Old maps and new pumps

Monday was a fairly uneventful day here as I went into the next valley to aid Brunetta (owner of the pool house) in finishing painting her new loft conversion, returning home in time for lunch and a visit from Dave and Sarah who had popped in with a bag of ripe figs to swap for one of our cabbages.

Tuesday was altogether at the opposite end of the spectrum as I started at the pool house at half six as per usual before heading to Vellano for the morning to do a bit of work with David, mainly in the form of yet more wood staining.

Small grass snake taking a dip.

After lunch back at home, Helen and I spent the afternoon making a start at installing the hydraulic ram pump I'd built down in the river. Helen carried the precious and somewhat fragile pump while I dragged a 30 metre roll of tubing through the woods with me.

Snagged yet again!

Blurry but seemingly happy

Dragonflies!

The river bed is full of fallen trees

Crayfish!!

SUCK!

version 1 too leaky!

So as the photos show, we had some measure of success in laying the so-called drive pipe from the natural pool up river and sucking hard to get the siphon to start getting water to not quite the location we needed it - seems I couldn't measure precisely enough with strides when negotiating a rocky riverbed - but for now at least it was enough to test version one of the pump. I call it version one as it soon became clear that once enough pressure had built up in the orange pressure chamber, leaks were appearing, releasing the required pressure. So that was as far as we were going to get that day, and another shopping trip elsewhere in town would be needed to find some better and high-pressure-type tubing with appropriate adaptors.

Wednesday, feeling a little weary from clambering around in the river the previous day, I opted to try and tick off a job from our ever-growing list by heading into to Pescia to get some car insurance quotes. I first headed to Allianz, where our friends Paul and Kathy had been getting good deals which was also very conveniently located next to two possible high pressure tube outlets... or so I hoped.

After walking out of the insurance office with a quote of over €1300 (€250 more than we paid last year with our current broker), which was apparently a reduced price for having a smart box fitted to the car to monitor driving style, amongst other things! What happened to insurance being a risk business? Must we expect a future of completely automated cars that we still have to pay to insure? Out of principle I wouldn't take one of these boxes anyway - it seems insurance companies like banks these days want their cake and they want to eat it, the inevitable outcome of having shareholders to feed?

[THUMP] (the sound of me jumping down from my soapbox). [Sigh] - the sigh of relief of my wife.

So anyway, the plumbers merchant had no tube to serve my purposes so I went to the irrigation shop where I had initially bought the rest of the components for the pump - yet again it was another lesson in asking for something even if you can't see it. I hadn't seen this type of tube when I bought the valves and other bits and pieces so had left without this bit and instead bought what turned out to be sub-standard bits from Frateschi. Had I just asked in the first place, I would have been furnished with what I left with that day (the correct pieces for the job) and would have saved myself €40.

Next stop was Pescia to the insurance broker named Cattolica, who Paul and Kathy were now insured with and had an even better price from.

After helping an American couple work out how to pay for their parking using a credit card (a new experience for me also), I headed to the Cattolica office, only to find their computer system out of action and be told to return after 5pm in the hope they had it fixed by then.

It seemed I wouldn't be getting a tick on our list after all!

As I was walking back to the car I passed the state archive building in central Pescia and noticed it was open. As with most places here in Italy, they do not have regular hours and opening times change on different days of the week, so spontaneously I decided to poke my head in and ask how we might go about finding some information about our house - mainly, if nothing else, when it was built.

It had been suggested to us that, if we took our purchase contract and paid a paltry fee we might be able to have access to whatever info they had about our property, so I wanted to finally confirm that, and maybe put the wheels in motion rather than just saying 'we should pop in there sometime', as we do almost every time we drive past.

It got the impression that the staff in there have slow days, and before I knew it large maps were being produced for me to look at to identify land parcel numbers, which would then correspond to entries within the old-looking books they had... What I thought would be a two-minute conversation in fact lasted for around two hours as both members of staff went around the place generally making a mess on my behalf. There were maps and books everywhere, and after an hour and a half we had seemingly hit a dead end where we couldn't decipher a handwritten number, combined with the confusion of land parcel numbers changing in the early 1900s when our part of the valley switched from being under the control of Vellano and fell instead under the jurisdiction of Pescia.

Things were approaching lunchtime, and I'm not sure whether it was this or the fact the members of staff had something to do that had them both so animated - either way, things were going at a speed now and I found it hard to keep up! Just as I was about to thank them for trying and walk out leaving them to tidy up before lunch, the lady (whose name I never got to learn) had a eureka moment and found a mention of our house changing hands. This gave us the magic number that we couldn't decipher and meant we could easily go back as far as their records allowed, which was 1825, showing that the house had changed hands, but within the same family, three times over a century or so.

That was then our deadend, I was worn out after two hours of that carry-on and left with a piece of paper scribbled with a few lines of relevant info that should now enable us to head to the state archive office in Lucca to go back even further. A job for another time, and another day, but exciting to have got so far and now know we should easily, in theory at least, be able to get back to the origins of the house.

The rest of the day I spent in the relative coolness of the house (27 degrees) to write up the previous week's blog, as i'm doing right now on the following Wednesday afternoon.

Thursday was another full-on day. I started at the pool house in the early morning before heading up to Vellano for a morning's work with David, coming home for lunch before heading back to the village of Pariana to help Brunetta with yet more painting for the afternoon.

That evening we spent a lovely couple of hours with our guests Katie and Greg, not forgetting Reggie who really quite enjoys a visit to the guest garden despite the presence of guests - in fact it seems to really help the bonding process along. I say 'bonding' in the loosest possible terms, of course, where Reggie is involved although he was readily offering Katie kisses before the night was out and even took a treat, if somewhat reluctantly, from Greg.

The week had somehow disappeared in a blur and after a slow start to the morning on Friday, having slept like the dead, I went to sell some of our excess veg to Amanda, filled the car with fuel and the went again to Catollica for an insurance quote, only to find that on Fridays they close earlier for lunch and I had missed them by 15 minutes!

After lunch I headed into Pescia to do the weekly food shop, as is the norm to allow us a free weekend.

Saturday morning after walking Reggie we headed to Sandrino's for coffee and pastries before deciding that, it being such a lovely morning and it being so nice to be out together on such a glorious day, we should not head straight back home just yet, and that maybe we should take a trip out to try and find some replacement garden furniture for the apartment.

Breakfast!!

While here two weeks ago, Mom and her friend Yvonne had done a great job with some wood glue, a hammer and nails fixing up the current guest patio furniture which, over the winter, had become a little worse for wear. It still looks great but the some of the arms had become detached at various places and if you leant back with any weight you would find the chair arms detaching - not ideal, and while they are suitably fixed for this summer, we thought it would be better to replace the furniture sooner rather than after a disaster later.

As it was, we headed in the direction of Lucca to find the hidden away Carrefour from which David and Sarah had bought their lovely garden furniture. Sadly we found very little left by way of garden furniture, but we left with four outdoor cushions and a new mosquito trap for the bedroom. Having satisfied our desire to see a bit of the outside world, we headed home for lunch.

After lunch we took the new and improved ram pump version two back to the river to see if the new pressure chamber would hold out.

The pool of crayfish.

Drive pipe.

Ram pump version 2.

It did!! And after half an hour of priming the pump it started clanking away automatically! I was so amazed by this thing I had put together actually doing what I had seen these pumps doing on the internet I didn't care at that point whether water was coming out the pipe further up hill. In fact it wasn't, but that did nothing to dampen my feeling of accomplishment. I left the pump running for a couple of hours to give it time to fill the 80-90 metres of delivery pipe in the hope that then we might see water arriving out of the tube 14-15 metres or so higher.

After that small success, and with Mara and Franco due for dinner, I decided to have a go at making one of the blinds I had been pondering over for the pergola to block the blinding sunshine that we now get of an evening in the hope that it would make it bearable to eat outside that evening.

With the help of Helen we managed to erect the first of three blinds in less than an hour and we tidied up before heading indoors to start cooking.

Helen cooked a lovely meal for us all using one of our somewhat demanding curry kits from the ever reliable Spicery, introducing yet another style of curry to our intrepid culinary explorers.

The pudding we tried was not from our kit but from a cookbook Helen bought some weeks back and although the taste was lovely and in keeping with the Indian food we served, it look terrible. Had the caramel not stuck into the pan, remaining there when the flan was turned out, it would have passed as a reasonable dessert. Thankfully it seems even Franco can be polite about food and nothing but complimentary noises of 'mmmmm' were heard around the table.

Blind number 1, version 1.

Pudding disaster!

Sunday started with a walk up the terraces with Reggie from where you can now clearly see the state of the dying silver fir tree in front of the house, I see a new drama in the near future involving this tree, but that will be for another blog post in the winter.

Spot the dying tree.

Sunday was hot and humid. With heavy, overcast skies (but not a drop of rain), the heat felt intense and oppressive and while I retreated to the bedroom for a couple of hours of catch-up sleep, Helen busied herself cooking up some of our glut of courgettes to put in the freezer.

By the middle of the afternoon, it was so hot and muggy that we decided Reggie needed his cool coat on, so we wet it as required and put it on him. He immediately went into a sulk and went off to his bedroom to prove it.

I HATE MY COAT!

...and now i'm going to sulk

...and sulk some more!

While Reggie sulked, we sifted through the piles of leaflets and information on the area we have accumulated in the apartment and filed it all into a nicely organised document box file. Thrilling, I know, but it's a job we've been meaning to do for a long time and we did have a glass of wine while doing it, which made the process almost enjoyable.

Information overload.

After that small achievement we gave in to Reggie's sulking and took his coat off him, which saw him immediately spring back to life. It seems as if he sees the coat as more of a punishment than a cooling aid!

There MUST be something i can bark at outside SOMEWHERE!

Finally, we ended the weekend with a quiet night watching TV and hoping for some fresher weather in the morning!

Managed a little more compost making early in the week

Roughly 1 cubic metre

Compost nice and hot

Beautiful cornflowers

Bumble bee enjoying the spacious squash flowers

Florence fennel

Brought some sunshine inside the house

These bees LOVE artichoke flowers!

And the rains came... (and left)

After the last week's holidaymakers returned home, Monday morning was time to get the apartment sorted and ready for the next set of guests who would be arriving at lunchtime tomorrow. Thankfully, it didn't take too long to whip the place into shape as Yvonne and Mum had left the place in good order on leaving (thanks both!).

After lunch, and while Helen returned to her work in the office, I turned my attentions to repairing a pair of shutters from the holiday house next to David and Sarah's in Vellano.

Some weeks back I had taken a couple of pieces of the old shutter into the wood yard and had them machine to the correct dimensions the required amount of wood... or at least I thought I had.

I've no idea what link in the chain fell down here, but the short version of the story was that the wood was still too big in both width and thickness, meaning that hours of adjusting with a router were required until by the end of the afternoon I had a system that was working. It was a little repetitive in the repeated changing of bits for the router (three times for each slat), but it worked and I was pleased I didn't need to return to the yard for a second time.

Just need a lick of paint needed now.

Tuesday was back to the normal routine, the first early two hours of which were at what we shall henceforth call 'the pool house' to clean the pool and water the pot plants, followed by a trip to Vellano for some more wood staining with David. At the end of our morning's work and before I headed home, David and I sampled a new brew from a well known German brewery entering what now seems to be the primary growth area in the market, that of IPA style beer - and respectable it was too, enhanced perhaps by the view from David and Sarah's terrace.

Not quite IPA but LPA.

Just after lunch, our latest set of apartment guests, Katie and Greg, arrived. We knew that they lived in Abingdon but had no idea how they had found us and whether it was a pure coincidence that they came from our old town - but we soon put the mystery to rest when we found out that Greg works in the same building as Helen used to work in, and had seen one of our flyers circulated (thanks to our friend Allison) over two years ago!

After a brief chat we left our guests to settle in while I headed over into the next valley, north of Collodi, to help out Brunetta, the lady that owns the pool house, at her own house. Are you keeping up?

It turns out that she and her husband are two months into a two-week building/loft conversion project - so it seems Italian builders can be as bad as (some) British ones!

Needless to say, Brunetta and her husband had got utterly fed up of sleeping in the lounge by now and had decided to throw some money at me to help get the job finished. This involves filling all the gaps between the roof tiles before painting them white, then staining the beams dark brown so that the walls can then be painted.

After an afternoon of looking up at the ceiling
I could sympathise a little with Michelangelo... a little..

The converted loft space, soon to be a bedroom, but not soon enough.

Typical method of supporting earthen walls,
may need a bit of this at our house.

It was clear after an afternoon's work on the ceiling that the job wasn't going to be a quick one and that I would have to make some return visits.

I headed home, but after a busy day, rather than chill out on our patio, it was time to clean up and dress up for an evening out - we had been invited to dinner with Amanda and Alessio in Pietrabuona.

With both Amanda and Alessio working in the food business (Alessio is a chef, about to start a job working as a private chef to a wealthy Russian family spending the summer near the coast), they both clearly enjoy their food and the conversation largely revolved around this topic while we demolished the first three courses: home-marinated anchovies served with samphire and a salad, followed by ricotta gnocchi with a fish ragu, and then a fillet of mackerel with a yellow pepper sauce and potatoes.

What a delicious feast it was, and by the time we came to the amazing cake that Amanda had made (ricotta with pistachio & pumpkin seeds) - which had me thinking back to childhood egg custard tarts - we were onto much more philosophical subjects. It was gone midnight before we knew it, and we left with a copy of Alessio's first published book, for which he won a prize recently in the form of a huge trophy and which we've said we will attempt to help translate into English for him.

Wednesday, as ever, was our Johnny lesson, but this week without David and Sarah as, following a flight delay, Sarah had arrived home from a 24-hour work trip to the UK in the early hours so had opted for catching up on sleep instead.

It was an enjoyable lesson, one of the random ones that Johnny throws at us from time to time, and this week it was on the subject of superstitions. It was fascinating to learn not only how many we Brits have in common with the Italians, but also the history and "reasoning" (or lack thereof) behind them, something we often know little of.

After the lesson I dashed straight into Pescia before lunchtime closing to get fuel, pay the electricity bill and pick up some essential drugs from the pharmacy, at which point the much needed and long awaited rains arrived.

After dashing through the rain and heading home for lunch I succumbed to heavy eyes and crashed asleep for an hour while the sound of rain hammered on the roof window and the thunder rolled around the valley, is there a better more soporific sound to fall asleep to? I think not.

After my nap I joined Helen in the office to do a bit of work on the computer, namely updating our friend Marie's website and a bit of other admin; with the rain stil pouring it was an ideal opportnity to do so.

We invited Katie and Greg up that evening for a drink and a chat so that they could meet Reggie and pick our brains to aid their planning for their stay with us. We had a very enjoyable couple of hours talking to yet more lovely guests before they headed down during a brief reprieve in the rain, leaving us to make a late dinner before heading to bed.

The rain was still coming down, although more intermittently, on Thursday morning, which meant there was no point in heading over to the pool house early in the morning. Come mid-morning, we found ourselves Pescia-bound (yes, i said we) as, having been stung on the knuckle by a wasp that was making a nest inside the pole of the rotary washing line two days ago, Helen's hand was continuing to swell, and perhaps more concerning was the fact that the swelling was starting to travel from her hand and along her arm this morning. We decided it would be prudent to seek a professional opinion at the pharmacy in town.

Both hands belong to the same person... who needs botox?

The lady in the pharmacy recommended steroid cream for immediate application followed by a trip to Helen's doctor for maybe something stronger, so with cream purchased we headed over to the hospital where Dottoressa Ida has a clinic.

After a wait of only 20 minutes we were in and were told it was nothing really to worry about, it was quite common for wasp stings to react like this, but to take a course of steroids to get it under control.

After lunch we had our weekly lesson with Samantha, dealing once again with the conguintivo. It's starting to feel like we'll never get the hang of this particular part of the language and Samantha telling us that even most Italians use it incorrectly was not encouraging! I particularly struggled this week, feeling like yesterday's tiredness was still well and truly with me.

An 'accacia' tree cut last Autumn growing lots of straight new stems.

Spot the rainbow!

On Friday, as the weather was much improved, I headed over to clean the pool only to find that the strong windy gusts of the last couple of days had claimed a casualty. I was turning into the bearer of bad news for Brunetta: last week a broken pool net, now this.

Is it just sitting down or broken?

After the pool house it was back to Brunetta's other house for a bit more work on the roof/ceiling. In fact, I spent the entire day there, opting to have lunch with her and her husband which was the first time I had said anything but hello to Sergio, so it was nice to chat properly while we ate chick pea soup and then huge pieces of salmon baked with olives.

Slow and laborious work, more so when you are too tall to stand.

Job one DONE!

Another working week under our belts and at last with the better weather on the horizon, the arrival of the weekend meant that Helen could join me outside to get some vitamin D and work up an appetite for dinner at Sandrino's this evening for our friend Kathy's birthday.

We spent the afternoon cutting young acacia regrowth before strimming the ground around them both around the car-parking area and around the poly tunnel below the house as these two areas had recently gone crazy and were looking horribly unkempt.

One of many loads of acacia off to the chipper to become compost.

Can you see our new oleander?

There it is!!

After a VERY sweaty afternoon we packed up tools and cleaned up ready for dinner that evening but not before Reggie got his second walk that day on the upper terraces. He has a fascination with a particular olive tree that has a split trunk and that must be providing a home to some creature or another - that is quite probably now deaf.

We had a great evening out with Paul, Kathy, Donatella, David and Sarah at Da Sandrino, eating a delicious variety of pasta dishes before diving into main courses. For whatever reason, it was the best meal we've eaten there and the restaurant had gone up a number of degrees in our estimation by the time we left - I, for one, could have happily sat there with a huge bowl of their spaghetti with olive oil, garlic and chilli, so simple and yet SO AMAZING! I must get a version of this classic (aglio, olio, pepperoncino) under my belt.

Sunday was a lazy start, as is customary, although breaking with custom we didn't have coffee and breakfast out at one of our usual haunts but had coffee instead down at our neighbours Valerio and Rosanna's as they had been asking us to pop in for coffee for a few weeks now.

We took them a bunch of our precious garlic as a little gift, knowing they hadn't grown any themselves this year and enjoyed a piece of cake with our coffee while trying to understand the two(+) simultaneous conversations that were going on at high speed at the same time (did I mention that Rosanna's brother and elderly mother and father were also there?).

We left around midday, heads spinning from attempting to converse with these speed-talking locals.

After lunch we headed down into the veg garden to do the weekly tidying etc., as well as harvesting whatever was waiting for us. The weeding now is almost zero, which is amazing and pays tribute to the amount of regular weeding we have done up until this point which hasn't allowed anything to set seed, meaning nice clean veg beds.

There was still an afternoon's worth of work for the two of us though, as the cucumbers, tomatoes and squashes were rampant and needed a fair amount of training.

By the time we had worked our way from the bottom up to the top terrace and had watered everything, it was getting on for 6pm, which is wine o'clock on a Sunday, so we retired to the terrace and waited for the heat of the day to slowly lower along with the sun before heading indoors to cook up a feast with some of the day's harvest.

Summer harvests are well under way.

Beautiful portaluca.

Beans growing up a sunflower.

Tomatoes all of a sudden...

...and they look VERY healthy for the time being. Stay away voles and stink bugs!

First aubergines too!

After training the tomatoes and cucumbers there
was quite a bit of material for the compost bin.

Sweet potatoes all survived and showing new growth.

The nightshade family all happy, although melons are taking their time.

Our very own sunflower field

Little cauliflower harvest.

Went into an Ottolenghi salad with some of our brocolli.