| CdP 27 August 2009 | |||||||
| It’s 34 degrees today, according to the thermometer on the north-facing wall of our terrace. It has been more or less that temperature every day since the end of June. There has been the occasional dip to 30. And the occasional excursion up towards the 40 degree mark. On July 27, Maria at the agriturismo up the road reminded me the other day, we had a ten-minute storm. A few drops fell three days ago, but not enough even to dampen the surface of a garden bed. That has been our summer: as hot as the legendary summer of 2003 but much, much longer. Relentless. I haven’t even been able to find the energy to get out into the garden. Of course, we are so much better off here than, say, in Rome. I went to Rome for a day at the end of July. After so long in the country, I finally realised what I hated most about a hot city. Here, we have heat beating down on us from above, and sometimes from the sides in the shape of a hot, enervating wind. In Rome, it was coming at me from the sky, out of walls and cars but – most painfully – out of the tarmac. By the time I got back home, my ankles were so swollen I thought they would burst. That, I reflected, was how I used to feel every day through summer in the city. I wonder how I stood it. As I write, the sky in the north west is turning black and there are gusts of wind knocking branches about from time to time. Are we in for another few drops? (They never came.) Keeping on top of garden things has been quite impossible in this situation. I’ll remember this season as summer of heat but also summer of bindweed (Convulvulus arvensis). Is this because I simply haven’t braved the heat to get out there and pull it up? I don’t think so. I think that, while everything else has fainted away, bindweed finds the strength to keep going. Even the couch grass – generally so omnipresent – is putting up a pathetic show in comparison. Which reminds me: the newly resprouted artichoke plants are being utterly submerged by a Sargasso Sea of bindweed. I must get up there and rescue them. I read somewhere that the roots can go down four metres. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Help! I’ll never get rid of it again. I entered into a debate about this with my friend Elspeth Thompson (www.elspeththompson.co.uk) along the lines of Roundup-yes?/Roundup-no? Of course I was on the latter side from the start, whereas Elspeth was a waverer. She had, she said, several packets of it in her shed, bought at various times then never used. I told her I’d rather dedicate all my waking hours to yanking the foul stuff up rather than use a product made by and for Monsanto which is evil incarnate and bound to be bad. Elspeth was relieved that I shared her prejudices. And she sent me a raft of documents about Denmark planning to ban Roundup because of seepage into groundwater. The ban never went through, and the EU feebly failed to put glyphosate on to its latest list of dodgy deals. But I’m not abandoning my suspicions, and I’m glad that I have Elspeth on my side. Also rife in this powerful dry is powdery mildew. After my cucumber-filled summer of 2008, this year has seen leaf after leaf in my courgette/cucumber/melon bed turn talc-y white then shrivel up, with any pathetic fruits that did appear quickly go yellow and twisted. An exaggeration of course: I did get a few, but now they’re a distant memory, despite all my showering with sulphur powder when the plants were small, and my squirting with milk and water when the plague broke out. Admittedly, I didn’t squirt very much or very frequently: suddenly there were too many guests around and I just never seemed to make it up there at the right evening hour. Various websites had told me that one part semi-skimmed milk to nine parts water over a few days would certainly do the trick. My plants, however, continue to fester. It’s so disappointing. This summer has also been swarming with animals. Well, relatively. The lack of fauna around here still astounds me. But one night, when I was closing the upstairs windows, I heard a strange snuffling noise in the field. I turned out all the lights and let my eyes get accustomed. Then I counted 12 wild boar rooting about down there. There may have been more lurking in the shadows. To me they all looked like enormous beasts. L was scathing about my description, saying it was clearly one big one and some offspring. I don’t know how he could have been so sure: it was pretty dark out there, and those shadows were ominous. I was glad to be up here rather than out and about. The hare I flushed up in the orchard was much less daunting. He sat and looked at me for a second or two with mild, surprised eyes, then bounded off down the drive, fleeing my dire warnings that if I was ever to catch him in my vegetable garden, I’d turn hunter immediately. All he did in return was run away in such a panic that he careered straight into my washing line prop, propped against the wall of the house, and sent it flying. At least I presume it was him. The prop certainly clattered to the ground round about the time I calculated he would have been down there. Birds of prey have, I think, been fewer this summer, or at least we’ve made fewer sightings. A couple of times, however, I’ve watched them lift themselves off the field below the house, slowly slowly climbing into the blue sky. And one day, I looked out of the chicken house to see one drifting, not all that much above eye level, out over the border between our field and Joe’s, just hovering there, turning in a dramatic arc, as if he wanted to give me a chance to admire him properly. He banked away at a breathtakingly slow pace, up the valley towards the Perugia road, then out of sight. I was enraptured. | |||||||