I
can hear them, you know. I can sense them. I know they're
there. Their little feet are pattering around in the darkness
when I go to sleep, and I can hear the buzz of their wings
sometimes when I'm working. I can't see them, because they're
keeping themselves to the themselves, but I know they're
there.
When I made the decision a couple of weeks ago that I would
stay in Barga with Brooke, it seemed like the best idea
in the world, or rather, it seemed like the craziest idea
in the world but I wanted to do it. I still want to do it,
but I have days when I feel this could be a mistake and
days when I feel it's just... right, you know?
I
guess this is what love is, in a way, what I spent many
strange and sometimes enthralling hours in therapy talking
to my therapist about. She always told me it was more complex,
more difficult being in love than I'd really seen it, and
now I think she must have been right. It isn't just a BOOM
thing, it's a whole mix of emotions and can vacillate between
"hmm, you're doing my head in" to "wow, I
couldn't leave you if i tried". And I suppose that
Barga is like that too, in its own way. A mix of the beautiful
and the absurd, the sublime and the ridiculous. Much like
the dear lady herself too, it has to be said.
So,
this is the penultimate blog. Oh yes. Though I intend to
stay in the this country, to see whether things will work
out with Brooke, to see the unveiling of Babbo's New Wine,
to see the spring come finally and take away all this bone-chillling
cold, to live in hope that Barga will get snow, to build
better friendships in the town, to learn better Italian,
to watch the vines get tied down to await next season's
fruit, to watch the artists' colony that Brooke wants to
build take shape, to help her make the shell of a house
she's got into something as beautiful as she sees in her
mind, to finish the book, to write the short stories I wanted
to do here... though I intend to stay here, I
won't be writing any more blogs after the next one. And
this is the last one I'll be writing from Barga, because
for me the last blog was always going to be written from
England, as a kind of retrospective, a kind of summation,
a kind of tying-all-the-pieces-together thing.
You never know - there may be blogs after this. I'm vacillating
again. It's just that I think the blogs have served their
purpose. I've taken more than 2,500 digital photos, nine
rolls of film and written more than 30,000 words in blogs
and supplements, not including this one or the last one
to come. In that time I've also written something like 60,000
words of book in its various incarnations, perhaps more.
That's a shitload of work. I didn't realise how much I'd
done. There's surely room to write more about what's going
to happen after this.
But
I mentioned, obliquely, the Locusts of Doom at the top of
this article, and there's a reason for that. Right now I'm
sitting in a kitchen that has to be close to squatting in
a refridgerator while the sun sets on the day after the
shortest day of the year, listening to Radiohead and I'm
wondering if I've made the right choice. I guess I can't
know that. There are some things you just can't *know* before
you do them.
"Tell me I've made the right decision," I said
to Brooke the first day we were up here and I *didn't* have
a flat to back to. I was feeling down. Obviously.
"I
can't tell you that," she said. My heart fell, because
sometimes you just want someone to say 'everything's going
to be all right', whether or not you or they believe it.
"But I do love you."
Like the wonderful and egomaniacal Julie Howell said to
me when I was trying to discern what to do with my life
from the entrails of a fresh goat I'd thieved in the night:
"The witch in Wild at Heart says 'Never turn away from
love'."
So
I've packed up my flat over the Two Bridges Bar, spent ten
days in Allan and Candy's B&B and have now shifted myself
to Brooke's big cold house on the hill overlooking the valley.
So be it. All this has been a major 'life choice' or 'terrifying
skip-load of uncertainty, fear, force of will and trust
in the unknown'. Looking at that sentence, you can see why
they call them life choices, can't you?
I
had considered doing Thoughts and Regrets in this blog but
I think I'll leave them for the Last Blog, because they
belong there, as do Thank Yous and Fuck Yous.
Instead, I believe Blog Tradition behooves me to talk about
what's been happening since the last blog, so I'll get on
with it.
Babbo cracked open his wine a little before the last blog
and gave some to everyone to taste. He'd decanted just one
demijohn of the new wine, one which, as far as he could
recall, had no tiny weeny preservative tablet-half in it.
He handed glasses of the new red out at the dinner table
with a gleam in his eyes. We waited expectantly. We did
not, however, have to wait long to make a preliminary judgement.
The
smell of sulphur, of, frankly, off eggs or a nasty fart
wafted easily from the bowl of each glass as we lifted them
to our sensitive noses, accustomed as they are now to top
notch Italian table plonk. We were not impressed. We were,
in fact, deeply concerned and though Babbo tried hard to
stifle his worries (and his gag reflex), he seemed worried
too.
"Seems fine to me," said Babbo, burying his nose
in the wine glass and his head in the sand.
The
rest of us round the table looked at each other askance.
Surely he didn't mean that he couldn't smell the eggy niff?
Does he think wine *should* smell like this? I was doubly
worried as this was the wine I had worked this summer to
help produce, and if it turned out to be a crock of shit
then I'd feel even more robbed by That God Which Does Not
Exist than I normally do.
Thankfully
(I'm sure Babbo has a direct line to his own personal version
of the Lord) the wine has mellowed and the eggy smell has
gone, so when we did the Traverso a week ago, which is when
we changed all the demijohns around by shifting the wine
to and from them, getting rid of the sediment at the same
time, we tasted it and both my and Babbo's faces lit up.
It was good. Damn good. It smelled fine. It was sweet, which
meant it would probably be a little stronger than last year's,
and it was a touch fizzy ('frizzante', as they say). It
was clear. In short, we grinned from ear to ear. The white
was still a little niffy, but Franco from next door said
that his wine was stinky too and that the white always took
longer to rid itself of its 'puzza'. All was well.
What
was somewhat less fun than dealing with the vines was olive
picking. Despite all the books about owning land in Tuscany
and Liguria saying what a wonder it is to have your own
olive trees, to get all the olives in the then rush them
to the presser where you can walk away with a cackload of
your own oil, getting olives from their little wooden homes
in the trees into sacks is a dull process. You invariably
do this task in fairly inclement weather, and in Barga this
winter inclement has been a word bandied around on a daily
basis.
In
brief, olive picking is to avoided at all costs unless your
life depends on it, because you would be *amazed* how little
oil you get from a lot of trees. Babbo has 60 trees, around
50 of which fruited this year. Michele, he of the wandering
eye which means he has the depth perception of a Cyclops
(never worked out why they were so dangerous if their whole
world was flat which meant they couldn't aim a spear) and
thus is just scary when flailing a stick in a tree near
your head, says that maybe 13 litres of oil will come from
this lot. This is a paltry amount of oil for all this work
and in my opinion Babbo should stick to banging the shelves
at the Pianeta superstore for his Extra Virgin.
But
most of my time has been spent trying to organise things
for Brooke's house, mainly while she was away in the USA
failing to organise a stay visa for Italy.
Now, before you get any funny ideas, when I originally
offered to help deal with the things in her house, like
making the central heating work (Dealing With Italian Plumbers
101), checking in her container-load of stuff that finally
arrived from Napoli (7 in the morning, lots of Italians,
not enough sleep), trying to get the place warm (impossible),
I wasn't planning on staying. I just... felt like I wanted
to help. Because it was her, basically.
Since
then I've learned some of the rudiments of How To Make Fire
(takes longer than I thought, must be watched like hyperactive
baby) and I've remembered with absolute clarity How To Be
Unnecessarily Grumpy Around Women You Actually Really Care
About, a skill I thought I'd almost forgotten. Thankfully
stuff like that's like falling off a log - hurts like buggery
and makes you look a complete cock.
Now,
I thought I'd got the central heating sorted with Alessandro
the Plumber, who organised the Lago Santo trip. I like Alessandro,
because he can speak a modicum of English but always speaks
to me in Italian. This is good, and isn't intimidating because
our conversations are 'supposed' to be in Italian - what
I mean is, they feel like they are and it doesn't make me
feel like a twat. This is very similar to John at the Osteria,
who can, I think, speak English but simply won't with me
unless it's to correct me or help when I'm very stuck. This
is, really, my favourite way of learning Italian, with Italians
like these. Alessandro Adami is more difficult to understand,
because he refuses to slow down for me. The bastard.
But
the heating, it transpires, isn't really much cop, the oil
can't be brought up the goat-track that passes for Brooke's
driveway and we walked in the other day to find half the
house under an inch of water. It seems that someone had
left a tap slightly open when it should have been tight
shut. Luckily (because the fucking house is as cock-eyed
as a drunken sailor) Brooke's roomful of stuff that I'd
arisen at 6 in the morning to oversee the arrival of was
untouched. Sighs of relief filled Barghigiani Uno shortly
after the first waves of terror. These events were followed
by lots of mopping. Ah, the joys of owning a house in Tuscany.
Don't believe a word of it, kids.
So
what now? I'm taking Brooke home for Xmas tomorrow (Monday
the 23rd), like a present for the UK to unwrap and enjoy.
Then I'm coming back to Italy on 4 January to begin another
adventure, and this one's got a lot more hanging on it than
the last.
Maybe that's why I'm sitting here feeling scared and more
than a little down. I should be happy as Larry; I've met
this wonderful girl, Italy is beautiful, I can see and know
I will reach the end of the book, everyone here it seems
is happy I'm coming back (although I do wonder whether they're
just smug that their predictions were proved right - they
gave me a beautiful oil serving plate for a 'going away
present' when I'm convinced some of them knew already I
wasn't staying away).
But
still there's this nagging feeling of... fear. Maybe it's
just the Locusts. Maybe it's the waning moon, maybe it's
the coming of Xmas, maybe it's the worry that I have no
money and no job.
Who knows? I don't. But I'm going to give it a go, and
I can't do any more than that. Most of the time I'm happy
to be doing this, don't get me wrong. I sat out in the afternoon
sun two days ago in a deckchair drinking red wine while
the late yellow sun warmed my face and I felt... content.
And I don't have that very often.
Take care all
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