The move to Tuscany : Relaxation.. swiftly followed by frustration and anxiety! (What were we thinking?!)

This week started out with some relaxation in celebration of Stuart's birthday, but that was swiftly followed by frustration and anxiety about the tremendous amount of work there is to do and the number of urgent jobs on our to-do list. It comes as something of a disappointment that, almost two years in, we are still fire-fighting (in the figurative sense), with urgent jobs jostling up and down on our to-do list vying for our immediate attention! We also recognise the importance of allowing ourselves some down-time, time to rest, to enjoy our surroundings and look after ourselves - but that does become difficult when there's a nagging long list of chores on our mind.

We are hopeful (ha!) that by this time next year things will be more straightforward. The major complication and additional stress at the moment is the renovation of the apartment ceiling - a huge undertaking that shouldn't need to be done again for a very long time, and we don't think there can be (m)any more nasty surprises lurking around the place to try and trip us up. We have a deadline for the completion of the apartment ceiling as we have guests coming in just under 4 weeks' time. The idea of the apartment ever looking pristine and beautiful again is a fair stretch of the imagination at the moment, but we know that it will and that in fact it will be far more beautiful than ever before, with the traditional chestnut beams and cotto tiles exposed in the bedroom and even an exposed section of the original stone wall (which will have been repointed). Progress on the apartment has stalled a little this week though - it's frustrating how easily these things can be sent off-course - partly because we took Monday off to celebrate Stuart's birthday, partly because Stuart has recommenced some of his gardening work this week. Throw in a couple of Italian lessons and a tricky problem with trying to decipher and understand lighting circuit diagrams (we are now at the point where Stuart needs to sort out the electrics and lighting in the walls/ceiling of the apartment before we can move forward with any more of the restoration) and we have a week without progress!

In an attempt to galvanise our efforts we have started both getting up a little earlier, and continuing to work outdoors until later in the evening so that we can attempt to fit more into the day. I have taken on the responsibility for strimming the terraces while Stuart concentrates on other tasks - at the moment the grass and everything else in between seems to grow before our very eyes, and strimming seems a little like painting the Forth Bridge. We're also becoming painfully aware that the more terraces we clear... the more strimming and maintenance there is to do. The terraces that we cleared over autumn/winter are already starting to be reclaimed by nature (bramble, bracken), so we need to take action quickly to put a stop to that!

Of course our seedlings have been thriving in the warmth of the polytunnel, to the point of some of them (mainly the beans and zucchini) almost outgrowing their pots, so we decided to dedicate the latter part of Saturday (after a morning dog walk, supermarket trip, trip to the garden centre, then a few hours strimming and puzzling over the electrics in the apartment) to digging some new beds for climbing beans and preparing some of the old beds for more things to be planted out. Once again we were frustrated by our slow progress - we knuckled down and spent the day grafting, yet by the end of the day we felt we had only underlined how much more work there is to do!

We were lucky enough to be given a car load (literally!) of plants this week: raspberries, a raspberry and blackberry hybrid, a grapevine, irises, sage, peonies, camellia, and several redcurrants. We were contacted by Claudia, our neighbour Mara's friend, who we had met last weekend when we went to see Mara and Franco and their bees. Claudia (a charming friendly German lady who has lived in Italy for over 20 years and lives just outside Pescia with her Italian husband and three delightful young girls) has a passion for plants and growing, but is slightly limited with space and wanted to pass some plants on to us in the hopes that we will be able to accommodate and nurture them. We were expecting to come away with a couple of raspberry plants and maybe one or two others but we literally came home with an entire car-ful of greenery. We had a bit of a panic over where to put everything (not having planned to fit all these things in) but eventually managed to get almost everything safely in the ground - so now we just hope that it all survives the transfer of homes and ownership.

We had a brief visit from our almost-next-door neighbours on Friday afternoon. We have met Valerio before, but this time he was accompanied by his wife - they had decided to take a stroll together and decided to come and visit. Of course Reggie did his best to try and drown out any conversation with barking, but our generous neighbours didn't seem to mind too much as they wandered round the garden admiring our view and plants.

It must have been the week for visitors as Stuart also met an old chap on our driveway. On asking if he could help him, the man shrugged and said no thanks... it seems he was on a hunt for mushrooms. However, Stuart engaged him in conversation and found out that he had grown up in the village - Stuart asked him if our house and land had always been as it is now, to which the man replied 'no!', telling him that it used to be a vineyard... Which is a bit of a turn-up for the books. Of course, this is only the story from one man and the conversation took place in stilted Italian, so we can't be 100% certain, but it's certainly very possible given that we have found vines growing on several of the terraces that we have cleared (both above and below the house) and that we have found a couple of large iron barrel hoops in the undergrowth - the sort that would have gone around large wine barrels.

We ended the week with a visit to the local agricultural school for its annual agricultural fete, 'Naturalitas'. We went to the same event last year with our friends the Phillipses and had a lovely time wandering around all the stalls, tasting the wine and buying plants (and willow baskets and soaps). This year, it seemed as if everyone we know in Italy was going to be at the fete and had asked us if we were going. We arranged to meet up with our neighbours, Mara and Franco, at the fete, and told everyone else that we would see them there - and indeed we did! We spent most of the time with Mara and Franco, but also ran into Claudia, Massimo and their girls, as well as Mara's friends Sylvia and Fabio who we'd met back in January and our 'actual' neighbours Valerio and Roseanna. We also spent some time with our friends Paul and Kathy from Castelvecchio, and David, Sarah and Donatella. To almost complete the set, we bumped into Sue and her friend just as we were leaving the fete. What a difference a year makes - when we went last year we had a lovely time wandering around with Chris and Sue (and we bumped into Donatella, Alex, David and Sarah, who we didn't know then quite as well as we do now) and marvelled at how many people they seemed to know and were awed by how many people they spoke to in Italian. This year, we once again came away with a warm fuzzy feeling, this time happy to know so many friendly faces and thrilled to have spent a large part of the afternoon conversing in Italian. Far from perfect Italian, of course, but it's an incredible feeling be able to laugh and share jokes with our neighbours and their friends in another language. They are, of course, very patient and forgiving of our mistakes, and it's only because we feel comfortable and relaxed in their company that we are able to do this (put me in front of the surly man in the post office and I will clam up, unable to recall a single word of Italian). We are hoping that Mara and Franco will be able to spare the time to come over to our house very soon so that we can show them some of what we are doing here and start to repay some of their kind hospitality.