A strange feeling this, being in Rome on Saturday evening when, 24 hours ago, I was all ready to hop in the car and precede L up to Umbria. It’s unnerving and unsettling and kind of frustrating, though the reasons are good – C’s temperature has been up to 38.7 today, and L is now into his second course of antibiotics to try to shift the bronchitis that doesn’t want to go away.

So here I am, fit as a fiddle (touch wood), rather bouncing off walls, but getting things done.

Like the latest, long-postponed step in my never-ending battle against pigeons. I tried several months ago to deter them by covering the balcony railings in that floppy green plastic netting you grow beans up. As the balconcino (and the emphasis here is on the ‘ino’ – we’re talking pocket handerkerchief) is right there, at the end of the living room when you open the French doors, I didn’t want to put anything around the railings that would make us feel hemmed in. So I kept the mesh wide, thinking that it would be sufficient deterrent to birds which never appeared to me to be particularly skilled at difficult take-off and landings (and utterly incapable of VT&Ls), great blundering conveyors of disease and filth that they are.

But to my dismay I found that despite appearances they’re actually rather deft at approaching their landing point then shimmying through tight spots, including flapping bits of plastic netting. And where they could, they simply broke through my barricade by sheer force of blundering: great sections drifted apart.

There were moments as I sent them packing (our neighbours must have garnered a rich vocabulary of English expletives listening to me) when I thought that they’d come to grief, getting tangled up in that netting during their inelegant scrambles to get away. Half of me was glad that their lives were being made so difficult (they, after all, make mine angst-ridden with their infuriating cooing); but the other half did, sometimes, wonder how long a pigeon would flap there in agony, netting twined about its ankles, before it finally croaked and left me in peace. Not swift, I conjectured. And probably quite noisy. I shall never know.

This morning I removed that floppy netting and replaced it with some fine-mesh rigid stuff. Not wishing to feel hemmed in has gone out the window, though in fact, in the end, it doesn’t make me feel claustrophobic at all. Pigeons perched on top of shutters and on ledges all around, watching my antics with their beady eyes. (They are, after all, out to get me…) So what a satisfaction it was, once I’d finished, to see them skimming in towards the balcony then veering off in alarm at the last moment when they realised there was no way they were getting through those pigeon-proofed railings. Inside, I was punching air, whooping with joy. Actually, outside I was doing the same thing. Of course, they’ll spend a sleepless night tonight, perfecting their vertical take-off and landings in order to stymy me. But at least I’ve given them something to think about. And maybe, just maybe, they won’t be able to work it out. You live and hope.

Task number two was to get my beautifully rolling system of plug-growing going. My birthday present to myself was some root trainers from the Organic Catalogue. I have to say, when they arrived I was rather taken aback. I had expected something larger: the plugs they produce are minuscule. But now that I have them, there’s no point in not putting them to the use for which they were intended – what’s more, their size is commensurate with the size of my balcony which is where they’ll be doing their job – so I’ve started. My Grand Plan is to get things going here in Rome, then transplant them into my spectacular vegetable garden (ahem…) in CdP in a wondrous rolling system which will ensure all the vegetables we need when we need them – never too much, never too little. In short, perfection.

Knowing my skill with seeds, we’ll probably have a limp few lettuce leaves some time in mid-August. But no, no defeatism at this early point! So far, in this ridiculous March that feels like May, I have gone for some herbs – coriander and dill, chervil and purslane – plus a few tomato plants (San Marzano) and a fair crop of sweet peas, these last to train up my pigeon-proofing in Rome, because I have made yet another attempt to plant sweet peas straight into the open up in CdP (over the last two years I think I’ve had three flowers in total from the stunted plants that have struggled up).

I have such a clear idea in my head of what my orto will look like, its colours (I have three different shades of chard waiting to be sown) and its old-fashioned charm – hence the purslane.

But as it is, I’m wondering whether I’ll even find the time to build my raised beds. The wherewithal for them is languishing in the woodyard in Fabro, where woodcutter-Stefano is saving off-cuts from oak beams for me, trimmed to the correct sizes. They need to be painted and erected and filled and planted. A dribble system needs to be installed and the paths between the beds need to be levelled and gravelled. So when do I think I’m going to do all this? Sometimes, just sometimes, I ask myself whether I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew.