There’s quite a frost out there this morning. It’s the first time that my fingers have seized up just opening the shutters: this glorious autumn has been so warm, with the thermometre on the terrace upstairs rarely dipping into single figures, even at night. Outside the window of the kitchen where I’m writing, vaporous clouds of condensation are swirling around the olive tree in the brilliant sunshine. It was a shock the other evening when, as I drove over to see a friend in Piazze, there was a ping in the car and the temperature started flashing at me. Three degrees. L said that, at that moment, it was warmer in Bratislava, where he’s being a juror at the film festival.
    He has gone away and left me with builders and dust. After the rigours of last winter, we snapped up a wood burning stove in the end-of-season sales. Everyone I know who has one swears that they’re well nigh miraculous, and we have so much wood going spare down there in the valley. We brought Stef down in April and showed it to him, and told he that he was, without fail, going to have installed the thing by Sept 1. He laughed and scoffed and asked what we thought he was: incompetent or unreliable or something? It’s December 3 and we still don’t have our stove. Hopefully, hopefully, by end of play today, we might.
    We spent many hours trying to work out where to put the stove. It has to warm the kitchen (but there’s nowhere to put it there) and the projection room. And so as to exploit the heat to the full, the flue has to go through our bedroom and heat that as well, which means that the projection room – directly beneath the bedroom – is the only place for it. But finding a spot where there’s a straight unimpeded line from ground floor paving to first floor rafters is very very difficult. Our initial decision was a disaster: Stef’s first move on Monday morning was to drill straight through a central heating pipe. I had had him round previously. I had had the electrician round and explained our plans. Both of them stared hard at the spot where the flue would pass but neglected to recall that not only the central heating but several tubes carrying water, electricity and god knows what else passed beneath the floor at precisely that point. I bit my tongue. Very hard.
    Now the flue passes right by my bed. I’ll probably be gasping for air and moving my pillow out to the terrace most nights. Maybe. In the mean time, I keep trying to eek out our furiously expensive Lpg supply. Which reminds me, I must get the delivery men round, because the tank’s getting low.

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I have been very efficient and built cages for netting around my brassicas. Well, around some of them anyway. They are rather fragile structures, and rather wiggly. As the builders backed into the one along the car park the other day, and the cane frame tottered, I found myself wondering just how long they’ll stand up to a concerted assault by peckish wild boar. Mind you, the way the local hunters are carrying on down in our valley, it’ll be a wonder if any boar survive. The last couple of weekends have been a blast-fest down there. And the garden has been full of over-excited hounds. When I was out weeding the artichokes and hacking my way though the honeysuckle jungle last weekend I feared for my life. But I have to admit that I’ve seen fewer strange and heavily armed men stalking my fields this winter, despite the racket they’ve been making. Clearly there’s so much action down in the woods that they don’t need to spend hours waiting in the field.
     With builders tramping through the house, leaving doors open as they go and allowing the place to fill with swirling autumn leaves, I guess I should have spent this week out in the garden. Instead, I have spent it in front of my computer.
    Last week we had three days in Venice. It was damp and hanging grey but marvellous. There were so few people in the city that even the normally tetchy Venetians seemed charmingly happy to have our company. Venice is a city of missed garden opportunities, of glimpses through high gates or over walls into damp and dripping greenery gone wild, weed patches which could, with just a little tweaking, become delightful. How I would love to be given carte blanche to make the city’s gardens into what they should be. As it is, we stayed in two hotels, both of them quite stunning in their way, one with a roof terrace where Philippe Starck had gone as far as putting out immense chocolate-brown plastic planters but was still arguing with the owner over what to put in them (he favoured cypresses… a ridiculous idea: they’d just blow straight over); and the other with a courtyard with a few little bay bushes stuck in long and very banal plastic tubs. The owner swore the plastic tubs were going. But they had been freshly planted and somehow had a rather permanent look to them. Such a pity.
    So after that little jaunt, work had built up back home. Why do I struggle so much to write articles? I should have handed over, some time ago, a piece on a-typical central Italian gardens for the Telegraph travel pages. It’s right up my street. It gave me a chance to go back to Sheppard Craig’s magical Bosco della Ragnaia. But for some reason my fingers stop moving when I open the file, and nothing gets typed. I have much more success the moment I open Vectorworks and start in on the plans for the project I’m working on with PC near Spello. Now that’s something I can (and do) work on for hours and hours.It’s huge, and right up my street: there’ll be a monumental orto and row upon row of fruit trees, with an old (-looking) stone pool in a grove of mixed olives and fruit trees, plus great expanses of roses, and hydrangeas beneath the pine trees. And not only are the owners charming but the whole team – to date – seems to work together. It’s so very different from other experiences of recent years. Architects, administrators, owners, garden designers all sit down and collaborate, pulling together to find the best solutions. No rivalry, no back-stabbing. It’s a very un-Italian situation.