Back to the coal face

Monday was the first rainy day we’d had in a long while, although the rain we did get was far from heavy - more of a British drizzle. It was still excuse enough for me to divert my energy (a resource sorely lacking since picking up a dose of man flu over Christmas) back in the direction of the new built-in wardrobe.

The first job was to wire in a light and switch to illuminate what would otherwise be a dark spot in the corner of the bedroom. If left in the dark it would make, for me at least, the grabbing of the correct clothes difficult as I live in less than a quarter of the clothes I brought with me from England - somewhat strangely, living on a farm, and having a dog on that farm, isn't a life that lends itself at all well to trousers and shirts, not even the casual variety.

I’m reminded of the time our four New Zealand guests left us, having showered, dressed, loaded their car and come to say goodbye. They were soon unloading some luggage and heading back into the apartment for a change of clothes as Reggie had decided it wise to put large muddy paw prints all over this particular lady's pristine white cotton top!

As such, my ‘normal’ clothes only tend to get an outing when we frequent a restaurant, which is not that often.

So, with the nice sparkly LED light fitted I could put more plaster board onto the studwork so that I could fit the all important corner beads before the next step of applying a coat of joint filler the following day. 

After lunch I followed Helen into the office to spend some of the afternoon working on the veg garden plan for the year.

Not wanting to have an easy year, we have decided we now need to make a real effort to get serious with our vegetable production if we’re ever going to supplement our modest income from the land we have around us.

Having benefited from the help of our friend Allison back in October in clearing a new area alongside the existing veg garden, we know we have enough extra space to increase the growing area from the current 6 beds, which give us somewhere near 60 square metres of growing space, to 25 beds, which will give us nearly 190 square metres. The clearing was always going to be the hardest part of this extension and were it not in the state it is now at this time of year there would be no extension, but we do still have a lot to do before April when the first of the young veg plants will be ready for transplanting.

Later in the afternoon we headed to Pisa airport to go and collect our friends David and Sarah who were returning from a trip back to England for Christmas. After dropping them back to Pescia to collect their car we parted company all with the same thing on our minds: getting home to heat up our houses (even more so for David & Sarah, whose house had been empty and unheated for over a week)! We've had a fairly sustained cold spell this winter, the closest thing to a winter we’ve had since being here (although so far, the first without any snow in the valley), and the forecast for this week promised to lower the mercury in the thermometers even further, with the coldest day of winter so far expected towards the end of the week. Monday was already cold and the wood pile was starting to show it. Of course one of the downsides of having a wood burner to heat your house is that you can't sustain the heat unless you are there to keep feeding it, and if you go out for longer than about an hour, the fire starts to burn out.

Tuesday was officially ‘back to work’ day as we had decided to observe the English bank holiday on Monday, so with both wood burners alight, Helen fired up the computer to check email and I went back to the wardrobe to apply the joint filler to the inside so that I could then plaster the solid walls, paint, fit new rails, move all our clothes inside and dismantle the old ugly inherited wardrobes, finally leaving me space to then finish the exterior of the wardrobe… not all in one day though you understand, today was just the joint filler.

After lunch I once again joined Helen in the office. Now in the groove with veg planning I wanted to keep the momentum going as the first thing we’ll need to consider is seed shopping, which will need to be done by the end of January so that a we can start seeding in the polytunnel in February, so it’s now starting to get quite important to have this planning bit done and that’s how the day ended, little consequence or real interest but progress at least.

On Wednesday it was back to the old routine with our group Italian lesson with Johnny, David and Sarah which was at our place this week, and as usual involved a fair amount of coffee and an enjoyable lesson translating bits of British news from our native tongue into Italian.

After the lesson Johnny headed up the valley to his next lesson and Dave and Sarah stuck around for half hour to chat before heading home just before lunch time.

After lunch Helen headed back into the toasty office - an office that, with today’s temperatures, would have been exceptionally miserable had we not got the wood burner working in there recently. Meanwhile, I headed back to the bedroom with a large bucket of lime finish plaster, trowel and hawk to re-skim the awful job done on the solid walls that make up some of the inside of the wardrobe.

I soon wished I hadn’t started. The bag of plaster we had kept under plastic over the autumn and winter from the recent round of apartment renovation had still managed to suck in a little ambient moisture, meaning that the bucket of plaster had a heap of hard lumps the size of gravel - less than ideal when you’re trying to apply a 5mm coat of smooth plaster to a wall. Needless to say, the air in that little wardrobe was soon as blue as the winter's sky outside and what should have taken me half an hour to lash on a skim coat instead took me almost two hours! The price you pay for not wanting to waste anything!

By mid afternoon the plaster was on the walls and drying… slowly. Back in the UK we use, and have used for decades, a system of gypsum-based plasters which dry pretty quickly - so quickly, in fact, you often don’t get much time without some tool in your hand. A wall would have two coats of skim plaster applied and a number of trowels after this to achieve the desired end result, and all would be done in two and a half hours, by which point the plaster would be solid. Not so with lime-based plasters: these air dry, and as such I was in the wardrobe with a sponge float at 11 at night rubbing the wall to a finish while Helen was in bed reading. Note to self: only apply finish plasters before lunch time.

The gap in the job did allow me some time to head outside and start pruning the olive trees. This is another job that needs doing before spring and as we have now added around another 20 olive trees to our collection with the recent clearing above the house, we now have over 60 olives to prune and tidy up after.

Not all trees take the same amount of time to prune but to give you an idea, one hour per tree might be a reasonable estimate, and then the huge volume of prunings that come from the trees need clearing - either burning or chipping, arguably a more demanding job than the pruning itself.

Before darkness set in I had all but pruned the three trees around the lawn leaving a heap of stuff for Reggie to either play with (or wee on) until I found time to move it from his playground.

Reggie's playground is now carpeted with olive prunings.

On Thursday after breakfast, while Helen tended both fires and her inbox, I went into Pescia to acquire a new spark plug for the strimmer and to pay the electricity bill which was now overdue (in fact it was a week overdue before it arrived, such is the Italian way).

When I got home late morning Paul and Kathy were at the house having popped in to say hi and to drop off a crate of delicious kiwi fruit harvested from their trees. We chatted for a while before they headed up the valley leaving us to grab a quick lunch before Samantha arrived for our second lesson of the week.

After having my homework pulled apart I left Helen and Samantha to it and opted for yet more veg planning, partly because it was a quiet activity I could get on with without disturbing Helen and Samantha, but also because the end of the planning was in sight and I was determined to have it finished this week.

This is the plan... All we need to do now is to make the beds!

Friday was a holiday here in Italy - the Epiphany bank holiday, which also brings with it the tradition of Befana. Befana is a benevolent witch who flies around on a broomstick (of course) on the eve of Epiphany and leaves sweets and other goodies for the good children and coal for the naughty ones. Legend has it that the three kings invited her to go along to see the baby Jesus with them but she told them she was too busy with her housework to go. After they had left her to it and gone on their way, she regretted her decision and has spent every night of the 5th Jan ever since flying around trying to find them… So if you are a kid in Italy you get gifts from Babo Natale (Father Christmas) on 24th December and then gifts from Befana on 5th Jan! Not bad, eh?

The mayor of Pescia is always a good sport!

It was a beautiful day for Epiphany, but the forecasters certainly hadn't been lying about the cold(er) snap, and the icy wind made it feel colder still.

Buona Epifania!

Reggie wasn't bothered by the cold weather.

A perfect winter's day.

With the local bank holiday, we decided to give the supermarket shopping a miss this Friday, and instead stayed at home making sure we could keep both wood burners fired up. By the time we retired to bed that night and after having both wood burners going all day the house was warmer than we’d had it all winter, the rooms upstairs were a balmy 18 degrees, if anything too warm! But there were warning signs of trouble ahead as, when brushing our teeth, the water pressure from the sink tap was noticeably low, the pipes were starting to freeze.

When weather like this arrives the general advice is to leave a tap running all night (even the guy from the water board told me to do so when he was here last January putting us in a new meter housing). A horribly wasteful idea, but life without water? We’d done enough of that so a tap was duly left open while we slept.

It didn’t help. We hit -8C overnight and despite the running water, the pipe supplying the house froze solid. It was a bit of a blow, but we weren’t the only ones - Donatella, Mara and Franco, and another friend Carolyn, all also reported having frozen pipes, and we knew there would be dozens more in the valley as it is normal practice to have a simple plastic pipe running from a far away meter to the houses (if installed well it would be buried to a depth where it wouldn’t freeze but this is rarely the case and having dug up almost our entire pipe last year to fix a problem last summer there was no way we were going to dodge this bullet).

By 8am it had warmed up to -6C.

Poor Santa Meerkat II was frozen after having been left out all night.

So with no working toilet, no working anything, after walking Reggie we headed out for coffee and breakfast before heading back up the valley to collect some water in the plastic containers we had brought with us in the boot. We headed for the free water fountain (provided by the water board) next to the San Lorenzo hotel - but we found that frozen solid as well.

Unlikely to get any water out of that for a while.

We drove back to the village to collect our bread and buy something for lunch from Amanda's shop, where Samantha very kindly offered us their sink to fill our water containers, which we did, thankful for the chance to at least have enough water on standby for bare necessities such as flushing the toilet. Containers filled, we headed home for lunch of marinated anchovies in garlic, chilli and parsley, and some farinata di cavolo nero - a new one for us, a dish based on polenta with cavolo nero, garlic and oil, very simple but delicious, satisfyingly filling and iron rich.

After lunch it was back into Pescia to do the weekly shop after having put it off on Friday in favour of keeping the fires going and generally avoiding the outside world but it could wait no more not least because Reggie was out of food.

We hit the sweet spot at two o’clock and were heading home within an hour. After unpacking the shopping we spent a while trying to decide what work we could usefully do that wouldn’t require a shower afterwards. While doing so Helen went to get more wood for the fire and came back telling me there was a leaky pipe at the side of the house by the stop-cock.

It was a junction in the supply pipe to the house. Clearly the sun on the lower terraces all afternoon had heated the exposed water pipe and it had started flowing at this point at least. As for the remaining few meters into the house which never see daylight, it would be hard to know.

I disconnected the junction and reconnected it and in the process retrieved an icicle from the tube - I had only been saying earlier that day that my childhood winter memories of winter included seeing lots of icicles but that ‘you just don’t see them any more’. WRONG!

Yep, that's an icicle.

It wasn’t long after sorting this problem and removing the icicle that gurgles were heard in the pipes upstairs and then we could hear the cistern filling!

Now with the promise of a shower that evening, we headed out to do an hour's work moving all the large acacia logs from around the old veg beds in readiness for making the new beds, which will be without edges at all.

With all but the heaviest trunk moved we dashed indoors to fill the wood burner and shower before the dropping temperatures started playing havoc with the water again and settled into an evening of cooking. Now that we could wash up that evening we could use one of our curry kits, tonight it was Ghanian beef and groundnut curry, sweet potato dumplings, curried rice and a pokey little bird's eye chilli sauce. It took a while to put together but it was well worth the effort.

Sunday was a lazy affair - we'd had such grand plans for the weekend but after the water incident (which we were relieved to find was still running this morning) and me almost turning inside out from coughing after just an hour's work yesterday, we did very little in the morning. Helen spent a couple of hours doing her Italian homework and I stuck my head in a book. We eventually mustered the enthusiasm to take Reggie for a walk around midday so that he could blow off some steam as he had been barking into the woods most of the morning (which could only mean that there was a hunt somewhere within his earshot).

Sure enough, once out in the woods we could hear the shouts and dogs but they were a safe enough distance away on the opposite hillside so we enjoyed a quiet and cold stroll around the donkey tracks, getting back to the house for a late lunch of left over curry with a lovely bottle of Greek ale sent to Helen for Christmas along with other Greek goodies.

After lunch thoughts turned to work in order to salvage something of the weekend, but I was soon ordered to stay in doors and ‘rest’ (while writing this blog post for you all) while Helen went out to toil away on the terraces, her migraine having subsided just enough to allow her to do so.

So, as I finish this post off, Helen is working on the lower terraces to try and clear some of the wood I cut down there, the mid afternoon sun has come around to the front of the house and is coming in through the window behind me, bathing the staircase in an orange wintery glow while the wood burner roars away with another belly full of acacia and Reggie is out cold in front of the fire.