Winter continues cold (bitter since about last Thursday) though slightly less wet finally. I’m trying hard to ignore Accuweather.com which tells me that deluges will soon start again, interspersed with snow. I have decided that the cheering, big-sunned weather reports on the site of La Repubblica are much more up my street: even the raindrops there are somehow chubby and jolly. Accuweather has a rain symbol which, even for the lightest shower, looks like the day of judgment is upon us. It’s good to have a chubby raindrop or two to look forward to, rather than something that makes you wonder whether you should start building your ark.
    I don’t know which animals I’d take with me if I did.
    Not the local cats, certainly: they’re in my bad books. While I was off in the Maremma last weekend, checking up on my garden project there, our cheerful postina – someone whose interest seems to lie more in make-up application than in successful letter delivery – left a bumper load of post for us. The fact that it was one of those day-of-judgment kind of days, with cloudbursts fit to wash us away, didn’t stop her shoving most of the letters into the box in such a way that the lid no longer closed, thus ensuring that the rain was channeled straight in, nor from standing one particularly large envelope – another mountain of DVDs kindly sent by my brother-in-law who works for Universal – standing propped up against the gate post.
    When I drove down the lane about 6pm, I thundered extremely unflattering things about the postina (you start talking to yourself when you’re left alone too long) as I picked up the soggy mess and chucked it on to the floor in the back of the car. But this was nothing to what I said about cats as the foulest stink started filling the car and I realised that some passing cat had left its mark – well, actually, more than its mark: more like emptied its very full bladder – over my envelope of DVDs. I’m now in a position to testify that Jiffy bags, for all that environmentally unsound plastic inside them, are not waterproof. I’ve never been able to understand why they waste the world’s resources wrapping DVDs in those cellophane covers which are almost impossible to get off. Now I’m very grateful for them.
    I would also, definitely, leave behind the beast that is still devastating my veggie garden, whatever it may be. For a while it left me in peace. But now, perhaps as punishment for the little thrill of vengeance I felt every time I heard a hunter fire a gun off down in our valley, it is back. I was presuming that it was back because it knew, instinctively, that it was that time of year when it could stick its head out without running the risk of having it removed from its shoulders. But this can’t possibly be.
    Just out of interest, I’ve been examining the site which tells me who can hunt what when in Umbria. It is truly fascinating; I never knew it was so complicated. From here in our kitchen, from September until February, it sounds like indescriminate guerrilla warfare has broken out down in the valley, with strange heavily-armed men and invasive dogs appearing in our field from time to time, infuriatingly. But no, it’s utterly byzantine, the whole business. For a start, there are dozens of species that can be hunted. But only on certain days. For certain months. By certain people.
    In this season boar, for example, got blasted on Thursday and Sunday in October, though not on October 4 – the feast of St Francis of Assisi, patron saint of Italy and animals – in the municipal area of Assisi, when all animals get a brief reprieve; it could be hunted on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday for the whole of November and December. Deer of various sorts could be despatched from 2 August to 29 October, and from 1 January to 28 February: still, therefore, fair game. Hare got its turn from 21 September to 14 December. Birds too numerous to mention are shootable on an infinitely complicated variety of days, which makes me presume that all those men out there with guns must have degrees in ornithology – and excellent eyesight – otherwise there’s no way they could be sure they were massacring the right fowl on the right day. On Tuesday and Friday there is what is quaintly known as the silenzio venatorio.
    So unless my vegetable-gnawer has access to the site and has spent hours tussling with the ramifications, it’s unlikely that it could possibly know it was safe. More and more, I suspect deer, though I’ve never seen one. Some of the leaves are chomped far too high up for a boar (and much less a porcupine), and there’s no sign of clumsy hoofs. The cabbages have all bitten the dust but – small comfort – so far, the beast doesn’t seem to fancy my cauliflowers, just their leaves.
    For the past few months I’ve been on a hunt of another kind. In the summer, V, a French-Swiss lady of ample means with a breath-taking house in the village, asked me whether I knew how to find the Hairdresser to the Stars, hidden away in some back street down in Po’ Bandino. There was a hairdresser there in the valley, she said, who dashed off regularly to adjust the barnets of the rich and famous. Perhaps, she said, he was even summoned to England. After quite a lot of hilarity, I wrote this off as an urban – or rather rural – legend. There were various things that made it more than likely to be total fabrication. For a start, V is the kind of person whose leg a joker might be tempted to pull. More tellingly, Po’ Bandino – an ugly straggle of houses and big hangars containing such emporia as Lidl and bargain-basement cast-off shoe vendors – is a total dump, and no Hairdresser to the Stars could possibly hole up there between glamorous assignments. Absolutely no way.
    It was just before Christmas, though, that I walked into one of the hardware shops in town and found three elderly ladies chatting there, one of whom had a haircut which screamed “not done in CdP!” She had lovely thick silver hair, granted, but the cut was very striking. Her friends asked her if she’d been to the woman in CdP. No, she said, she’d been to X (I didn’t hear the name) in Po’ Bandino. “Ah,” said the others, with reverence. She nodded sagely. “Quando ci vuole, ci vuole,” she said: there are times in life when things like this are essential.
    I didn’t have the nonce to butt in and ask her for information and directions. After this, I simply forgot about it. It wasn’t until the other day when I was looking very like the Wicked Witch of the West, and Al was about – Al who knows everything about everyone and would surely be able to unravel this mystery – that I thought about the Hairdresser to the Stars.
   "Oh yes,” she said, “I tried to get an appointment with him yesterday but he couldn’t take me.” Appointments are unusual in most places in Italy, but around here they’re unheard of: this was promising stuff. I was passing by (after a trip to Lidl, to purchase some of their legendary, and very improbable, mangos) so stopped in to make an appointment, for the following morning, at 8.30am. Eight thirty am. That kind of time is painful to me. This had better be good.
    Of course, the following morning was the only one since we’ve been here when I woke up to a layer of snow. It was a thin layer, admittedly, but more than enough to make me very wary of driving in it. I did though, slowly and ever more assailed by doubt. The salon, I’d seen, was not “hidden away”, as V had described: it was just off the main road and had a whacking great neon sign. And the woman who had greeted me had a hair cut which… well, I wouldn’t have wanted it: it was one of those jagged, scraggy things that manage to make even lovely, thick, dark hair look like a Medusa-head disaster area of badly applied extensions.
    Giampietro Baiocco, when he appeared, had a haircut to match hers, just shorter and limper. What is it with this dead-straight and straggly thing? It suits hardly anyone. Anyway, I was bracing for what would happen to me. His demeanour wasn’t stellar: perfectly pleasant, seemingly interested in the (dreadful) state of my hair. Unless the stars he deals with in the UK live in Maidstone or Brentwood, his British experience has been limited: those are the places he told me he was familiar with. What emerged from his scissors was a pleasant surprise. What emerged from the blow-dryer of his curly female assistant was… jagged, straggly, straight and ghastly. My heart sank. I was clearly in the wrong place. No star would want this, that was for sure. I would have to have a word with Al.
    Now, however, I’m more confused than ever. I washed my hair and dried it myself, and what emerged was clearly a very, very good haircut. So was I at the Hairdresser to the Stars? Or, as happens in these parts, had his reputation been subjected to rural Chinese whispers? Maybe the forgetable starlets in that dreadful soap Carabinieri went there once; or maybe a passing VIP happened by and it has never been forgotten. Or maybe Giampietro’s a good hairdresser but the Hairdresser to the Stars lurks elsewhere in the nether reaches of Po’ Bandino. I wonder if I’ll ever find out.

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