Melting...

I know, I know, where has the blog been for the last couple of days? If you're in the UK, you're probably hot and bothered and just waiting for the weather to break (or has it broken already?). It's the same here. Except hotter. We're already melting and the forecast doesn't dip below 33C for at least the next 10 days - we're expecting 38C tomorrow. Nice if you have a pool. Nice if you have air con. We have neither.

We have been dreaming up ways and means of attempting to keep cool though. (When I say 'keep cool' I mean 'minimise the heat' - there has been no 'cool' here for many days, and even in my dark and dingy office the temperature is hitting 27-28C. The idea of me having sat here at my computer in the winter wearing a woolly hat, scarf, fingerless mittens, a slanket, two pairs of socks and slippers, while clutching two hot water bottles, seems utterly ridiculous and I can hardly bare to think about it).

I think we last updated you on Tuesday. We didn't do much worthy of note on Wednesday - office work, terrace work, dog walking, chicken checking. Yesterday we had our friends David and Sarah over for lunch. We've known David and Sarah from something of a distance for a while now - they are very good friends of Alex and Donatella and moved over here last autumn. We have met them on several occasions now, and always enjoyed their company, but other than a coffee shared a few weeks ago, we'd never really had the opportunity to spend a significant period of time with them and get to know them well. I think that the tragedy that has befallen our little community has given us pause to think about a lot of things - and, as I've said here before, if there is anything remotely positive we can take from Alex's death then we're going to grab it with both hands. We'd been meaning to get together with David and Sarah anyway, but I think we now feel that it's even more important to connect with people and not let other things get in the way of forming and firming friendships - it's so easy for 'life' to get in the way of things here: you have so many great plans for doing this, that and the other, but then your car breaks, your internet breaks, your water breaks, you have to go into town to meet with the geometra, you have to spend a day strimming your terraces, you have to spend a day strimming someone else's terraces, etc. etc. and before you know it, you haven't done what you said you would do.

So anyway, we invited David and Sarah for lunch yesterday, they came, and we had a thoroughly enjoyable lunch and afternoon (and into early evening - I've no idea where the time went!). We were really pleased that we finally got around to having them over and spending some time with them, they are another set of like-minded people facing the same issues and challenges and with the same joys and frustrations. It's always good to get to know people with whom you share the same values, interests and outlook, not to mention people whose company you enjoy. We feel blessed with the close group of friends we have landed here.

For those who are interested, we feasted on quinoa salad made with tomatoes, salad ricotta (which is like feta), toasted pumpkin seeds, home-grown cucumber and home-grown mint; lentil ragu served as a dip, made with home-grown onions and home-grown courgettes; three-bean dip pimped with a jar of roasted peppers; carrot, raisin and chickpea salad and some of David and Sarah's amazing home-baked sour dough bread. We're told that the sour dough wasn't at its best, the starter-mixture dough having taken exception to the heat, but it tasted pretty good to us!

The heat was intense, but in the first of our trying-to-make-it-as-bearable-as-possible schemes, I had made sure that the garden umbrella went up long before the sun even hit the patio in the morning to at least make sure that the table wasn't hot enough to fry an egg on it (which is often the case when it has been in the sun), and Stuart hatched a plan to tie the corners of the umbrella canopy to the table - to avoid the wind blowing it off-course, in the process creating a rather fetching hot-air-balloon effect:

(You might notice here that the table is now in full sunshine, with the umbrella doing little to help - this photo was taken at around 5pm in the afternoon, but at lunchtime the umbrella was doing its job properly.)

Sarah and David left after a lovely afternoon at around 6pm - the time had just disappeared - by which point we were just too hot to contemplate doing anything more than flaking out on the sofa in the relative "cool" (around 27C) of the living room.

Yesterday was also a momentous day for our little Florence - for the second time in roughly a fortnight, she felt brave enough to go outside with her brother in the morning. However, unlike Lucca, who has adopted a habit of staying out for a couple of hours before asking to be let back in through the 'people' door at around lunch time, Florence was out all day.

Just like the last time she went out about 2 weeks ago (it's probably coming up to a couple of months since she was last in the habit of going out regularly, thanks to having been traumatised (and chased) by Barky Four-Paws), I had to go and search for her at the end of the day, and just like last time, she was hiding right in the thickest of thick undergrowth at the edge of the drive. I clambered up through all of it (collecting scratches and scrapes galore along the way) but failed to find her despite hearing her plaintive miaows. However, when about 20 minutes later I persuaded Stuart to come out with me to launch a two-pronged rescue mission. she came wandering out of the undergrowth of her own accord and we were able to usher her safely into the house while Barky Four-Paws was temporarily shut in the office.

Found her!

She seemed utterly exhausted after her day's adventure in the outside world and promptly flaked out on our bed with her brother similarly flaked out on the floor (apologies for the poor quality photo):

Just like last time, Florence has gone back to being on strike again today though – she has spent the day in the bottom of the wardrobe once again, curled up on a pile of clothes. We are wondering if going outside for a day is going to become a fortnightly ritual!

Today has been much the same as Wednesday - office work, weeding of vegetable beds and trying to cope with the heat. Reggie largely deals with the heat by staying indoors and lying on the relatively cool kitchen tiles, sometimes lying in wait next to the cat flap in the hopes that he might 'welcome' a feline into the house:

"If I wait here long enough..."

I tried feeding him chicken-flavoured ice cubes today as a treat to cool him down (we made a batch of chicken stock from the chicken we roasted at Easter, which we then froze in ice cube trays) - he seemed to enjoy them, but just gulped them down in the same way as he does with any food we give him, barely even chewing. In fact, he ate them so quickly that we wondered if he would have given himself an ice cream headache!

Stuart's next brainwave on the heat mitigation front was to fashion some temporary 'shutters' for our bedroom windows. Traditionally, most (all?) of the houses in this area had shutters at their windows. Indeed, our own house used to have shutters and still had some remaining when our predecessors first took possession of it. (Said shutters could still be found on the rubble pile outside the house when we first arrived.)

This was taken in 2007 (apparently the date on the photo is wrong...) when our predecessors first viewed the house.

The traditional secret to keeping cool in one of these old stone built houses is to close all of the windows first thing in the morning, keep the shutters closed all day, and then open the windows at night time to let the cooler air in. It seems to go against the grain to close the windows in the morning, but we've been doing this religiously, and it does really seem to help. A bit. Of course, our attempts to keep the rooms cool are somewhat thwarted by the fact that we have neither shutters nor curtains at any of our windows (we would love to reinstate the shutters one day - but that will likely involve yet more paperwork and permissions from the comune), and once the sun gets around and streams in, there is little we can do to stop the rooms heating up like an oven.

Stuart decided, therefore, to experiment with making some 'shutters' of our own. From cardboard. He duly measured the windows, cut some cardboard boxes up and used drawing pins to secure them at each of our upstairs windows:

The real test of the Heath Robinson shutters won't be until tomorrow, as Stuart didn't get around to doing this until after lunch, by which time the sun had already been beating into the bedroom for several hours. Nevertheless, when I went upstairs at around 5pm I found that the temperature in the bedroom was 28C - one degree lower than when Stuart had first gone up to install the 'shutters'. Things look promising!

Our current set of guests are due to leave tomorrow, and we have a new set arriving on Sunday, so most of the weekend will be spent getting the apartment ready and the outside area ship shape. Frustratingly, despite all the hot weather and lack of rain, the grass and weeds in and around the lawn have still grown long and ragged, so the lawn mower and strimmer will have to come out at some point tomorrow. With 38C forecast, we aren't relishing the thought. Maybe we'll just have to get up and do it in the middle of the night when it's cooler. Wish us luck!