Sure enough, Helen had been up at the goose enclosure, but as I walked out of the house she met me with a solemn face and the news: 'At least one of the geese is dead but I haven't been able to get close enough to check the other, it's very quiet though, and there are a lot of feathers.' My heart sank and immediately I felt guilty for having constantly delayed fitting barbed wire to the top of their fencing while leaving them out over night.
Sure enough, when I got into the enclosure while Helen kept Reggie quiet, I found two dead geese and one missing egg. I felt sick and could have really kicked myself for allowing this to happen and yet more guilt for the fact they had met such a gruesome end (I'll spare you the photographs, but both heads and necks were absent along with any chance of possibly seeing a gosling...) what have we done?!
By now I was running late for work so I headed off, telling Helen I'd deal with them later - but by the time I'd arrived in Vellano I'd realised that we should at least be attempting to salvage something from this situation so asked Helen to bag them up and put them in the utility room until I got home, which she gamely did.
The early part of my morning was spent with David, Darren and Malcolm moving gravel that had been washed to the bottom of a long gravel drive (courtesy of a heavy downpour a month or so ago) back to the top, then raking it all flat. We weren't sure how long this arduous task was going take as there must have been a cubic metre or more to move back up hill, so we were pleasantly surprised to be finished by 8.30am!
After saying goodbyes to Darren and Malcolm, I went with David to say hello to Sarah who was working in their vegetable garden a few terraces up on the same piece of land. En route, David mentioned that as we had finished early he was going to go along with Sarah to help Donatella try to find a leak in her water pipe - this was no easy task as the distance of the pipe from the house to the meter must be almost a kilometre, but it urgently needed to be found as poor Donatella had just received a letter from the water company to say that her water usage was huge (meaning she must have a leak) and that she now owed them almost €1,000! The water company were offering to reduce the payment if she could find and fix the leak. It was clear this needed sorting out quickly, so I offered to lend a hand as well.
David, Sarah and I met Donatella and starting clambering through the woods, following and digging up the plastic pipe - giving me flashbacks to when Helen and I did the same, starting at 5.45am and taking all day when we'd had our own water pipe drama not so long ago. It wasn't long before the pipe disappeared under a tree that had fallen in the storm back in March so we changed tack and went to the stop cock (which is about halfway along the pipeline) and worked from there backwards. After almost an hour battling with bamboo that had since grown over the pipe, its roots making it very slow going, we managed to get clear and made some relatively speedy progress, so while David and I carried on, Donatella and Sarah went up to the village to find the meter.
It turned out that the meter was lost under yet more undergrowth - but fortunately a neighbour had appeared who knew exactly where it was and helped them hack their way to it.
Once they had got a clear view of the meter, we turned the stop cock off, and they reported back that the dial on the meter had stopped spinning - this was excellent news as it meant that the leak must in the lower half of the pipe (below the stop cock), half of which we had by now uncovered. An hour later, we had also uncovered the other half of the lower part of the pipe, yet we could find no leaks. After some head scratching, we realised that the only place the leak could now be was between the stop cock and the point at which we'd started tracing the pipe from the top - a length of about 5m, 3m of which ran under an old lady's driveway. We started digging at the stop cock and immediately saw a patch of wet soil. Another shovel or two later it was clear we'd found the leak, so we cleared the way and re-plumbed a new section of pipe to the stop cock before heading to Donatella's for a celebratory lunch.
Donatella's Mum had clearly been busy cooking all morning as after a very quick glass of beer we were presented with a huge pan of pasta, which was followed by roast pork and roast potatoes and finished off with huge wedges of watermelon. I told Donatella that if this was the payment for helping her with problems she was welcome to have more.
As much as I could have lingered, the day was wearing on and I needed to get home to Helen, who I knew would be disappointed to have missed out on helping us all.
When I got home I set up a table behind the house out of the sun and set to work attempting to butcher what remained of the geese. It was a strange thing handling our geese this way, but I somehow felt oddly detached from the experience. I think the amount of concentrating that was needed helped as it was not an easy task. An hour later I'd managed to bag up and freeze 4 breasts and four legs with the rest of the carcases ready for disposal in a huge sack, I'd like to think the geese would happy knowing that they didn't die in vain but I'm sure they don't strive to this end and therefore don't think like that, either way I felt much happier, even though Helen was worried about the fact they'd been sitting around all morning before I got around to attempting my butchering skills, and I'm not sure I'll be able to convince her to eat any of it!
With that done, and Helen having finally finished a long day's work in the warm office, we sat down to a glass of cold beer and dinner on the patio.
Our first task on Saturday morning was to take Reggie for a walk before it got unbearably hot - we took him up to the cava track, where most of the walk was in the shade and he had a good run around. After that, it was the usual Saturday task of getting the supermarket shopping done, and in the afternoon, instead of sweating it out on the terraces, we opted to go and do some more shopping - this time, we headed for Montecatini to buy more cans of spray paint for the water tanks, some work t-shirts from Decathlon for me, some doggie chews (and while we were there we picked up another pack of tennis balls for Reggie) and a few plants from the garden centre there (basil, a lanturna and an agapanthus).
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| MY tennis balls. |
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| All mine... |
By the time we got home, it was nearing 5pm, so we whiled away an hour doing admin tasks before sitting down on the patio with a chilled glass of white wine to await our guests, Helen and John, who we'd invited up for a glass of wine on the last night of their stay with us. We had a lovely evening chatting with them again, and it was great to find out how they'd found their time here. We chatted and sipped wine with them until quite late, but with such good company, lovely cool outside temperatures (relatively speaking) and the last of the year's fireflies flitting around, it was hard to call time on the evening - but all good things must come to and end and with their departure the next morning, they had some final packing they wanted to do so left us to it.
Sunday started at a civilised 8 to 8:30, and as we were having breakfast on the patio Helen and John came to say goodbye - yet another sad farewell and yet more guests we really genuinely hope will come back sometime. We really enjoy having people to stay in the apartment and feel that meeting so many new people enriches our lives more than we could have imagined, so long may the good guests continue!
After breakfast we coerced Reggie into the car to take him for a walk. I say "coerced", but Helen had to resort to picking up all 25kg of the non-compliant lump and posting him into his crate. He's not at all keen to get into the car in these temperatures, and I can't say I blame him - by the time we went out at 9.30am it was already on its way to 30 degrees. Unfortunately for him (and the rest of us), the 10-day forecast still doesn't predict any change in the weather with 35+C for the foreseeable future - temperatures that hugely slow down progress outside.
We headed up to the top of the valley just beyond Pontito, the northernmost of the ten castella and parked about a kilometre away from Croce a Veglia so that we could have more of a walk around the area and maybe even make it up to the saddle of La Pracchia before Reggie went on strike.
The views from La Pracchia were stunning - not only can you see all of the 10 castella at once from up here but you can also see into all of the neighbouring valley. It was beautiful and had made its way to being one of our favourite place to go for a little walk, but we did have to cut it a little short of the saddle itself as we stumbled across the free range cattle that graze up here and knowing that dogs and cows are not a good mix, we headed back downhill to the car.
The morning now mostly gone we decided, rather spontaneously, to head out for lunch in Montecarlo. How times have changed! We had something of a dining-out habit back in Abingdon - not a huge vice, and not always anything fancy (often just a sandwich and chips in the local pub), but it was our go-to thing when we had some free time to ourselves. Here, however, Helen and I have not been out for a meal as a couple (just the two of us) since last May - more than a year has gone by! That's not to say we haven't eaten out of course (if you've been following the blog you'll know that we've sampled a good number of the restaurants around here), but it's always been with friends and family, so today we were both really looking forward to lunch together.
We were a little disappointed to find that our usual haunt in Montecarlo was closed for lunch today, so that forced us into going somewhere different. We decided to try an Osteria that had opened a few months back under new management. For those not in the know, an Osteria is a grade above a Trattoria, Trattorias are the mainstay around here, serving simple but delicious home cooked food, so were we in for a treat? OF COURSE WE WERE!
A tasting plate of pecorino cheeses with local sunflower honey and a plate of superb quality cured meats, were followed by some roast pork with a fennel and celery salsa for me with beans cooked with sage and a delicious chicken salad for Helen. Of course it was all accompanied by some house wine which I have no doubt comes from the Montecarlo area. I'm afraid we can't comment on the standard of the home cooked sweets as we were both stuffed after the main course and only I opted for a coffee before heading home to the dog.
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| Er.. an Italian London black cab! |
Once home a stressful hour or so followed in which we couldn't find Lucca. He has become a creature of habit lately and tends not to eat much breakfast first thing, instead opting to go out, only to come back in mid to late morning for a snack and a sleep, and the latest he tends to stay out is lunch time. Today, however, there was no sign of him when we went out and no sign of him on our return. We both walked around calling for him, but there was no response. I think that after the recent fox attack it was hard not to jump to a horrible conclusion, and we sat worried for a while before Helen went back out to try again, only to eventually find the little tyke nonchalantly walking towards the house. It's safe to say he's in the dog house for the evening, but that didn't stop him gobbling down a meaty chew stick before collapsing on the rug in the bedroom.
So as the sun drops in the sky and the temperature reluctantly drops with we plan to settle down to a glass of chilled wine on the patio before maybe catching up on the Tour de France this evening having missed the first four stages.
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