| CdP 9 June 2009 | ||||||
| We’ve had no phone for nine days now, which is live-with-able. But as of last Saturday – four days ago – we have no ADSL line either, which makes life very difficult indeed. How do we work without internet? How do we stop feeling cut off from the world? It’s odd how, when we’re away, I switch off my computer and the modem and lock the door behind me and never think of world events. But here, at home, if I can’t keep an eye on the news – and, more importantly, keep in touch with friends and daughter via Skype – I feel baseless and rootless. Maybe I should just go out into the garden. The garden is, if anything, in a worse state of confusion than I am. From rain to ten days of 35 degree temperatures – July weather – and back to grey skies with the added excitement of howling gales (which, incidentally, is what lies behind our lack of phone line, the trees in the valley towards Camparche having brought it down). They went on for days. Some rain, but mostly just thunderous gusts which transformed my rue into unruly flattened heaps, almost uprooted a tall rose by the back door, broke a thick flower-filled branch off the funny old pink rose up in the car park and of course neatly removed most of the spectacular blooms from everywhere else. Still, I shan’t complain unduly about that, because the sheer joy – nay, privilege – of being here 24/7 (rather than just the odd weekend) to watch those beds of roses break into a frothy foam of perfumed blossom was almost overwhelming. Stepping out the front door, or just opening the bathroom window, was a true treat. Being here constantly, you get to appreciate the progress of scents, from the jasmine to the philadephus and roses; and now the honeysuckle up by the front gate is perfuming the whole garden, with the hot dry smell of gorse as its only competition, and we have so little of that around the house that the scent has to waft all the way from one neighbour or another. Up in town, the lime tree flowers leave you feeling slightly inebriated. Yesterday I took Jekka McVicar’s advice and made tea from the honeysuckle blossoms, or rather, I added them to a pot of green tea and it tasted of spring. Good for coughs and colitus too. Which got me to thinking about all the things that I don’t harvest and don’t do around the place. I look on disapprovingly each time L buys a packet of wasteful industry-intensive tea bags but where are my great jars of dried honeysuckle flowers to inject a note of spring to a winter’s day? And how often do I raid my great cushions of sage to make sage tea (use as a gargle for tonsilitus)? And what about that forest of savoury out there, just waiting to be havested for an appetite-inducing, flatulence-reducing infusion? In fact, we do find ourselves using large quantities of herbs now, though only in cooking. In Venice recently, I was talking to a friend whose younger son had just gone off to university, leaving them in the same childless position as we are. ‘So, what has changed most about your life?’ I asked her. She thought for a moment and said ‘we eat so well.’ Now she, like we, is not a person to throw in the towel completely and head for the nearest McDonald’s but it’s a process of attrition, and there’s no denying the fact that the path of least resistence in the face of the offspring’s nose-wrinkled-in-disgust is often a simpler option than seeing your culinary experiments rejected out of hand. Now we’re chucking great handfuls of ‘disgusting’ herbs into all kinds of things and finding it all a delicious release. L’s herb pots outside the living room are yielding great quantities of coriander and purslane, chervil and melissa (another tea favourite). And the chives and savoury are, as usual, going crazy. Another couple of unexpected Jekka gleanings? Olive leaf infusion lowers blood pressure and helps nervous tension; and strawberry leaves make an interesting musky tea whish is also good for ulcers and sore gums. I must try them. Flowers in salads are another thing that we’re not that good at: yet another experiment to add to my list. One thing in the garden that doesn’t seem at all fazed by our oddly leaping meteorological conditions is the fruit. I admit, I didn’t get a single apricot off our poor little tree, and my two new baby plums are not looking very promising. But the cherries are wondrous, especially that huge old tree down at the bottom of the field which was just one mass of ivy and vitalba when we got here but which has now returned to exuberant life: its lower branches are almost touching the grass, so full of fruit are they. And the tiny bright red berries are sweet as sweet can be, which is pretty strange for an unreconstructed Prunus avium which should produce something very tart indeed. As for the damson tree… well, if gales don’t return just at the point where the fruit is ready to fall, then I think it will be a harvest to beat the year when I got 20kg off those three spindly little branches. (It should also be said that those three branches aren’t looking so spindly now which is a bit of a pain, right in the middle of the vegeta ble garden where they are spreading rather more healthy shade than I’d like.) There’s a little limoncello apple tree up the top where I think I’m going to have to go and manually thin out the fruit otherwise the apples are going to knock each other off the branches. And even the peach trees, tortured with leaf-curl as they are, are full of big fruit. The broad beans and artichokes suffered from the sudden heat, leaping from thriving and delicious to weak and limp, so much so that I have pulled out the former already and replaced them with runner bean plants. The weeds, naturally, loved the heat after the damp and along the drive and carpark had reached a point where you needed a map and compass to navigate down to the house. Feelings of poverty notwithstanding, I just had to get Vittorio back, and back he came, bringing his wonderful wife Daniela and his taciturn side-kick Giovanni with him. He is useless at the finer details but what a relief if is to have someone who’ll wield a strimmer till the cows come home. The tall steep banks around the house have been mown right back – a necessary move to keep snakes away (hopefully) and those wild bits of grass on the left of the drive as you arrive are beginning to look like lawn. Well, kind of. I want to get to the point where I can whip over them with the lawnmower, but we have a lot of stone- and grass-hummock-removing to do before then. | ||||||
Coda: how to restore a phone line, Umbrian style | ||||||