Falling Off a Log

The Logs Man Cometh – August 2009

in Italy this summer we were planning a day’s walking in the mountains and were packing up the picnic bag when the doorbell rang and it was Martin our (English) neighbour who said that he’d just heard from the logs man that thirty quintale of logs would be on their way to his house around lunchtime and could I possibly give him a hand with getting them into the house, for the logs man just dumps them on the street. Yes, Martin, of course. But you’re just on your way out. We’ll cancel it. No, don’t do that, don’t worry, I’ll get it sorted, you go and enjoy your day in the mountains. Nonsense, Martin, we can go to the mountains tomorrow.

The logs man phoned about lunchtime to say he was running a bit late and would be there sometime after two. I told Martin we’d probably see the wagon pass our house on the way to his, and we’d give him a bell.

We heard the logs man before we saw him, as his creaky old lorry – a bit like those you used to see cattle carried in, with high sides and an open top, it probably once was a cattle truck – came struggling noisily up the hill. We looked down from our top floor and saw it was loaded to the brim and beyond with logs. They can’t all be for Martin, surely. We phoned Martin to say that it could be his logs, or it could be someone else’s, so to let us know if they actually were his.

Within a few minutes there was a ring on our doorbell and it was Pam, Martin’s wife, in a state of agitation, saying can you come quickly, we need someone who speaks Italian, for although Pam and Martin live there pretty-much permanently, they speak only the most basic number of words.

I followed Pam down the street while she explained that they had ordered thirty quintale, the man had brought forty-two, and he was going to have to go away and come back with thirty, but their Italian was not up to explaining that. A quintale is a hundred kilos and if you want to know what four thousand two hundred kilos of logs looks like, well, it’s an old-style cattle truck filled very considerably to the brim.

I explained the situation to the man, who was rather striking-looking for an Italian as he had azure blue eyes. He said that he had brought forty-two for that is what it said on the ticket. Can you show me the ticket? Ah well, no, for I’ve left it back in the office. Well I tell you what, suppose you drop off just thirty of the forty-two quintale, take the other twelve back to the yard, then Martin and I will come down to the yard tomorrow, and if the ticket says thirty we’ll all be straight, and if it says forty-two Martin will take the extra twelve and pay for your time to do a second delivery? The man looked like he might agree to this, and since Pam in particular was adamant they’d asked for thirty, I was banking on the chance that it would, in reality, see the end of the matter. I translated what we’d agreed for Martin.

No, no, said Martin, tell him we’ll take the forty-two now and be done with it; just tell him we’ll take the forty-two. I told the man that we’d take the forty-two, and that if they wouldn’t all fit in the house: well there are other people with houses. The man could not conceal his relief and delight. And he began the process of tipping four thousand two hundred kilos of logs onto the street outside Pam and Martin’s front door.

Right, said I when the final logs had been kicked by the man off the back of the truck, that is the agreed price of . . .? thirteen euros per quintale, said the man, which was the price Martin had told me he’d previously agreed. Right, that will be thirteen times forty-two equals five hundred and forty six euros. Five hundred and forty five, said the man. An Italian will nearly always do this, knock a little off as an omaggio, or homage or gift.

Martin got out his wallet: here’s five hundred and fifty, tell him that’ll be fine. I told the man: He says here’s five hundred and fifty and that will be fine, would you count it. The man was, to put it mildly, incredulous. An Italian, he said, would never do that, he would ask for a bigger discount, an Italian would just never do that, I only gave you a discount of one euro because I was expecting to be negotiated down further. Well, I said, these Brits, that’s why they’ve never got any money, they’re always giving it away to people like you.

That humorous comment appealed to the man. I usually find that the British sense of humour intrigues Italians, though this does not extend to British jokes.

The man and I counted the notes together and then we had the customary jolly chat about how in winter, here in the hills it’s cold but dry, whereas where he is in the valley it’s not so cold but is damp, and then he went happily, very happily I’d say, and smiling on his way.

And there we were at 3 pm, Hilary and me, Martin and a seething and fuming Pam, two of their friends who had arrived the previous evening and were staying for a holiday; one just recovering from major heart surgery and the other with some sort of shoulder problem, and four thousand two hundred kilos of logs. Nothing for it but to start getting them loaded into the house. I asked Pam jokingly what she was going to do with them all, and she said: I know what I’m going to do with them, I’m going to put them either side of Martin’s bollocks and push. She was absolutely steaming, feeling she had been done, and Pam doesn’t like feeling that she’s been done.

The other thing that angered Pam and had Martin in her malicious log-wielding sights was that earlier that day she’d arranged with an English builder called Johnny who lives in the vicinity that one of his Albanian labourers might give them a hand with the logs and Johnny had agreed at a cash-in-hand fee of ten euros per hour. Martin had insisted she cancel this and she had done, thus annoying Johnny. When we saw just what level of job lay ahead, all to be completed before nightfall, for to have an unlit pile of logs blocking the street would be extremely dangerous, Pam phoned Johnny again, but he was so upset that he’d had to tell his Albanian labourer that he’d have some work for the day, and then had to renege on that, that he simply put the phone down.

In circumstances such as these, there are three sorts of people in the world: there are those, of whom Martin and I are examples, who say right: there’s a job to be done, no messing no theories no arguments, let’s just get on and do it however long it takes. Martin and I got stuck in immediately. Pam is of the second type: she flaps, trying to think all the time of ways in which the job can be overcome and who we can ask for help. And then there is the third type, who cries bad back, though to be fair to Pam and Martin’s guests, Peter, the man of the couple, could certainly be excused as he was recovering from serious heart surgery.

While Hilary sorted the logs into size, I filled a blue plastic toybox of similar-sized logs and carried them through to Martin’s cellar, where he was stacking them neatly. Peter, he of the dicky heart, tried to help a bit, under severe admonitions from his wife that he should desist at once.

Pam, meanwhile, was desperately trying to find a better solution, and eventually talked three of the neighbouring children to come and help; these consisted of two brothers, aged about fifteen and fourteen, called Michelangelo and Leonardo (yep) and another boy of thirteen called Simone. Michelangelo and Leonardo’s sister, Giulia, came out to help but was told very firmly to go away by the boys, and very firmly by me not to stand around among tumbling logs in bare feet and flip-flops. She languidly asked if she could help once or twice, but I said no, definitely not in flipflops.

The dad of Michelangelo and Leonardo, Sandro, runs a kind of hardware store, and also sells logs, and he had asked Martin if he wanted any this year but Martin said no he was getting them from elsewhere. This seemed a bit risky in terms of neighbourly equilibrium, but Sandro charges at least three euros a quintale more – in fact he may well get his logs from the man with the cattle truck.

When we used to run our hotel we learned something quite fundamental about the recruitment of staff, which is that to get the best person for a particular job, it helps if one or other or preferably both of their parents did that job. Someone will clean lavatories much better if her mother was also a cleaner, than if her mother is a teacher, say, or an accountant. And so it is with hardware store owners: their children have a natural bent for the task.

(Recruitment procedures in large organisations would usually find it discriminatory to ask someone what their parents did for a living, and so it probably is, to the employer’s decided disadvantage).

Michelangelo went and helped Martin with the stacking, and took to it like a fish to chips. Leonardo his brother has a moderate-to-severe learning disability, but after a period of throwing the logs about (unfortunately he’d seen me do that while Hilary was taking a break and I was similar-size sorting), Leonardo took to filling a blue IKEA bag with more logs than he thought he could carry, and then carrying them through to Michelangelo and Martin in the cellar, and then coming back to see whether he could carry even more next time.

Simone started off doing a bit of log-chucking with Leonardo, but then he too got into the carrying, this time with a yellow IKEA bag. I think it was Pam who explained how much happier she would be if they carried logs through to the cellar, rather than chucking them around, after one of the tossed logs hit Peter on the leg and caused him to bleed, and because his medication is an anti-clotting drug, the bleeding would not stop. After an hour or more it did stop though.

Some time later Michelangelo and Leonardo’s mother called them in as they were to go out somewhere, or maybe she was protecting her husband whose log business had been snubbed, whatever, Michelangelo and Leonardo disappeared, and along came Simone’s mother, who is small and slight but accustomed to manual work, to help.

Martin’s cellar was rapidly filling up with logs and looking like it might not take them all, so we offered to buy two or three quintale from him, which we did, me switching to loading the back of our car with logs and driving them up the street to our house, unloading them and then coming back for another load. We took a guess at what was a quintale. So we now have logs to last us the winter (just about – we normally get five quintale but can always get some more from Martin if we need them I’m sure). Three out of forty-two is not much, but helped him a bit.

And just as it was getting dark, we were out in the street, sweeping up the remaining pieces of bark. Between us and somehow, we had cleared forty-two quintale of logs, because you do, if you know you have to, then you do.

And Martin has a cellar full, very very full, of logs. Pam was still incandescent, but Martin knows that, as he and Pam are staying there for pretty-much all this winter, those logs will soon diminish, in fact they might even diminish to zero. Pam and Martin’s house is a cold one to heat in winter as the central stairwell acts as a kind of chimney up which travels all the heat and there aren’t really any doors you can close off; the house was not very well designed in that respect. Martin is thinking they’ll probably keep their open fire and stove going pretty-much constantly, so the logs will quickly be eaten into. We’ll see how they get on.

The Pedaso Cozze Festival

The Cozze Festival at Pedaso, August 2009

During August, every town in this part of Italy holds a sagra or festa.

Strictly speaking, a sagra is a fair and a festa a party, though in practice there seems to be little or no difference between a sagra and a festa. Every town’s sagra focuses on a particular type of food; one we are intrigued by but have never been to is Altidona whose food focus is polenta and snails, but the sagra we go to every year is at Pedaso, where the subject is mussels.

At Pedaso, the festival of mussels

2009 was the 43rd sagra of cozze (mussels) in Pedaso, which means that the first was held in 1956. Every year since then, during the few days leading up to and including ferragosto (15th August), Pedaso holds its sagra delle cozze; some of the streets are closed and the tennis courts and football pitch are dedicated to the sagra. You buy a ticket at a shed that serves as the ticket office; precisely what’s on offer varies a bit each year but this year you paid €6 for a bowl of mussels, and/or €7 for a bowl of spaghetti with a marinara (chopped seafood and tomato), sauce and a bread roll. Every year it’s a bowl of mussels, a bowl of spaghetti marinara, and a bread roll, it’s just the price bundle that periodically changes.

You buy you ticket, then queue for your tray of dinner

When you’ve got your ticket you take it to the food dispensing tent, where you exchange it for a cardboard tray on which is placed a plastic container perhaps 8 inches by 6, piled high with mussels; a similar plastic container full of spaghetti and sauce; a bread roll in a transparent sealed plastic bag – this is a good idea as the roll can roll off the tray – and a paper wallet containing a plastic knife and fork; a paper serviette; and a lemon-scented hand wipe in a sealed envelope.

The mussels cookers stir big vats in the serving tents

The mussels have been cooked by being tipped from sacks into large heated vats, stirred by a man with a paddle. The vats will contain a little water and some oil and herbs, and when the mussels have opened and are lifted out you get a fair amount of the juice in the bottom of your little container. The spaghetti is cooked al dente, somehow they manage this on the large quantities, and is mixed with the sauce in orange plastic washing-up bowls before being ladled out into portions. The bread roll is a typical Italian bread roll, of heavily-processed white unsalted flour, and with a good crackly crust; for some reason only Britain seems to insist on bread with rubbery crusts, which is a pity as the bread itself is often of good quality, just badly let down by the pathetic apology for a crust (why is there no popular uprising against this?).

And da bere (to drink)

To drink, this year it was plastic glasses of white wine for free, or rather bundled in with the cost of the food, and litre bottles of sparkling or still water for a euro each.

Next, find a spot at a table

You take your food to one of the trestle tables that are laid with white paper tablecloths that cover about four place settings and are surrounded by white plastic moulded chairs, and you sit down and eat your dinner, and talk with your friends.

For dessert, cocomero (watermelon)

After you’ve eaten the mussels and spaghetti, you can buy a large lump of watermelon (cocomero the Italian word) on a plastic plate, together with a plastic knife, for a euro a portion, and for a further euro if you want it an espresso coffee in a paper cup.

Efficient clearing of tables

When you’ve finished, a man comes round and shoves all your leftovers, trays and all, into a black plastic sack, and when you’ve got up and left he does the same with your paper tablecloth and replaces it with a fresh one, ready for the next customer.

Efficient functioning of the whole event, amazingly

And it all works, surprisingly efficiently; surprisingly because efficiency is not something that Italy is famous for, but even more surprisingly given the number of people eating at any one time. It’s hard to estimate exactly, it will be at least a thousand, probably two or three thousand, may even be as much as five. This is at any one time. Serving starts at 7.30pm and goes on until about 9 or 10, and for most of that time there are few spaces available for someone to sit down; people are found wandering about with their tray looking for a free seat. It’s not too bad if you are a couple, you can usually find somewhere, a foursome generally not too much problem, but six or upwards can be a real struggle and they often have to split up.

The old fashioned screwing of the system

Since the Italians tend to arrive in largish groups, this difficulty of finding adequate places together presents a problem, so what many of them do is to send someone to find a place, who then reserves the seats alongside by telling anyone who comes along that they are already taken. No one seems to start a fight by disputing or arguing with this, even though they themselves might be hard-pressed to find anywhere to sit.

The next difficulty arises on account of the queues. A couple of thousand people needing first to buy a ticket, and then to collect their dinner from the dispensing tent, will inevitably create a queue. For much of the evening this is an immense queue, which moves, slowly, slowly, but snakes for a hundred yards or more. So the trick of certain unscrupulous groups is to send one person to find and bag some seats, another to queue for the tickets, while the rest stand in the food queue, so that with any luck the person buying the tickets will be able to get to them before they reach the food serving counter and so hand them the tickets. This sometimes works, but often it takes longer to buy a ticket than to queue for food, so you find a gaggle of people waiting by the counter, saying to others behind them, who have followed the procedures in a more public-spirited fashion: please, you go ahead.

The queue-jumping and general overall uncertainty puts some people off going, but we find it all part of the general theatre. Also we try to get there reasonably early.

You walk on a bed of linolem

All this movement of people might be expected to churn up the football pitch and make a pretty muddy experience underfoot, so to overcome this they lay down a floor. This year it was a kind of springy grey linoleum-like vinyl, a bit like we have in one of our bathrooms at home though a lot more bouncy. It’s therefore simple to clean and presumably gets chucked away at the end of the four days, since there will undoubtedly be the odd cigarette burn-mark, though actually the number of people who smoke at the tables is surprisingly low – I’d estimate about one in twenty.

Ancillary entertainment

After having finished your dinner and bounced your way on the vinyl past the still-queuing ever-hopeful diners, there are roadside stalls to see; sometimes – though not this year on the day we went – there are street entertainers, and there is a live band with dancing. You can take a stroll by the sea, and you can go to a café for a coffee or an ice-cream.

The stalls are a bit predictable: an African selling carvings; a grubby-looking girl with lank dark hair, smoking a cigarette and selling silver jewellery; candy floss and sweetie stalls; and this year, somewhat ominously, the Scientologists, selling books. We take a look at these; we watch for a few moments the people dancing to the band, though only for a few moments as the band, which this year consisted of a female singer, a male trumpet player, and a man playing an electronic accordion and simultaneously controlling the synthesised percussion machine, were a bit hard to bear for long.

A stroll by the sea

We walked by the sea and then went to the café for an ice cream, leaving eventually to drive home at a quarter to eleven. We went on the 13th August; had we gone, as sometimes in previous years, on the 15th, we could have waited to see the firework display over the sea, which begins at an Italian midnight, ie about twenty past twelve.

This is the fifth year we’ve been to the mussels festival at Pedaso and we have formed some observations about it:

1. All the standing in line, queue-jumping, reserving of seats at the tables, it has a feel of Britain in the 1950s. It probably has a feel of Italy in the 1950s too, but Italy hasn’t moved on. The Brits still queue at the checkout in IKEA, they still queue to get on the Ryanair plane, but they don’t like it, and I think they’d take one look at the queues in Pedaso and say: let’s go somewhere else.

2. No one stands on the sidelines. Everyone participates. I’m sure in Britain now you’d get groups of people standing about and looking while they make up their mind. This is another change since the 1950s.

3. There are no immigrants, nearly everyone is a working-class Italian. It’s not entirely true that there are no immigrants, as there’s us, but we’re most unusual. The first time we went to the mussels festival in Pedaso we looked around at these thousands of heads around tables there on the football pitch and said to ourselves: there must be some Brits here. But there weren’t, and there aren’t. The local Brits don’t go. Nor do the Poles, or Albanians, and there are certainly no black faces to be seen. The whole thing works because everyone is following a common cultural set of rules. Why don’t any of the many local Brits go to the sagra? Who knows?

4. Free wine works for Italians of a certain age. No one drinks too much. Many don’t drink any wine at all. Unlimited booze obviously wouldn’t work in Britain, and it probably won’t work for the younger Italians, especially in the cities, where there’s an increasing drink problem.

5. Italian children in this area of Italy eat mussels like sweeties. Next to us at the trestle table were two women and two children, a boy and a girl, the boy perhaps six-years-old, both children tucking in to the mussels as if they were a bowl of coco-pops. Which just goes to show . . . probably something about the power of mothers. We’ve seen children enthusiatically chomping mussels in Sardinia too.

6. One in twenty Italians smoking is a surprisingly small number. And even if it isn’t one in twenty, it’s not many; you’d almost look around and believe that no one is smoking at all. This must certainly be a recent change.

7. Five thousand people on each of four nights, each spending €10. It comes to €200,000 and will be an underestimate. The organisers will have to pay for the sacks of mussels and the pasta, for the staff of whom there are a fair number especially those clearing tables, for the vinyl flooring, for the personalised cutlery wallets, for the fireworks on the last night, for the band, for the (not very extensive) marketing. Do the sums stack up? Hard to know.

Chicken and Chips

A Chicken and Chip Dinner in a Hotel, July 2009

We’d booked on internet a Great Western hotel between Verona and Vicenza at what seemed like a bargain price. And so it turned out to be. Either new or newly refitted, and a great plus for us was that it had a swimming pool that you could swim in (as opposed to just pose alongside), in a pleasant garden with the main Verona-to-Venice railway line running past the end of the garden. So you couldn’t get bored, even while swimming. The hotel was obviously trying hard to attract custom by means of promotions, one of which we’d picked up on. And good luck to it.

The hotel was trying hard and one group of people it appeared to have succeeded with was Serbs, from Belgrade. There was an extended family of Serbs. It’s nice to know that Serbs are getting the opportunity to get out and about at last.

Dinner

Dinner was in an over-elaborate dining room presided over by a little chap with a moustache. He presented us with the rather extensive and fancy menu, which was in Italian and which we proceeded to peruse and come to some decisions. After a while the moustachioed man came to our table and said, ‘Sprechen sie Deutsch?’ This is not the first time in Italian restaurants that we are thought at first to be German. We replied in Italian that we spoke Italian and he said, in Italian: Benissimo, then may I offer some advice? It’s quite normal for an Italian waiter to offer advice, and even more normal for the customer to ask the waiter for his advice – the Italian word for advice in this context is consiglio – rather like the English word, counsel.

Moustachio advised that there was a special on tonight, two courses and coffee for only 15 euros. Tonight’s special consisted of spaghetti all’amatriciana (a sauce of tomatoes, onions and fat bacon) followed by chicken and chips. And may we add an antipasto from the buffet table? Si, for an extra five euros. So we did that. The help-yourself antipasto was extensive but fairly tasteless; the spaghetti all’amatriciana was not too bad (or, more grammatically accurate for fear of being ignominiously corrected by someone: were not too bad), and the chicken and chips tasted just like . . . chicken and chips.

Banking on the monolinguals

It seems that the restaurant had a big menu in a red folder to look swish, but was banking on no one who was not Italian being able to understand it, at which point the waiter comes along and explains in either German or English that he advises tonight’s special. There were some Italians in the dining room too, mostly also eating the special, though one somewhat elegantly-dressed slim blonde woman of about forty came in, evidently staying there on business, and ordered something we didn’t catch, and which turned out to be a sheet of brown paper full of shellfish, baby octopus etc, deep-fried in batter. A kind of shell fish and chips without the chips.

The woman spent the entire dinner either talking on or fiddling with her mobile phone, and picking at the deep-fried items in a rather unenthusiastic way. She ate about a third of it, and apologised to moustachio that it was just too much for her, and then went on her way. Apart from her – and we smelled the deep fried batter as the waiter brought the parcel to her table and it smelled rather considerably like deep-fried batter – apart from her everyone seemed to eat the special: chicken and chips.

And there’s nothing wrong with chicken and chips, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with anything. But if you’re going to do it, do it with panache. Quite hard to do chicken and chips in style. I’ll have to see if I can find an example where it has been done impressively.

Dinner with the Neighbours

January 2009

We were privileged to be invited to dinner with our neighbours. Privileged because they are a working-class Italian family, father, mother and three children aged about 21, 18 and 12, the youngest a boy and the older two girls. Mother was to make gnocchi, and Hilary said she’d like to see how it was done – to their bemusement, as everyone knows how to make gnocchi!

First, mother made a big ball of dough from mashed potatoes and flour, getting it to a consistency where it was kind of stretchy. She then took gobbits off this and rolled them into tubes on a flour-covered board. For gnocchi, you really do need a ‘tavolino’, a large wooden board that you can coat with flour to roll the dough out on. When she’d rolled out four or five snakes of dough, each about ¾ inch diameter, she put them side-by-side and cut off sections with a knife, each section ½ to ¾ inches in length. These she dropped into a pan of boiling water, and when the gnocchi rose to the surface, they were ready to eat.

While the cooking as going on, the father of the family took me into the dining room, ie the sitting room with a large table laid, for he wanted to show me a travel magazine. Brazil, Thailand, Cuba – these places should get a good exchange rate, no? He is ‘curioso’ to see the world, which given that he will only eat pasta, is kind of a slightly painful wishful thinking, but given his financial situation, as a manual worker in a shoe factory that is suffering increasingly frequent lay-offs, and with three dependent children, is also practical wishful thinking. We looked at the brochures. He would love to go places, in principle at least.

At dinner there was Hilary and me, father and mother, their three children, and daughter number two’s boyfriend, who carries about him the to us splendid name, though to him clearly the slightly embarrassing one, of Eros. Eros’ job? He drives a cement lorry. Like all cement-lorry drivers, Eros is overweight and his stomach hangs over his belt. He is in his early twenties.

Dinner began with gnocchi in a sauce of mushrooms and sausage. Daughter number two and 12-year-old son did not eat any of this; daughter because she does not eat vegetables, and son because he is an increasingly demanding 12-year-old who gets his own way with just about everything, and he does not eat vegetables either.

Following on from gnocchi with mushrooms and sausage, came gnocchi with ragù, ie a meat sauce. Gnocchi with ragù was popular all round, both number two daughter and son were able to tuck into this. Eros, to his credit, tucked into everything.

After this second gnocchi dish came polpetti. Polpetti are Italian meatballs. And with the polpetti, some salad. Our stomachs were pretty full, as the gnocchi, especially that with ragù, came in an enormous dish, from which we were encouraged to take second, third and unlimited helpings, and which was still half full long after we were nearly completely so.

The taste, from beginning to end, was beyond criticism. Squisito.

To drink there was just one bottle of red wine. No one had more than the tiniest of glassfuls. Italian families will typically drink a small glass of red wine, then do as Eros did, and when offered some more place his hand over the glass and shake his head in the certified fashion, with an especially determined and serious look on his face. We have not perfected this yet, but have learned to be politely abstemious.

There was talk of dessert, though nothing it seemed had been planned especially, but we had brought as a small gift a packet of chocolate ginger biscuits, so we all agreed that with some coffee we should eat some of these.

‘All’ here excluded number two daughter and 12-year-old son, who would not even contemplate trying something like ginger, that they were unfamiliar with. The others did try them, and Eros in particular was most complimentary about their subtle taste, which was fair comment, we had brought them from the UK and they were of expensive quality.

I asked Eros what his hopes and expectations were for 2009, and he seemed a bit taken aback by the question, but replied that he expected that 2009 would be an exact replica of 2008. And I suppose that probably, for him, it will, as it probably will for many working people all over the world, it was inconsiderate of me, coming as I was from my privileged position of professional-class choice, to ask it.

While the dinner progressed, the typically Italian circumstances prevailed of:

a. unbroken and multitasked conversation, and

b. the large-screen television on in the corner of the room; in this room’s case quite close to the table – 12-year-old son spent the best part of the meal with his eyes glued to this.

In addition, and in case we should find the walls too bare, there was a fish tank with a number of brightly-coloured fishes swimming about looking rather agitated. Some red ones and a rather spectacular and shark-like blue-black one. The fish tank is a recent family acquisition.

It was extremely kind of the family to invite us, and somewhat difficult to know quite how we can repay such hospitality.

Old Fashioned Potatoes

January 2009

In Britain, when you go up a hill, you can be fairly sure that when you get to the top, there will be before you another hill – aha but that's only on foot or by bicycle – eventually you get to the top of all the hills, and then you start coming down the other side.

Not so in the Sibillini Mountains area of Italy; there when you get to the top of the hill, there is quite commonly a wide plain – it reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where the explorer talks of climbing Kilimanjaro and says that it’s a fairly stiff slog until you get to the top, at which point it levels orf a bit. That’s exactly what happens in the Sibillinis.

These plains are high, and flat and wide; very hot in the summer and often extremely cold in the winter. It is here that they grow those crops not so well suited to the lower altitudes: potatoes, onions, flowers for cutting, and lentils. The high plain between Caldarola and Foligno, based around the town of Colfiorito, is famous for potatoes.

Alongside the road, in every layby and track, is a tractor and trailer, with a farmer, or possibly it’s a salesman dressed as a farmer, selling potatoes. We been across this plain before and for the first time this time we stopped and bought some potatoes.

Small red-skinned, potatoes, of a floury texture when boiled, and eating them, as we did mashed with some sausage and cabbage and on a subsequent evening baked with some monkfish and onion, is for me a kind of evocation, a taste of my childhood. Potatoes don’t taste like that any more. It’s hard to pinpoint. Of course it may just be the variety of potato, though it could have something to do with intensity of cultivation that we now suffer. I had not realised the change that has taken place, until I was so reminded of it.

Fireworks to Start the Year

January 1st 2009

I have heard it said that the way you see in the New Year will betoken an omen for the forthcoming twelvemonth. In general I don’t go with these superstitions though I do have to concede that fallings asleep before midnight on the 31st in recent years have preceded a general tendency to do this on most days in the succeeding months, however this year we stayed up for the bonging of the bells.

Of course we were in bed while many of our brothers and sisters were still prancing, as continental Europe is an hour ahead of the UK, which makes the whole thing so absurd; if I had happened to be in the UK this year instead of Italy and had gone to bed at exactly the age that I did, then I, who will have lived for exactly the same amount of time wherever I was, would have been in bed at the magic hour, whereas I was standing on our loggia at this particular, chronologically different but symbolically similar hour watching the sparks of the Italians setting off their fireworks.

Italians light fireworks on New Year’s Eve, all a bit randomly, and with a fair number of accidents. This year there was one death and just short of 400 injuries, including a couple of lost hands and some, slightly less unfortunate, who only lost a finger or two. This loss of limb comes from not letting go of the firework soon enough.

The death happened in Naples and, as with almost everything that happens in Naples was not as straightforward as it first seemed. A man standing on a balcony watching the firework displays was hit in the neck by a ‘projectile’, that was at first reported to be a rocket, but was subsequently discovered to be a bullet from a pistol. Local people reported seeing a 22-year-old woman fire the pistol, and she was at first nowhere to be found. She subsequently reported to the prison, (it said in the paper), accompanied by her lawyer, protesting her innocence and saying that the first she knew about it was when she saw the newspaper. This sounds like a weak excuse, until you read on and discover that she was the daughter of a Camorra (the local Mafia) boss who is currently in prison, her brother being partly instrumental in this having turned supergrass. This would make her incarceration in certain prisons locally extremely dangerous for her. Added to the complexity of the case was the fact that although she was nominally living some way away, her grandmother lived in the same block of flats as the man who was shot. The local police have the job of unravelling this muddle; something for which their reputation is not what you might call world-renowned. The case has since disappeared from the papers and will undoubtedly stay that way.

A Trip to Trieste

Trieste – August 2006

We took a trip to Trieste. Trieste is a border town, and I like border towns.

We took a bus in Trieste to visit some caves and it ran right up to what was once the imposing Slovenian border post and then turned down a lane instead of passing over the line. Trieste was an important port in the Austro-Hungarian empire and still retains much of the architecture. It’s at the foot of cliffs leading down from the Karst, or Kars, or Carso (depending on your language), a limestone plateau with lots of caves, that drops down steeply to the sea. So Trieste is very picturesque.

We went to Trieste on the train from Porto San Giorgio; a journey of three trains in fact which, amazingly, all arrived on time. All went well until the final leg, when three unfortunate events happened, all disconnected, except for the connection that unfortunate events always come along in threes.

First, I trod on the toe of an African woman and she became most angered. A kind of:

One day this bold Russian had shouldered his gun

And assumed his most truculent sneer.

To the train he did go,

Where he trod on the toe

Of Abdullah Bubul Emir.†

Young man, quoth Bubul, has life grown so dull,

That you wish to end your career?

Vile infidel know you have trod on the toe,

Of Abdullah Bubul Emir.

† These words are an adaptation of the song by Percy French, usually known as ‘Abdul Abulbul Ameer’, or variations on that. I have used as a basis the sheet music published by EMI London in 1980 under the title of ‘The Best of Percy French’. It seems to be closer to the original than the more widely-known version as sung by Frank Crumit. So there.

Sort of anyway, except that I’m neither bold nor Russian and it wasn’t Abdullah, probably more likely something like Bridget.

This unfortunate incident out of the way we decided to have a picnic on the train.

In Britain everyone eats on trains but in Italy practically no one does. But we were in a secluded set of seats so thought we wouldn’t cause too much offence, but then the ticket collector came along and he was a tall thin officious misery, and he looked rather disapproving, but we gave him our ticket and he told us it wasn’t valid.

What do you mean, I asked him, look, it says here; and he said no, it hasn’t been validated. In Italy (and France) you buy your ticket but before getting on the train you must feed it into a yellow machine on the platform, which stamps it to validate it. We’d remembered to do this for the first two of our journey-legs that day, but completely forgot it for the third, for although it was one journey, we had three tickets. We explained that on account of a tight connection at Mestre it had completely slipped our mind, so he huffily validated it with a pen and clipped it and gave it back to us without charging a fine (which he can, apparently, but tends to waive for foreigners).

Then at some point later in the journey I dropped my glasses case onto the floor, and immediately picked it up. This may not sound like anything worth reporting but when we got to the hotel I found that my glasses case was empty. When the case hit the floor it must have opened, the glasses scudded out under a seat or something, and then it closed again, so that in Trieste I had a case but no glasses and could therefore not read anything.

We went to the station next morning and eventually with asking variously we found the lost property office and asked if any glasses had been handed in. Yes, said the man, and opened a cabinet to reveal the most motley collection of sunglasses, with frames from pink to baby blue, but specs there were none.

So we went to look for a glasses shop to buy some reading glasses, but it was Monday, and on Mondays, all the glasses shops in Trieste are closed (this may be one of those stupid archaic regulations that the Italian government has not found the time to reprieve, and that glasses shops are closed all over Italy, on Mondays). On Tuesday we travelled back to Le Marche, and here I had a spare pair of glasses. But apart from that silly episode of life playing a run of stupid practical jokes upon a person, all went well and was fun in Trieste.

Looking down onto Trieste from the cable tramway that takes you straight up onto the carso.

The old tram at its topmost terminus.

A Cenone for New Year’s Eve

December 2005

Male Appetito

It was New Year’s Eve and on NYE in Italy you eat a cenone. A cenone is a big cena, which is the Italian word for dinner, rather like a calzone is a big sock, you thought it was an Italian pastie what you get in pizza restaurants didn’t you? Well it is, but it means a big sock, which is a pretty good description if you think about it. Anyway, a cenone is a very big dinner and on NYE it commences about 9pm.

Facing a Cenone

Facing a cenone in one of the region’s best-thought-of restaurants, when your appetite has gone missing, as mine had done for a couple of days since, is rather like the man with no arms or legs who enters a swimming competition, jumps into the water and sinks straight to the bottom. When they fish him out he splutters, “What a time to go and get cramp in the ears!’. Whereas I had to face the following tweleve-course meal:

12 Courses

1. a plate of cold stripey-grilled vegetables; courgettes, aubergine, mushroom, onion and olives, preserved in oil or vinegar or both.

2. some olive ascolani and cremini, olive ascolani are large green olives special to the region of Ascoli Piceno, which have been de-stoned and the resulting hole filled with a mix of chopped beef, veal, turkey and pork, the olives are then coated with flour and deep-fried. Cremini are little cubes made from a mix of flour, egg and sugar which are then coated in flour and deep-fried, so the result tastes rather like deep-fried custard, if you can imagine such a thing.

3. something resembling a slice of mushroom quiche.

4. a mushroom omelette

You may have detected at this point that someone who doesn’t like eggs or mushrooms could be disadvantaged – yes indeed, the menu planning could be improved, notwithstanding the restaurant’s reputation. I like both eggs and mushrooms but unfortunately not that evening.

5. pig's trotters and lentils as a kind of thick soup.

I was looking forward to trying this and it was quite palatable, even for someone with no appetite.

6. mushroom ravioli in a creamy sauce

yes, yet more mushroom.

7. a slice of vegetable lasagne, vegetables including mushrooms.

8. a plate of sliced duck meat with an Italian pickled onion

(less harsh than the British form as done in red wine vinegar, not malt vinegar, so not too awful to eat).

9. a pork chop from a young pig, with potato cubes done in the oven in the pig fat.

10. a plate of salad.

11. a dessert of a kind of jam- and cream-filled sponge.

12. coffee and chocs.

With this came four bottles of wine, a fizzy white one to go with the starters, a light red one for the pasta, a darker red one for the meat, and a sweet fizzy one for the dessert.

Going Out For Air

Fortunately, now that smoking is banned in Italian restaurants, the Italians are forever getting up and going outside for a smoke during their dinner, so I was able to wander out for some air now and again, without seeming to be rude or out of place.<

A Jolly Do

But it was quite a jolly evening nonetheless, with much wandering around and shaking of hands at midnight.

Going Out For Air

And I’m pleased to report that by the time we came to drive back to the UK on 3rd January, my appetite had been found again.

Our First Agriturismo

A Trip to Italy – August 1992

We got an Air UK Bae 146 to Florence airport, with a Scottish pilot who said, upon approaching Florence, that the temperature ‘downstairs’ was 33°. He also said that the runway at Florence was rather short and that therefore the landing would be a functional rather than pretty one, though easily managed by the sophisticated technology of this *British-built* aircraft.

Old-fashioned airline pilots like that don’t exist any more, do they?

We got off and casually walked to the airport building which was under reconstruction, with a sign that said, ‘Your inconvenience today will be more than rewarded tomorrow!’

To get to the toilets in the airport one had to step over the tools and live cables of a man fixing the electrics. The loos were marble and tile, probably unchanged since the 1960s, with cables hanging down the walls that had about two inches of dust on them.

We hired a little Lancia Y10 with a worn-out centre of the steering wheel from too much pressing of the horn. At first, it was fitted with a child seat in the back, but I muchly amused the car hire clerks by passing this through the window of their cubbyhole and so creating some Italian confusion (We were novices to Italy at this time, and unaware that such episodes of confusion invariable cause delight and mirth).

Then on to our agriturismo run by Andrea, with a fine collection of baggy shorts, and Berta, who speaks good English with a deep voice, and smiles a lot.

In the agriturismo there are staying:

a. Two German-speaking Swiss, maybe just married, who are first with the sun-loungers by the pool each morning and who never go anywhere. They spend their time getting browner, Mrs having two swimming costumes so as to spread the white bits. They have little to say to each other and spend much of the day playing board games. After dinner, though, with a half litre of red down them, they sit on the terrace and are quite voluble.

b. Two German-Germans, a roly-poly man and a bony lady with red-painted toenails. Like the Swiss they appear to speak no Italian and are similarly isolated, though they do at least go sightseeing.

c. Two Italians, a man we call the Etruscan with an Etruscan haircut, curly grey, and an Etruscan beard, long and down-pointing and with a moustache that stops short of his nose. His wife, who looks older than him, like him smokes all the time and has a terrible smoker’s laugh and rasping voice. She is frightened of insects.

On the first night in the restaurant a giant moth flew in – big as a bat. Mrs Etruscan ran out with her head down and would not return until Mr Etruscan had turned off all the lights and waved his napkin about, with the aim of convincing the moth that outside was a saner place to be.

After dinner, Mr & Mrs Etruscan sit by the pool and talk, Mrs waving her cigarette in the air energetically to keep the bugs at bay.

d. Initially, Mr & Mrs Bradshaw, schoolteachers from Oxford. Mr Bradshaw cleaned the surface of the pool with a net so that his wife might have a swim, and spent the rest of his time reading in a deskchair with a white cap on his head. They left on Thursday.

e. There have been two sets of young Italians who have nothing whatever to say to each other.

f. On Friday, Mr Spindlylegs and Mrs Frumpyshoes arrived. Seriously academic-looking. At least they have plenty to say to each other in the restaurant. Mr Spindlylegs goes into the pool, but only to swim widths. He daringly borrowed the Swiss-German’s sun lounger one evening – after they had gone to get dressed for dinner.

More on this tale to follow when I get round to it.