We celebrated the end of 2014 and welcomed in the new year at the Phillips household in Pescia. We arrived at 7pm, having already taken Reggie for a walk around town for an hour in the hopes that he would settle down a bit better once there (he didn't).
While dinner was cooking, and Helen and Sue were chatting indoors, I helped Chris cut up a pile of olive tree prunings to make a bonfire on the patio.
We then ate a starter of delicious tomatoes cooked with garlic, hot olives, cold olives, humus, flat bread, roll mop herrings and crisps - a great way to start the evening, along with beer for the boys and prosecco for the girls (and fizzy orange for Henry and Erik).
After that, we lit the bonfire and all stood around it for an hour or so, chatting, drinking wine and enjoying the warmth of the hot embers in an otherwise clear and cold evening.
Once the fire had gone out we retired indoors to eat the main course - a delicious fish stew with roasted potatoes - so good, in fact, I went for seconds, a real taste of the ocean!
We were all shocked to realise that, somehow, by the time we'd finished the main course, the clock had ticked on to almost midnight already!! We had absolutely no idea where the last four and three quarter hours had disappeared to, so we charged our glasses and went outside to stand on the patio to toast the new year and watch the fireworks and Chinese lanterns floating across Pescia. We even had a sparkler each - a real night of celebrations!
Once the majority of the fireworks had finished and the cold had completely numbed our extremities, we retired indoors to sit in front of the fire and see in the British new year with the BBC on the TV and more prosecco.
That was followed by more prosecco, wine, chatting, wine, prosecco, chatting... and so on, until the next time anyone looked at a clock it was 4.30am and we hadn't even stopped for pudding (the zucotto that we'd made earlier that day)! It was already far too late for that though (besides which, Henry and Erik had long since gone to bed), so we all rather quickly decided that bed was calling.
We'd been offered a bed for the night in the Phillips's little chestnut house that stands next to their own house. The chestnut house is a little like a well-built barn (chestnut houses were originally built for the purpose of drying out the chestnuts to make chestnut flour). In order to get into the 'upstairs; part of the house you have to climb up a ladder - so Helen, Chris and I clambered up, with me giving Reggie a fireman’s lift up the ladder. Chris lit the little wood burner in there for us before leaving us to it, advising us on his way out that we might want to wear woolly hats to bed as it might get a little chilly once the wood burner had gone out.
He wasn't wrong. I woke up after only an hour or so to find that Reggie had made it into the bed between us. My nose and forehead were like blocks of ice, and Helen was hugging Reggie tight to her like a hot water bottle.
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| One frozen man, one cosy dog. |
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| Reggie had found his nirvana. |
After trying - and failing - to get back to sleep, we decided we would attempt to make it home. Helen hadn't had as much to drink as the rest of us last night as she'd suffered with a headache, so she offered to drive us back up the hill. Decision made, we quickly dressed (not that we'd really undressed to get into bed), gathered up our belongings and, after less than three hours' sleep, we were heading out into the cold, frosty morning light.
We realised that there was a path around the back of the chestnut house that leads up the hill, through the olive terraces, before dropping back down onto the track that joins up with the road, so rather than carrying everything back down the ladders again (we had with us two large bags of bedding and dog paraphernalia as well as Reggie’s crate and Reggie himself), we opted for the route through the trees. We had no real idea where we were going or whether we were going to end up in the right place, Helen managed to scratch her face twice on brambles, we both kept tripping over rocks and tree stumps, and Reggie thought the whole escapade was brilliant, clearly well worth being rudely awoken from his cosy grown-up-bed slumber for. We finally wobbled down to the car with all our belongings and drove home in the broad daylight, arriving back at 8am.
On entering our chilly house, it felt blissfully toasty in comparison with the chestnut house, so we fed the cats and let them out, released the geese, sent a quick tweet to Sue to apologise for having done a runner, put Reggie in his crate and both crash landed into bed.
Helen got up again at 11.30am, when Reggie started making noises indicating that he'd like to be let out for a trip to the toilet, and then stayed up with him, watching TV quietly and trying to keep Reggie quiet while I curled back up under the duvet - I was starting to feel decidedly under the weather.
I won't go into too much detail here, suffice to say that after I got up at around 2pm, I spent the rest of the afternoon feeling nauseous and dashing for the bathroom. I really wasn't good company for my wife for the first day of 2015. In between dashes to the bathroom I curled up on the sofa and dozed fitfully until I could take no more and collapsed back into bed at about 8.30pm.
Thankfully, after a 13-hour stint in bed I woke up this morning feeling ready for breakfast - the bug, or whatever it was, had left the building, so to speak, so I devoured a bowl of cereal before we both put on our shoes and coats to take Reggie out for a walk.
We decided to walk in Vellano, and walked part of the way along the footpath that leads from Vellano to Calamari in the valley bottom. The sun was beautifully warm - so warm, in fact, that I was down to my T-shirt halfway through the walk and sweating - the milder weather that had been forecast had definitely arrived.
After Reggie had had a good stretch of his legs (to make up for not getting out further than the garden yesterday), we went home for lunch and decided to attempt a little outdoor work this afternoon.
I was soon digging yet more fence post holes (since Reggie can now jump the temporary fence at the rear of the house, which was protecting the cats' entrance and exit, we need to put a taller, more permanent solution in place) while Helen took the new Stihl hedge trimmers down onto the lower terraces to put them through their paces and clear the brambles from the terrace beneath the house.
Since having Reggie, we haven't yet attempted to both work outside, and we didn't quite know what to do with him: leaving him alone in the house would be asking for trouble, putting him in his crate in the house seemed unfair, and as I was dismantling the temporary fence to make way for the new one, there was no Reggie-protection for the cats. We decided there was nothing else for it but to stake him to the floor - well, his lead at least, and give him a large pork bone that we bought him from the supermarket in the hope that it would occupy him for a while. He's not yet had a real bone (only one made from pig skin, which he likes, but it doesn't really hold his attention), so we weren't sure what to expect, and I think we both fully expected for one of us to have to down tools and dog-sit while the other worked.
It seems he adores bones! We couldn't get near to him once he had his paws on it - I went to pick it up to move it from the gravel to the paved patio so that he wouldn't keep getting gravel stuck to it, but the moment I went to reach for it he snarled and snapped his teeth, to tell me in no uncertain terms that I should not touch his bone.
The bone kept him busy for a couple of hours - he was so focused on his bone that he completely ignored Lucca walking past and meowing at me. That speaks volumes about how much he loved his bone!
As the daylight slowly started to fade and the temperature started to dip, we packed away our tools and moved indoors, both feeling much better for having done some manual work albeit only for a few short hours.
So, it has been a supremely better latter half of the year so far, and the plan for the evening involves nothing more than reading in front of the fire and a belly full of vegetables for dinner in the form of fajitas.
Happy new year!
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