CdP
13 August 2008
It’s late and cool and I would be in bed were
it not for the fact that I have four big jars of passata
di pomodoro bubbling in a pot on the stove. This is the
first lot of tomatoes I have done this summer exclusively
with my own produce – the others have had large amounts
of imput from Mario and Vittorio, both of whom keep showering
me with all kinds of goodies from their orti. I like
to think this lot will be infinitely better than the ones
I’ve been boiling up up to now. But I suspect that if
I don’t mark the labels in some way, I’ll never
be able to tell the difference.
After two weeks in which the house has positively heaved with guests, we make a charmingly quiet little domestic scene this evening, in a hi-tech kind of a way. My tomatoes are bubbling, I’m writing, and L is sitting across the table from me, working his way through many years of unerased emails, looking for people whom he’d like to inform of the fact that we are now mainly resident here in Umbria, rather than in Rome.
It’s a big step: I mean, once the emails have been sent, there’s no going back, is there? And L is, oddly, taking it before me. Sometimes I wonder whether he’s keen to burn his bridges before he thinks better of it. But no, I think he is as committed to this move from city to country as I am. In fact, he alleges that he’s more committed: on my last trip back to Rome, he had me come back with the car packed with his whole side of the wardrobe. Most of my clothes are still down there. I, on the other hand, don’t feel the need for grand, dramatic gestures. And what’s more, I’m trying to do the groundwork here. It’s pointless, if you ask me, carting untold amounts of belongings up the motorway if they then have to stay in boxes because there’s nowhere ready to stash them. No, I want my move to be a stately, orderly retreat: something terribly natural feeling, rather than a major wrench.
Or so I say. I suspect the wrench will be there. C has her place at Cambridge and will be heading off to start that new phase of her life in October. (In the mean time, this week she is camping in constantly drizzling Amsterdam.) Could our move be an attempt to deflect attention from the Empty Nest? To some extent, but it’s a move that has been in our plans for a long long time.
After two weeks in which the house has positively heaved with guests, we make a charmingly quiet little domestic scene this evening, in a hi-tech kind of a way. My tomatoes are bubbling, I’m writing, and L is sitting across the table from me, working his way through many years of unerased emails, looking for people whom he’d like to inform of the fact that we are now mainly resident here in Umbria, rather than in Rome.
It’s a big step: I mean, once the emails have been sent, there’s no going back, is there? And L is, oddly, taking it before me. Sometimes I wonder whether he’s keen to burn his bridges before he thinks better of it. But no, I think he is as committed to this move from city to country as I am. In fact, he alleges that he’s more committed: on my last trip back to Rome, he had me come back with the car packed with his whole side of the wardrobe. Most of my clothes are still down there. I, on the other hand, don’t feel the need for grand, dramatic gestures. And what’s more, I’m trying to do the groundwork here. It’s pointless, if you ask me, carting untold amounts of belongings up the motorway if they then have to stay in boxes because there’s nowhere ready to stash them. No, I want my move to be a stately, orderly retreat: something terribly natural feeling, rather than a major wrench.
Or so I say. I suspect the wrench will be there. C has her place at Cambridge and will be heading off to start that new phase of her life in October. (In the mean time, this week she is camping in constantly drizzling Amsterdam.) Could our move be an attempt to deflect attention from the Empty Nest? To some extent, but it’s a move that has been in our plans for a long long time.
Now, I wonder what effect this will have on my garden.
Already I’m thinking in terms of year-round usability:
we must, for example, have a pergola outside the kitchen,
where in summer the shadow of the house doesn’t swing
around to cover the table until about 2.30… which is
just that bit too late for lunch except, of course, on the
numerous days when I don’t get my act together and get
food on the table until that time anyway. But it would also
break up the ‘monumentality’ of the huge valley
façade of this building. It never ceases to amaze me
what a massive construction the house would appear to be from
down in the field… where it’s not obvious that
the place is long long long but only one room thick.
The trees in the orchard way up the top are coming along nicely (well, apart from the poor stunted little pears) but that area – so lovely as the sun sets behind – is virtually unused/unusable, which is a shame. I want a pergola with seating: a homage to the four brick columns which once formed the corners of the makeshift barn where straw was stored when the grain was beaten off it on the aia (threshing floor) up there. And I’d like proper access: steps going up from just inside the gate on the drive side; a smooth ramp up from the lower level where I’ve put the plum and cherry trees. When will this happen?
Then there’s the caravan – that never-ending story. The iron frame for the long long table which will eventually grace the concimaia – our putative barbeque/outside dining area where the caravan has sat all these years – is ready: all it needs is wooden planks on top and of course something for people to sit on. And L thought he had done negotiating with Demolition Man (they’ve changed the rules recently, and sticking caravans in fields to house chickens can now get you immense fines, so the Vittorio solution fell through definitively) but the moment some arrangement had been reached, Demolition Man remembered that he was going off on vacation and couldn’t come to take away our lump of fibreglass (and, he says, possibly asbestos) until well after the Ferragosto holiday (August 15). Hey ho. It will go one day. Maybe.
Garden ‘ornaments’ is another area that needs considerable thought. For a few days we managed to wrest C’s stripey swinging garden chair away from her, and move it from her room where it gets in everyone’s way to the oak tree for which it was originally bought. She soon demanded it back again, but that brief hiatus reminded me forcefully of the impact of focal points. The strip of grass that sweeps down to that smaller oak is looking good, but it looked even better with a splash of swinging stripey colour catching your eye way off at the far end of it. I must find something else to hang there…. and other ‘finishing’ elements for other key spots, such as down past the vaschetta and up behind the caravan. My garden is gaining in beauty as the plants grow, but still sadly lacking in ‘interest’. The old wooden bench that L stuck at the far side of my vegetable garden is a case in point. It looks quite lovely there. I must remember, too, to plant something pretty in the wooden grape-gathering vat that I put in the orto months ago but never filled… except with unwanted stones from my garden beds.
The trees in the orchard way up the top are coming along nicely (well, apart from the poor stunted little pears) but that area – so lovely as the sun sets behind – is virtually unused/unusable, which is a shame. I want a pergola with seating: a homage to the four brick columns which once formed the corners of the makeshift barn where straw was stored when the grain was beaten off it on the aia (threshing floor) up there. And I’d like proper access: steps going up from just inside the gate on the drive side; a smooth ramp up from the lower level where I’ve put the plum and cherry trees. When will this happen?
Then there’s the caravan – that never-ending story. The iron frame for the long long table which will eventually grace the concimaia – our putative barbeque/outside dining area where the caravan has sat all these years – is ready: all it needs is wooden planks on top and of course something for people to sit on. And L thought he had done negotiating with Demolition Man (they’ve changed the rules recently, and sticking caravans in fields to house chickens can now get you immense fines, so the Vittorio solution fell through definitively) but the moment some arrangement had been reached, Demolition Man remembered that he was going off on vacation and couldn’t come to take away our lump of fibreglass (and, he says, possibly asbestos) until well after the Ferragosto holiday (August 15). Hey ho. It will go one day. Maybe.
Garden ‘ornaments’ is another area that needs considerable thought. For a few days we managed to wrest C’s stripey swinging garden chair away from her, and move it from her room where it gets in everyone’s way to the oak tree for which it was originally bought. She soon demanded it back again, but that brief hiatus reminded me forcefully of the impact of focal points. The strip of grass that sweeps down to that smaller oak is looking good, but it looked even better with a splash of swinging stripey colour catching your eye way off at the far end of it. I must find something else to hang there…. and other ‘finishing’ elements for other key spots, such as down past the vaschetta and up behind the caravan. My garden is gaining in beauty as the plants grow, but still sadly lacking in ‘interest’. The old wooden bench that L stuck at the far side of my vegetable garden is a case in point. It looks quite lovely there. I must remember, too, to plant something pretty in the wooden grape-gathering vat that I put in the orto months ago but never filled… except with unwanted stones from my garden beds.
