It was an earlier than hoped for start to our Sunday this morning: the cats, Lucca in particular, wanted breakfast before 6am, although he was studiously ignored until 7am, and shortly after that, Reggie uncharacteristically started whining in his crate. Reggie's crate is positioned directly above the bedroom of our guests who arrived last night. They'd had something of a nightmare start to their Italian holiday - pressured into buying expensive and unnecessary hire car excess insurance by AVIS (of all people), getting lost immediately on leaving the airport (due in no small part to the quickly descending darkness), and then smashing the wing mirror on a road works sign before getting here. They looked absolutely frazzled when they finally clambered out of the car at about 9.30pm last night and were so tired they couldn't even face reheating Helen's lentil ragu for dinner and settled instead for red wine and bread.
With this in mind, Helen quickly jumped out of bed to let Reggie outside. She didn't make it back to bed afterwards, opting instead to do washing up and keep an eye on Reggie while I lay there listening to him having his usual morning bark-a-thon and wondering how long before Diane and Ernest packed their bags and left for the airport.
I eventually got up at about 8.30am and Helen and I ate our breakfast outside at a very leisurely pace with the beautiful sweet smell of the acacia blossom all around us and the sun gradually heating up the patio.
After we'd finished our breakfast, we changed into work clothes and headed down to the vegetable plots on the lower terraces to rake and weed the bed that my uncle John had dug over for us the week before last - we were in urgent need of more space for veg as the cucumber seedlings in their little plug trays were starting to struggle with their confined space, as were others.
About three quarters of an hour later, we heard Reggie barking in the garden. I guessed (correctly) that he was at the gate barking at Diane and Ernest so I went up, jaw clenched, to remedy the situation. No animal brutality took place, you'll be pleased to hear. Instead, I invited Diane and Ernest up to our patio for a drink and a chat so that Reggie could have some time to get to know them. The four of us then whiled away the rest of the morning chatting about the local area and our move here, and it wasn't long before Reggie had done enough familiarising to go indoors and flop down on the cool kitchen floor for a doze.
By the time Diane and Ernest headed off to explore, it was almost 1pm so Helen and I settled on the patio for a lunch of fresh tomatoes drizzled in extra virgin olive oil with salt and pepper, cold lentil ragu (which makes an excellent cold dip), fresh rocket leaves dressed in oil and lemon juice, boiled eggs, bread, oh...and a glass of beer (it was Sunday after all!).
As our guests made for Pietrabuona on foot, we finished lunch and headed back to work on the lower terraces in the searing heat. The weather app on my tablet would have me believe it was only 26C today but it felt hotter than that. In fact, it was so hot the I gave up working at around 4pm, unable to take it any more - I was on empty. I left Helen digging over another new vegetable bed, as yet untouched, in the hope that we can find space for the squashes and pumpkins that are growing.
It was while we were down on the lower of the vegetable terraces that we both had a depressing realisation: the bracken, brambles and other plants have started re-growing with a real vengeance. So much so that we will have little choice but to watch quite a bit of what we have cleared over the winter (both on the lowermost lower terraces and the uppermost upper terraces) get covered over again this summer as it's just too much to keep on top of while have so much else to do that takes higher priority. The only slight silver lining is that this autumn we won't have to clear anything like the amount of decades-old bramble growth that Helen razed to the ground this winter with her trusty Stihl hedge trimmers.
Anyway, I headed indoors to the cool of the house and hid there for an hour until Helen appeared, her back done in, having finished the first and hardest dig-over of the bed. We were shortly joined by Diane, pen and paper in hand, as she and Ernest were off to stock up their cupboards at Esselunga and, knowing all too well that we are car-less at the moment, she had come to ask if their was anything we needed - a very kind gesture indeed, and one that hopefully meant that they couldn't be too annoyed with our not-so-little bark-machine... yet. Let's hope this morning's introduction has sped things along towards a harmonious (and as peaceful as possible) holiday for them.
Helen and I then sat on the patio with a couple of cold beers watching the sun slowly dip and thankfully cool (how on earth did we do all that physical work last summer in temperatures like this and higher?). Tonight's dinner is as yet undecided: do we harvest our very own first crop of radish for a quinoa salad or light a fire and cook fire-pit fajitas? We'll let the beer decide.
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