre of concrete but how can you do that when the word for both concrete and cement is ‘cimento’? What does it mean when you say you want 300kg of cimento per cubic metre of cimento? Absolutely nothing!

… and then we wanted it laid on mesh. Mesh is ‘rete’ but then so again is ‘fence’ and ‘grid’ and probably a dozen other things, too.

There is only one word for ‘paint’. That one word has to cover emulsion, gloss, enamelled paint etc etc.

Prunes, plums, greengages etc are all called ‘pruni’. Dogs are dogs (they don’t have breeds) and cars, tractors, lorries etc all get called ‘una macchina’.

I can’t stand the way every phone call begins with ‘Pronto?’ meaning ‘Ready?’. I can’t help hearing the English, “Oy, you. Are you listening to me?” instead. No-one says ‘Ciao’ – just ‘Pronto’. Ciao itself means ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’, by the way.

But what gets me most of all is that there must be a dozen or more words for pasta when it’s all the same thing, anyway!

The ‘thrill’ of the hunt

Since Damaris asked the chief honcho to give us warning before he and his calvary come charging across our land in search of some unfortunate creature, it has been relatively quiet on the hunting front. A few days ago, though, we started noticing a regular group of cars parked just off the last stretch of public road (before it becomes our private drive). From the rifle-shots, it was clear that they have taken to hunting in the woods belonging to the Church. These woods abut our land but are at least 100 metres from our house so we are out of range, at least.

I wouldn’t mind if they concentrated on shooting pigeons, the rabbits and hares which find our orchard so nutritious, wild boar and crows but they insist on shooting thrushes, woodpeckers and anything which is foolish enough to think a tree in the middle of the woods is a good place to live.

These hunters are a funny lot. Mainly middle-aged to elderly men, they dress up in camouflage gear, smoke the Italian equivalent of ‘Capstan Full Strength’ cigarettes and creep furtively from bush to bush. They will also take the liberty of throwing their rubbish down in your field and even building a hide from corrugated iron sheets and anything else at hand.

From time to time we have to go to the ‘Hunting and Fishing’ shop (also an ironmongers). We’ve renamed it the ‘Rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ shop’ for obvious reasons. It is usually full of the aforesaid old men hanging around boasting about (presumably) the smallest bird they’ve ever shot. Apparently it’s ok to shoot migrating birds because they aren’t native. You can never be too sure what they are talking about because the nose-tapping and whispering stops as soon as you enter the shop.

Fortunately there is a growing movement – particularly among the younger generation – that finds hunting unacceptable. Unfortunately, the government makes a great deal of money from license fees paid by hunters so it is not about to throw that revenue away. This leaves each individual land-owner to attempt to come to some agreement with the local hunters group.

Preparing the house for winter

We finally managed to get a plumber to replace our copper guttering which means that there should no longer be a constant stream of rainwater running down the face of the house from the dove-cote balcony. We had a few short words, first, though as the guttering was initially about 15cm short of the eaves it should have lapped under. Any rain, therefore, would have merely gone around the guttering and straight down the walls.

The guttering was organised by the painter whom we had given up on. No fault of his but we had made it a condition of his work that he organise a plumber to do the guttering – the last thing we wanted was two different contractors and two different lots of staging/scaffolding.

As always, our decorator went round in a whirlwind. None of his men seem to move particularly fast but turn your back for a second and they’ve done another wall. The house wall area is around 415 square metres and there are 25 windows (it cost a fortune to double-glaze). One coat of sealant on top of our fading and deteriorating paint and then two top coats of high-quartz, exterior quality emulsion in glorious pink!

It was a relief to see our repairs disappear under the new paint. If we had to sell in a hurry, the crack signs would upset a lot of buyers – unjustly so since the root cause was that the house is built on two separate foundation grids and they settled differentially when the house was constructed; six or seven years ago.

The new stove is gobbling up the pellets although now we’ve got everything automated, we use less with the fire on 100% of the time than we did when it was being switched on and off manually. It is a brute of a thing and cost us the best part of 4,000 Euros. It gets through 3 sacks of pellets every two days (4 Euros a sack) but in return it heats up the underfloor heating of the long-room (100 m2 floor area), the radiators, the water for the shower and the water for the indoor swimming pool via a heat exchanger. Unfortunately there is still some work to do on it and neither of the two side panels have been fitted on yet.

The insects and such are beginning to look for a winter home. Yesterday Damaris fished a drowned scorpion out of the indoor swimming pool and I killed a queen hornet in the long room too. Either would have been ‘fun’ to stand on.

The gardeners are coming less frequently now that the weather is turning. Although there is a lot to do, the colder temperatures make it less appealing and they cancel at every opportunity. They are a group of Moroccan brothers who alternate at weekends but have a tendency to take liberties – eg if it is raining where they are, they don’t come despite the fact that our microclimate is very often different to that in the valley where they live and it is commonplace to drive up the hill and out of the clouds (like on a plane) when going to our home.

We’ve bought a few more plants – climbers mainly – and these need to be planted this weekend. I can see Damaris struggling to do them if we get abandoned again.

Piano, piano

If you’ve read my blog on ‘bello’ and ‘bruto’ you may be forgiven for thinking that those are my least favourite Italian words. Wrong! Piano, piano is my most hated phrase. Oh, how I loathe and detest it.

Piano, piano – to those who don’t know Italian – generally means ‘Take it steady’, ‘Slowly does it’, ‘A bit at a time’ (you get the picture?). It is mostly used when an Italian is lost for words (and, yes, that does happen). So, why do I hate it so much?

Well, my main reason is that it is superficial and just ‘gloss’. Not wishing to harp on a theme, there are some things that my disability makes very difficult for me – standing being one of them. As soon as I get to my feet I have literally one minute to get to another chair or face the most vicious back pain. So, there I am, face screwed up in agony, frantically trying to get to the nearest chair and all my Italian supporters can say is ‘piano, piano’. I can’t take it steady – I’ve got to get to a chair as fast as I can.

I tell them that after five years of studying Italian – having a private tutor, doing every single exercise in an old-fashioned textbook and four years of living in Italy – I can hardly string a sentence together. What do I get back? Piano, bloody, piano. If I ain’t sussed it after all that, I’m not going to. Piano nothing.

I hate being trivialised and this phrase epitomises that action.

Bello and Bruto

You might be forgiven for thinking that ‘Bello’ and ‘Bruto’ were two protagonists in some Renaissance operatic but you’d be wrong. This unlikely pairing are to be encountered every time you ask an Italian to make a decision. Nothing is ever ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, things don’t ‘work’ or ‘don’t work’ and your taste is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Everything is ‘Bello’ or ‘Bruto’.

For example, we’re just having a thermostat control panel fitted in our front room. The electrician, a most knowledgeable chap who knows my views nearly as well as I do, immediately starts off with telling us that one type of panel is ‘Bruto’ and the other is ‘piu bello’. It’s a control panel – it works or it doesn’t work. I don’t consider it a thing of beauty. If I had my choice, the wall would be devoid of switches etc but then we’d have no lights or heating and I would not like that.

The same thing happened when we put in a slotted drain next to the swimming pool. One type was ‘bruto’. Why it was ‘bruto’ goodness knows but the general consensus was that it was.

Ditto again with the layout of the garden which we have deliberately chosen to aid my disability. The location of the paths etc aren’t intended to be ‘beautiful’, they are practical and allow me to have the access that the ‘bello’ option would deny.

So, everything gets labelled ‘Bello’ or ‘bruto’ – from the tiniest screw to the new tractor. To the non-Italian eye, there is absolutely no logic to it whatsoever and, even to those who were born and bred locally, some still ‘get it wrong’ and label ‘bruto’ for ‘bello’ or vice versa.

Yankee-Diddly-Doodle

Have you noticed how the Yanks dominate the expat forums? In the interest of getting and giving help on matters concerning expat life, my wife and I joined an expat forum for our country. It was a busy group with lots of questions and answers being posted daily. Unfortunately when we tried to get involved, we were basically cold-shouldered by the American contingent which had formed cliques with their own indecipherable code.

The only questions which were answered were those put by the US members who all seemed obsessed with finding the latest ‘cool’ places to meet up in. Most of the drivelly conversation consisted of partying and who was seen drunk with whom and there was a self-appointed arbiter of ‘good taste’ who would rubbish anyone whose views differed from hers.

In the end I butted into a conversation and was asked which state I was from. That finished me off. I pointed out that while the Great American Unwashed (and a lot of the ‘Washed’ too) might consider Britain to be a small island off of the coast of Uncle Sam Land where unwanted missiles could be conveniently be located to fend off perceived attacks from the Communist hordes, it was actually an independent monarchy. I wasn’t quite sure why we should be fearing an attack from behind the former Iron Curtain – perhaps these infidels wanted to get their red hands on the apple pie and turkey crops. I also said that I had a degree in advanced flag-burning. That got me drummed off the forum – something which I don’t regret.

What is it with them that they have to invade wherever they go?

Two anecdotes from when I was in my twenties that, perhaps, illustrate my comments.

The first was when I was in Germany. I’d just landed at Frankfurt airport and was desperately trying to find the tube train to the main railway station. Unfortunately there must have been a dozen different tube trains sitting in the underground terminus, none of them displaying where they were going and no platform signs either. An American woman asked me if I knew which train went to the main station – she was going there too. I said I had no idea but would ask a guard. She replied that she would get on ‘this one – it’s bound to be going my way’. Why should she think that the train would go where she wanted to go and ignore the other passengers who ‘must have got it wrong’. I later found out that she headed off in exactly the wrong direction.

The other thing that springs to mind is when I was going to do Voluntary Service in Africa. Our course leader was at great pains to tell us that there were three good ways of ending up in the proverbial missionary’s stewpot. One – get involved with a native lady (AIDS), two – tell the village elders that you don’t approve of women doing all the work and that they should get off of their collective rear ends and help out or, three, associate with members of the Peace Corps. The last of the three being the most dangerous.

I fully expect some xenophobic accusations from this but I stand behind it. My wife is half-American and she agrees with me.

Water, water but where?

Water cuts are a way of life up here in Umbria.

Don’t know what’s for dinner as the water has been cut off for about the fifth time in as many days. All of our stuff is in the dishwasher which has now gone haywire, of course.

The problem with the water is that we live at the top of a mountain. The water gathers in a tank at the bottom and is pumped up. Unfortunately:

1. The size of the tank is based on the number of people who lived here some time ago.
2. Those people were not really on mains water, had their own springs and didn’t have modern appliances.
3. The pumps are old.
4. As soon as the water goes back into the tank, the savvy ones fill up their spare tanks thus creating another shortage.
5. We are at the very end of the line.
6. Our Comune is very poor and VUS who supply the water are not much better off it seems.
7. Half the time the girls who take the calls from people saying there is no water don’t tell the blokes who are actually going to have to fix it.
8. At the end of the summer, there isn’t too much water to go around anyway.

Damaris has just phoned again (about 4 hours has elapsed since we reported it). It seems our original call was forgotten and they’ve just noticed it ten minutes ago. That means no water again tonight.

It’s the hunting season again

With the advent of Autumn, the hunting season recommences.

Umbrians have a very fixed idea of the value of animals – they are either there to work or to be eaten or preferably both. They have no concept of depletion of species, see no value in songbirds or rare flowers or butterflies. Their only thought is how good it will taste or whether it is in their way.

There are two sorts of hunter. The first is officially licensed by the state and they pay a fee each year for the privilege of wandering across anyone’s land shooting whatever they fancy as long as it isn’t owned by the landowner.  This means their dogs run amok and they can just pull up whenever and wander around. The only way to legally stop them is to pay the Comune a fee to have them barred and put up an expensive fence (our perimeter is several miles long). There are very precise rules about how close to the house they are allowed to come, how far they must be before they point a gun towards a property (quite a long way) and where they can park. They are mostly interested in wild boars.

The day of the hunt a sign goes up warning the public and then men in orange reflective jackets accompanied by packs of hounds with bells around their neck fan out into the woodland. Not that either of us approve of hunting but we have seen a wild boar family on our land and know how dangerous they can be to both us, our dogs and our orchard. We don’t lament an organised culling.

The other sort of hunter are basically sneaky. They arrive unannounced at about 5am and hide in our woods unless either I or one of our dogs who also sleeps light hears them. A chorus of the dogs barking and me shouting, “Via – questo e proprieta privata” (Go away, this is private property) usually shifts them although I even caught one once emptying all the rubbish out of his car onto our drive.

They will happily block your drive (something that licensed hunters are forbidden from doing) and will shoot anything which doesn’t move fast enough. This means thrushes and other song birds. One once showed my wife very proudly a mistlethrush he had shot and told her how ‘Good eating’ it was. She got very angry and was nearly sick.

Before we came here, they had nearly depleted our 20 acres of birdlife. After two years of living here, we now have woodpeckers, blackbirds, robins and buzzards again although it is still far from plentiful.

We have made it clear that we have zero tolerance as far as this goes.

They are a strange breed and are very cruel to animals generally. They often have decoy thrushes in cages to lure others to them. Not only that, they throw down poison to kill off competitors’ dogs. We know from speaking to our vet that nothing can be done about this poison and the dog dies in agony over a period of 2 days.

You see these old men (most of them are) in their camouflage gear hanging around the ‘rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ shop’ as I call it where they sell everything you could need for the big hunt. Although there is a growing animosity among younger Italians to this culture, it is still strong here in the mountains – particularly among the older generation who can see no wrong in it.

Weather

Looks like the summer’s over. One day we were sweltering with the temperature up in the high twenties/low thirties, next day we were shivering and lighting our pellet stove.

Looks like Damaris may have missed out on her last swim in the outside pool. Despite the solar water heaters, the water is just too cold and last time she swam in water like that (Cambridge) she was laid up for days with agonising back pains. We can’t take the chance. Now we need to get the internal pool finished but our plumber left us on Saturday saying he’d be back in a day or two to clear it all up and now we’ve found out he’s going to be off for at least a month with a hernia operation scheduled for Wednesday! That is typical Umbrian.

It won’t be long now until the leaves start falling off the trees and bunging up the guttering once again. The wind has changed from the South West to a Northerly which means it is coming right off the mountains. They even have a name for it (which no doubt I will spell incorrectly) – the Tramontana. All I know is that it is bleeding cold when you get caught in it. We copped -12C last winter and with that wind blowing as well, we might as well have been at one of the poles.

We had a barbeque tonight but it was too cold to eat outside so we took it into the kitchen. Seems a bit daft, that.