30 August 2005
CdP
It was my friend Rachael, who bravely brought her spouse and two children to stay in early August, that first drew my attention to the lack of insects this year. Her compost bin in north London, she said, would have been swarming with flies. Mine, in pleasantly warm Umbria, was eerily bug-free. As were the damsons weighing down the straggly little twig of a tree right above it – a tree which this year produced huge quantities of fruit thanks, I suspect, to the fact that the compost bins are now regularly stationed above its root area. One day I noticed that the damsons had suddenly ripened to the point where they were turning to prunes on the tree. Hardly any had fallen. And not even the few on the ground had so much as a wasp hole in them. Down in the front field, the wild apple tree which is usually lost in a cloud of insects through the summer had unmarked sweet fruits, perfect for adding to my damson jam.
I commented on the phenomenon to Mario, our wizened farmer neighbour. He gave me that gently compassionate look he keeps for city people who clearly know nothing and announced 'le mosche arrivano sotto ferragosto' – flies arrive on August 15. And so they did: the first house flies made their way into our kitchen on that very day, then disappeared soon after. But the other winged beasts he predicted would attack our few meagre fruit trees from that date on stayed away, so that even Mario was forced to comment on the strangeness of the season. There were a few wasp nests, granted, soon dispatched with long-range squirts from fantastically expensive wasp-zapping products, but on the whole the wasps kept themselves to themselves. And the bumbling hornet-like creatures that the locals call muraioli – their black and yellow bodies oddly disjointed in the middle –buzzed and whined all over the house searching out well-hidden spots in which to build their delicate mud houses which I became expert at discovering and detaching. But muraioli, they say, don't sting. There were none of the huge black African wasps which made last summer such a trial: those aggressive beasts descended in droves every time we tried to sit outside with a light on. And though my compost bins seem to have been totally colonised by munching maggot-like worms, there's nothing more threatening there either.
One side-effect of this has been cabbages, cucumbers and courgettes in abundance. I met Mario's brother-in-law Augusto one day as I was enjoying a leisurely stroll into town. Augusto is one of those people for whom walking is a kind of penance and therefore he insisted that I accept a lift in his rattly Fiat. Augusto keeps a tidy vegetable garden in a corner of one of Mario's fields. Having made my acquaintance, he became a regular visitor to the house, arriving every couple of days with another battered plastic shopping bag filled with surplus produce. 'I'm giving away more than I'm eating,' he told me. 'I've never had a year like this: I can't keep on top of it.' As I desperately tried to think of interesting variations on cabbage – a vegetable I rarely eat at all –I was reminded of the artsy family that lived down the lane from us in Sussex when I was a child, at the height of the Good Life phenomenon. They were, probably, fairly self-sufficient. But even at my tender age I could tell they weren't very good at it. Invitations to lunch were fraught with danger: there was one summer when the only crop that didn't fail was the onions, and though it was fun learning to plait onions into long ropes and hang them from rafters in the barn, there wasn't much amusement in a meal of onion stew with a side dish of fried/pickled/raw onions. Each time I heard Augusto yell 'Signora!' I wondered whether bothering to plant my own vegetable garden would be worth my while. After all, now that this ritual of extraordinary generosity has been established, it will never go away.
But no, I will make my vegetable garden eventually, if only because I have finally had that pump installed in the water tank. And of course, once I had it done, I was left wondering why I had waited so long. The nagging Scottish bit of me resents the fact that even turning on a tap on the valley side of the house, where the pressure was quite acceptable already, makes the pump pump. But up behind the caravan where watering my few plants with the dribble that came out of the hose pipe used to take hours, energetically squirting sprinklers look like a godsend.
It's strange, though, that they should look so useful at this time of year. By rights, storm clouds should be gathering over our parched earth. But after a July in which only the very final week was sweatily hot, our August seemed not August but October: cool and very very wet. This was good for the few grass seeds I had planted in strategic places in an effort to keep the dust from my topsoil out of the house. But it was miserable for holiday-makers, many of whom packed up and went home earlier than planned. Now, the rain has gone and the skies are blue and, with September close at hand, itŐs looking like August again. A strange summer indeed.