A lemon and 4 strawberry trees

Valtopina ASL (Health and Health Administration Centre) is open one morning a week – Thursday – so, after phoning to verify they could help, I went down there today to change doctors.

The clerk behind the hatch greeted me with the stony-faced ‘it isn’t my fault’ look of the Italian bureaucrat and announced that the computer wasn’t working.

“But I phoned first!” I protested.

“If you’d got here fifteen minutes ago, it was working then.”

“Is there any chance it might start working again before you close?”

“I just told you,” (I never heard him) “I’m closing now and taking the computer to the technician.”

So that was that. Complete lemon. But there are 4 mature and beautiful strawberry trees just outside the entrance. I spent a few enjoyable minutes taking photos of them.

Strawberry trees outside Valtopina Health Administration Centre

Houses hide things

Breathing machine and mask

This morning we had a call from a technician wanting to do the periodic checks on the bi-level breathing machine which Clive has on loan from the Italian health service.

Anyone coming to the house for the first time is almost certain to have difficulty in finding it and this young man was no exception.

During the course of his checks, he asked for the booklet in which the visits are recorded.

Blow me, I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t in the case that the machine came in, and it wasn’t in the bookcase where it had been last time.

I kept looking for it until finally he told me not to worry.

Of course, an hour after he left, I remembered where I’d put it. It was in a box upstairs, along with all the spares and other paraphernalia to do with the breathing machine.

I wasn’t sure which was more annoying: not finding it, or finding it when it was too late.

There’s an Italian saying which I’ve heard several times:

La casa nasconde ma non ruba.

Literally it means: ‘Houses hide things but don’t steal them.’ In the same situation we might say: ’It’s there somewhere,’ or ‘It’ll turn up.’

Comforting words except when you’re actually in the throes of turning everything upside down looking for some elusive object that isn’t where it ought to be.

The stove continued

Today, a fortnight after our ‘never-before’ problem with the stove, I had a call from the local technician. He called himself  ‘the stove technician’ so I had some trouble working out who he was.

It turned out that he had had an email from the manufacturers of the stove who somehow knew we had a problem.

Our trusted technician had had a bereavement, I found out, but his co-worker promised to call us back and never did. I guess he was the one who told the manufacturers.

The error alert on the stove control panel

In any case, assistance (if it can be called that) took a long and circuitous route. Each party undoubtedly introduced its own delay.

My point here is that if you lie down and do nothing in Italy, no-one responds in any reasonable length of time. As far as any of this lot were concerned, we were a fortnight without heating.

I in fact got our regular plumber/electrician to have a look at the stove and he got it going again without any new parts that same evening.

Which was good, though almost certainly not the end of the story.

This evening one of the ‘common’ but nonetheless unnerving faults occurred again: AL HOT PEL (the ‘hot’ and the ‘pel’ flashing alternately). It means: ALARM – over-heated something. For ‘something’ read flue, burner, water, pellets etc as appropriate.

I have to unscrew a button and re-arm a sensor. There can be a delay of several hours before the sensor is ready to re-arm, but fortunately this time it didn’t take long.

Visit to the Planning Office

Looking towards Valtopina Comune (in the background)

I braved the rain today to go to the Comune (Council) and climb up the 4 flights of marble stairs to the Planning Office.

I proudly produced drawings and substantially-completed forms to do with minor alterations to our house, all as stipulated.

The drawings were fine, I was told, but in the time (admittedly rather a long time) that it’s taken us to prepare everything, the law has changed and the forms have been completely redesigned.

We’re talking now not about something called a DIA (Dichiarazione Inizio Attivita), but about something called a SCIA (Segnalazione Certificata Inizio Attivita).

Take my word for it, the titles amount to pretty much the same thing.

I’ve done some research and the motivation behind the change is supposed to be ‘simplification’.

No comment.

Anyway, it didn’t help when the Comune technician said the new procedure had only been introduced, in our area, ‘a few days ago’. He knew very little about it, and didn’t have photocopies of the form already prepared.

It’s ’back to the drawing-board’, figuratively speaking.

No water

“There’s no water!”

“Not again!!!”

The first thing is to phone the water company VUS (Valle Umbra Servizi). They’ve centralised now, so they don’t know the town name or the road name and you have to spell them.

Clive has a private bet as to which phrase I’ll open with:

• There’s no water
• We don’t have water
• Water is lacking here
• Water’s not coming

I try to put him off the scent by giving location details first, but I can hear his whoop of satisfaction behind me when he’s guessed right.

Their possible responses are equally formulaic and limited:

• I’ll inform the technician
• We’ve already been informed
• The technician is on his way there
• The technicians are working on it

I understand from our neighbour that our water supply originates from 2 springs, one of which tends to dry up in summer while the other feeds through pipework that is perpetually in need of repair.

The Blue Pig with its morning glories

We have a spring of our own which feeds into a 1,000 litre storage tank we call the Blue Pig. Its colour just happens to be the same as that of the morning glories we grew round it one year.

This spring of ours, though, while a torrent in winter, delivers just a drip in summer and the tank takes a serious amount of time to fill up again when you draw some off.

Our rainwater collection tank, the Blue Elephant, is more useful and has a pump attached for irrigation from various standpipes around the garden – or for filling buckets to flush the loos.

The water was off yesterday evening and it’s still off this morning. I finally get through on the Emergency Number.

“The technicians are on the spot. They’re plugging the leak and filling the tank. You should have water shortly.”

“So we should have it by lunchtime?” A very conservative hope,  I thought.

“Well, I couldn’t say. But I would hope so …”