Hmmm, well, so much for year-round country living. It feels like we’ll never get there. L has gone to San Sebastian for the film festival. C is engaged in the longest pack in history. I mean, how long can it take someone to put some essential clothes and books into two suitcases… and tidy up a disaster area/bedroom after? The answer, when the person in question is C, is weeks.
    So here I sit, happy to be with my soon-to-depart daughter, frustrated at not being in my garden, wondering if there are still tomatoes on the vines and whether those pesky little caterpillars have got to my brassicas. Wondering too whether the rain that finally fell in reasonable quantities last week, followed by lovely days of puffy clouds and warmish sun, means that the lawn which has been brownish and short through the summer is now lush and knee-high. When I dug three 40cm-deep holes beneath the service tree outside the front door at the end of August to plant some myrtle bushes in that empty bed, I was shocked at how there was nothing there – at a point where I watered more or less regularly through the summer – but dry, dry dust (plus the inevitable large stones). I think the situation now would be slightly different. Even without the rain, the dew is enough to get things springing to life again. It’s funny how quickly moisture appears once temperatures drop just a few degrees and nights close in earlier. Just as well I have Vittorio there to keep an eye on things.
    Other things are weighing on my mind too, like the walnuts which should be picked now. (I gathered a fairly respectable quantity of hazelnuts. That was a first: I’ve always managed to miss them up to now.) And like how on earth I’m going to get up there at all if I give our car to the friend who is driving her daughter’s and C’s belongings up to Cambridge (we’re driving back down). Maybe she’ll leave me her car? I’ll have to sort something.
    Since returning last week from a grand family reunion in Northern Ireland I have spent precisely 18 hours in CdP. Some of those were sleeping hours. Many others were dedicated to scrubbing out two stinking fridges: was the house taking its revenge for our ‘abandoning’ it by switching its own electricity off downstairs? It took much throwing out and much swabbing down with bicarb soda to get the smell out of those machines. The two packets of cod fillets in the freezer in the laundry certainly didn’t help matters. At least it gave me a chance to clean up and close down the large laundry fridge, ready for our less ambitious life as a twosome in the coming months with just the smaller kitchen fridge to keep things cool.
    I managed just half an hour in the garden, early the following morning. It was, as I mentioned, dripping with dew, and the plants had a greener, relieved air about them. They had all looked so down-trodden towards the end of the long dry summer. I pulled some of the tallest weeds from the lawn outside my office, ate a couple of wonderfully crisp tart apples from my limoncella tree (cutting carefully around the insect colonies that keep getting into the core, despite all Vittorio’s ministrations), picked some courgettes and tomatoes and despaired once again over my spectacular looking french beans which really haven’t produced more than a handful of beans all through the summer… not a single pod there now. What can I do? It's almost time to admit defeat and rip the plants up.

I need to find more gardens. If only people weren’t feeling so poor!
    My project in Tarquinia is finished. Well, apart from final details which seem to be dragging on endlessly. It makes no sense to me that nurseries wouldn’t want to wrap things as soon as possible, and move on to the bill-issuing stage. Why oh why would they want to leave half an hour’s work still to do in a garden which is over an hour’s drive from their base? It seems like so much bad business.
   Though agonisingly slow, this contractor did plough on. Again, it was a job that could have been done in three days. Instead they took five days in June and another three days at the beginning of September. They didn’t help themselves, I’m afraid, by wading into the jungle-like lawn (so much for their intimations that they thought I was off my head, telling them to seed a lawn during a draught) in September with a strimmer and lopping off the tops of about 20 of the well-established plants put in the ground in June. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I should have been there when they got there I guess. Then again, why did they send a different team from the one that planted in the first place, without giving them a copy of my plan? And how could so-called gardeners not have noticed healthily flowering lavenders and perovskias poking out? You have to wonder.