The end of summer

It’s been a short but hot summer here up in the mountains. Our oldest dog doesn’t venture far from home these days as he overheats. He is, however, prone to nocturnal jaunts to our nearest neighbours whom we’ve dubbed the ‘Hillbillies’ namely because they seem to resemble the ‘nouveau riche’ hicks of the tv series inasmuch as their brand new house is already surrounded by bits of farmyard equipment, animal dung and there is a mad old woman who spends most of her day running around it crying, “Chee” in a very high-pitched voice to her chickens.

Needless to say all their dogs are securely locked up in cages all day long. Apart from a couple of very small ones, they don’t ever seem to be let out. Our dogs wander over there from time to time (against our wishes, of course) and wind up the resident canines. We have a sneaking suspicion that our mutts somehow get to eat their food.

No doubt we will get a complaint one day soon. That said, we’ve been here a year now and not spoken to each other. We get on ok with the other people on the hill except for the guy who runs the hotel and who served us that inedible, greasy meal at 25 Euros a head (see this blog).

The outdoor swimming pool has finally been chlorine-shocked and sheeted and the pump put on ‘casual duty’. The winter storms haven’t really started yet but one is scheduled for tomorrow and we know that the north wind that blasts sub-zero temperatures up our valley cannot be far off.

That said, we’ve still been cropping strawberries and the odd raspberry although there don’t tend to be too many left after the dogs have picked them. The tomatoes go a similar way, too.

Now, we just sit and wait to see if our new under-floor heated, double-glazed option room with insulated walls and ceiling and thickened north wall are up to those gales we can expect. More to follow, no doubt.

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.

Ex-pats

Oh how I try to avoid these people (for the most part). They come out here with their heads full of ‘La Dolce Vita’ and behave like a load of American Peace Corps volunteers. They patronise the locals, are completely naive about the way of life and if anyone dares to say something is less than perfect (and Italy has plenty of things which are far from perfect), they self-righteously pronounce, “This is Italy” as if for some strange reason the fact had escaped me.

Here’s an example of how embarrassing they can be. Some time back we’d stopped at the local pizza restaurant in our village for – guess what – a pizza. We know (as in to speak to) the lady who runs it with her husband. They are very quiet-spoken and, once they get to know you will chat about ‘general matters’ with you. They are friendly but not effusively so. This is typical for our part of Umbria.

A group of middle-aged British ex-pats arrived. 50 years old with IQ’s in single figures. The women were done up to the nines (this is a pizza parlour and most people here wear jeans or some casual attire) and the men were in suits and having mock fights with each other. When they reached the counter, the manageress asked them what they wanted and they replied in spaghetti-English until it came to the drinks. She did the usual – Coke, Fanta or Beer. With that the men sprouted pogo sticks and bounced up and down shouting ‘Birra! Birra! Birra for me!!!!!’ The manageress looked even more embarrassed than we did.

She came over to us later and asked if we were from the same country. My wife said, “Io sono francese’ and I said, ‘Io sono tedesco’. No way were we going to admit to being British.

We’ve lived here for 5 years now and our experience is that Umbrians are generally very friendly but they are largely self-interested (who isn’t?) and they like to be able to wave, smile and exchange pleasantries with you but without having you in and out of their homes.

People coming out here are expected to believe it is all perfect and are criticised heavily for saying otherwise. As I have said elsewhere in this blog, Italy has a lot going for it and I am not sorry we came here. That does not mean that I have to act like the world’s sole surviving brain donor when confronted with Italian culture or customs nor do I have to think everything is wonderful – it isn’t!

Going it alone

I had my last treatment for my lymphedema in Ancona on Monday. Damaris came with me so that she could do the clever stuff and talk in Italian but, when it came down to it, I’d guessed most of it.

Basically I see the whole thing as an equation. I have to endure three hours in the back of an ambulance, sitting sideways on, not wearing a seat belt in the proper manner, being thrown around all over the place while the various drivers refuse to accept they are not on a ’shout’, I am only going for an appointment and it is not life and death. That is the minus side. On the positive side, I get some treatment but it is not very ‘vigorous’ as Damaris would call it. They just lightly touch the soles of my feet with electrodes (which came apart on Friday and I had to fix) and then wrap my legs in bandages which are so tight around the instep that I am in agony the rest of the day.

The final straw came when Damaris spoke to the doctor. At the beginning he had been very supportive and different from the other quacks I had seen over the years. On Monday it was back to situation normal. First thing he said was that my problem is that I spend all day in bed. How does he know that? All he knows is that I’ve been getting up at around 7am to get the ambulance every day for just over a week and that I told him at the outset that I got my edemas from sitting too long at a computer working for the company. Where did this ‘lying in bed’ bit come from?

The second thing he said was that he had been discussing my weight with the person who supplies shoes. Perhaps he could have broadcast it on the radio or had a chat with the kitchen staff, too. He knew how sensitive I am over it – that was not necessary.

Finally, I am to blame wherever the hospital has failed. For example the radiographer who wouldn’t let me use his table to lie on was because I refused to use it. Ah, that makes more sense now.

I can’t work with people like this. He clearly cannot be trusted and his judgement is terminally impaired by prejudice. ‘Fat and lazy’ are inseparable as always. Why not ’stupid’ too?

What my wife did notice was that her meeting with him was interrupted for a long time while he discussed an exotic venue for a forthcoming medical ’symposium’ with a rep. Shit always smells like shit ultimately.

So, that’s it – alone again, naturally as the song went. I’m now having to find an alternative as I can’t continue carrying around this amount of weight with this level of pain. As I see it, the only thing I can do is to save up enough money to get into a clinic somewhere. I’ve no idea what it will cost – I know it will need to be for at least 6 months so I’m guessing £40,000 to £50,000 but it could well be more. I need to sell a lot of advertising space which means a lot of writing which means a lot of sitting at the desk which means my edemae will get worse before they can get better. It’s a race against time.

I have to keep stopping because of the pain. The soles of both feet are constantly burning up with heat. From time to time and without any warning or precursor, a searing pain will shoot through them and I will cry out with the agony. Because of that, I have to keep lying on the sofa every hour or so. That said, the swelling and the pain is usually less in winter and, according to the weather forecast, the temperature will plummet and a storm will start (I can hear the rumblings of one now as I write this).

Pasta, Pasta Everywhere

I hate pasta. I can’t put it any other way – sorry.

Everyone here literally lives on it. Most Umbrian families think nothing of eating it twice a day and it’s the set menu for all the restaurants. If you are like me, you are used to going into a restaurant and having a choice of what you fancy eating – ploughman’s, steak and kidney pie, fish and chips, mixed grill, lemon sole etc. Here it’s the same menu in every restaurant – antipasta (an assortment of cold and slimy salami, hard, full fat cheese and inedible bread).

After the antipasta comes the pasta – I suppose that’s logical when you think about it. You can usually choose from the full range of pasta but, and this is what I don’t get, they all taste the same anyway. I suppose the only exception is the ravioli which has the option of coming with spinach stuffed inside it. Popeye, I ain’t.

Just to make the pasta ‘interesting’, you get to choose whether you want mushrooms, full-fat cheese, tomato sauce or truffles mixed with it. Wow, what a selection. By the way, the pasta is always overcooked, oversalted (which, I suppose, goes some way to making up for their bread which has no salt in it) and coated with olive oil.

If you managed to struggle through that high-cholesterol dish (which you can augment by pouring over Parmesan), it’s the turn of the meat. Meat in Umbria is generally good – as it should be when you consider that the countryside around here is very verdant and the animals are well-fed on natural products. Unfortunately by the time it has been handled by the butcher and your chef any bones will have been reduced to splinters. On top of that, the chef will insist on coating it with a layer of salt and then cremating it on an open fire. It has crossed my mind that this might be some kind of religious ceremony.

The other thing about the meat course is that meat generally is quite reasonably priced yet this half-burnt offering in front of you will probably cost more than the rest of the meal.

Of course you can always have a salad. I nearly said ‘with it’ but the Italians find it weird to eat anything with their meat although if you persevere they will shake their heads and bring you a bowl of salad to eat with the meat. NB salad is lettuce OR rocket OR tomatoes. It is not a mixture of legumes and fruits that we are used to. Of course, you can always douse it in some more olive oil!

Having finished the meat course, you move on to the sweet which is always Tiramisu which means ‘pick me up’. The only logic in the name is because Tiramisu is a concentrated source of caffeine. When you consider that Italy is the home of ice-cream, why do we always have to have this dark, bitter spongy cake? Some restaurants offer ‘English Custard’ (which is actually the ‘Creme’ part of Creme Caramel) or lemon sorbet but often as not, the only option will be ‘Tiramisu’.

After that you get this strange apology for coffee that the Italians drink. For starters they are afraid of anything hot so all ‘hot’ drinks are actually tepid. Secondly coffee to them is somewhat less than a mouthful of highly-concentrate caffeine with loads of sugar mixed in. No mug of coffee to sit back with in an Italian restaurant.

Finally you might have a glass of the stomach-wrenching drink they call ‘Grappa’ which has much the same delicate effect on one’s guts as methylated spirits. Perhaps the idea is that you have a couple of glasses of that and then you become oblivious to how bad the meal was – not that your average Italian would ever complain or send a dish back (I remember how shocked a chef was when I returned a burnt but raw pork chop).

You then pay your 20 to 25 Euros per head and contemplate what other restaurants you can try – not that you will get any different. It’s always the same menu, the same opening hours, the same closing day etc etc.

When I went to Russia just after the collapse of communism, the food was disgusting but I knew that there were no better ingredients available – the chef was doing his best with what was available. In Umbria, there is as good a selection of quality produce available as you could wish to find anywhere – it’s just that the Italians either export it or ruin it.

Read more about my worst meal.