Two wheels good

Have borrowed my cousin’s bike!

Time taken to ride it from my cousin’s house to here: 30 minutes

Distance covered: About 9k

Average steepness: Bloody steep, but some fun downy bits

Amount of bugs swallowed on journey: Four (that I know of)

Amount of times nearly mown down by truck: Once (not bad for Italian road)

Amount of limbs lost: None. Yay!

I am now officially mobile, provided the temperature stays under 25 degrees and the roads aren’t too steep. This presents a bit of a problem as the temperature is solidly above 25 degrees and I’m living in a valley but hey, am happy to potter up and down the SS45 and travel only at dawn or dusk (travelling after then is way too terrifying. Italian drivers are nuts enough as it is, when it gets dark they get even worse)

The blind leading the blind (Alert: may contain non PC material)

The bus really is a wonderful place to make friends (as opposed to in London where the bus is a wonderful place to meet serial killers) although frankly I’m lucky that the person I got chatting to today feels halfway friendly towards me.

I’ve seen V around the village a couple of times, using a white stick and with a tubby Labrador trotting around her, usually off its lead, and this morning she walked past the bus stop and stood chatting to the local gossip, R, before standing by the side of the road anxiously listening to the traffic.

When I was about 12 years old someone I knew was killed on that exact spot of road, and as the traffic started haring past her the dog seemed to be dithering, and V looked nervous, so when there was a break in traffic I leapt forward and asked if I could help.

“Yes please,” she said, so I started to guide her across the street. We were halfway across when she said: “Er… I’m waiting for the bus actually.”

Cringeing and apologising copiously I led her back over the road and, thank God, the bus turned up seconds later. She got on first, and I sat on the opposite side of the aisle to her. We had a lovely conversation about the dog (V’s training her up) about her daughter and her late husband. We found out we lived quite near each other, and I waffled on about London being ‘molto grande’. I even managed to do without my usual habit of gesticulating when I can't think of the right word and she seemd to understand most of what I was saying.

Eventually she asked “are we getting near Piacenza yet? Can you let me know when we get to blah street?”

Sadly I had no idea where blah street was, so I decided to just tell her roughly where we were, so she had an idea of when to get off. “Well, we’re in Via Genova now…” I said.

As we pulled up to the stop, she gathered her things together as if preparing to get off the bus and said:

“Well it’s been lovely chatting to you…”

“You too – drop in for a coffee sometime.”

“Love to!” The door of the bus opened and I waited for her to get off, but she didn’t. The door closed again, and V started humming quietly to herself while I tried to think of a way to keep the conversation going. Until slowly I realised that she hadn’t intended to get off at that stop at all – she thought I had.

I spent the next 10 minutes being as quiet and still as possible, avoiding the driver’s amused eye, and trying not to yell out when she dumped her shopping bag on my lap.

Realised I am not going to receive an award for services to the blind anytime soon.

Long live the party

Thanks to a lift from my cousin, I managed to catch the last night of the Rivergaro Annual Communist Party Party. Of course it’s not called that any more. When I was growing up it was called the Festival of Unity and involved lots of red flags, posters of Lenin and an accordion band playing polkas, waltzes and mazurkas. But these days the Party has rebranded itself the Democratic Party (isn't every party called that these days?) and renamed the festival Rivergaro Rocks. 

Polkas and politics were in hiding, instead we got The Catastrophic Band (this is actually what they’re called, not a sarky name I’ve given them.) They’re bunch of fortysomething rockers with a sexily-leather-clad-but-pregnant lady lead singer, whose belting voice was spoiled only by her not so perfect English (at one point during U2's One I swear she sang Love is a pimple, love’s the higher law) 

Then came a bunch of lads who were absolutely brilliant. Better than lots of the other bands I’ve seen this year (that’ll be you, purple tights bloke at Farmfest) and they wrote their own stuff too. I tried to film them but my camera doesn't do night. Or sound. So you'll just have to use your imaginations. 

I munched on tortelli and kebabs, chose a drink from the vast selection (beer, water or espresso) and bopped my head like a happy idiot until the end of the evening when the band signed off, and the sound system launched into the Internationale, the one reminder that this evening’s entertainment was brought to you by the Wonders of Socialism. At least that’s a song that never changes.

Silly statuary

Lovely trip to Milan this weekend. Finally after 36 years of visiting Italy (37 if you count that one trip in utero) I’ve stayed there for more than three hours and actually had a look around the place. It goes without saying the shops are great – it also goes without saying I didn’t go into many of them (see entries below re: freelance work and financial situation) but I still had a great time going from café to café, touring the castle and the Monet exhibition, and finally climbing onto the roof of the fantastical sugar-plum fairy cathedral. This was my favourite bit, not just for the views of the city but also because of the creative carvings. I know, I know, I'm a philistine but really they are very special. My favourites include:

A naked-butt boxing match that goes on for three pillars and that is Not Homoerotic In Any Way (I think the bloke on the right won in the end)

A man who obviously had a dodgy curry last night

A woman who I'm going to sign up for a "boob job nightmares" story

A punk vampire duck

Not sure what any of these things have to do with God. I’m sure if I searched online I could find the hidden meaning behind them all, but I prefer to just think the stonemasons just got a bit bored after all those angels and saints and figured “oh well, it’s on the roof, nobody’s going to see it anyway” then amused each other by making stuff up.

Zpeak ve-ry-zlo-li

About 10 years ago, my Italian reached caveman level and stopped. For some reason, no matter how hard I try I can’t seem to get any better. OK, I occasionally pick up an interesting word or two (did you know that finocchio, which is Italian for fennel, is also slang for gay? I haven’t worked out yet whether it’s a homophobic insult or an affectionate nickname.) I understand most of what goes on around me and sometimes I can communicate some quite complicated ideas. But I’m still limited to the sort of sentences Tarzan would use: “Me Like Italy. Me Go In Milan. Me Make Fire, Fire Pretty.”

For a long time I found this really frustrating, but I recently realised there are advantages to the fact that everyone assumes you’re a moron. In other words, when you do something wrong, nobody’s very surprised or disappointed, and when you do something right – something really intelligent like remembering your door key or getting on the right train – everyone is overwhelmingly proud of you. Low expectations can be quite liberating.

For example this morning I dropped a parcel and a couple of letters off at the post office. I then mooched across the road to the tabaccheria where I was queuing for bus tickets when suddenly there was a tap on my shoulder – it was the bloke from the post office, holding out one of the cards I’d given him. I realised that in a stroke of genius I had forgotten to put the address on. In England this would have been the cue for much apologising and explanation but there was no way my language skills could stretch to it. I settled for “I regret. I forgot the address.”

I then had to grit my teeth through a friendly lecture, in which he patiently revealed that “if you don’t put an address on the envelope, it won’t get there.” But I could see he didn’t think I was a moron, just an innocent foreign babe in the dark scary woods of the international postal service. I flashed him a grateful smile, and with a friendly wave he headed back to the post office. He had the warm glowing feeling of having done a good deed – I got two seconds of humiliation in exchange for not having sent a birthday card to nowhere – everyone was a winner.

Of course I have to add a special PS – when would a London post office worker ever even cross a room to help you, let alone a whole street…

Codgerology

I love market day, it’s one of the few things about Italian country life that hasn’t changed at all since I was a kid, especially the day in Small Town 1, the only town within walking distance of where I live (internet reception: nil). It’s a market untroubled by knockoff DVDs or mobile phone accessory stalls, preferring to concentrate instead on the widest selection of tablecloths and kitchenware known to man, boxy shoulder padded blouses for elderly women, fruit, cheese, salami and agricultural machinery. And it’s here that I see one of my favourite examples of Italian wildlife: The Codger.

When he was alive, my grandfather was a codger par excellence. The moment he stepped off the plane from London, after kissing the ground and downing half a bottle of red wine that is, he’d kit himself out in the regulation codger uniform: bellywarmer trousers that would make even Simon Cowell shrink away, vest and/or shirt, braces (Nonno’s were a colourful red and green) and a trilby hat of dubious age and condition.

If you have a huge roman nose, no hair and no teeth, that helps complete the look perfectly. You then deposit yourself in the same bar you’ve been going to since 1927 with all your cronies, and proceed to argue in dialect, play cards for high steaks (or salami, or coppa, or other meat products) and gesticulate wildly at everyone around you. I have no idea what they talk about, but I think a lot of it involves the war, ogling young women and how nobody these days has any respect.

But I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently. The old-style Codger is dying out, to be replaced by Codger v2.0. These men have no respect for their traditional heritage. They flaunt themselves in polo-shirts and designer shades pushed up onto their heads. Their trousers, instead of skimming high over the pasta-belly, skirt under it. Some of them even have the effrontery to wear denim shorts.

I propose the founding of a SNPCI – Societa Nazionale per la Preservazione del Codger Italiano. This will involve special Codger Fridays in which every man over 65 is legally obliged to wear a vest and braces, tax incentives for people to let their teeth go, and a special discount on hats. Believe me, there are weirder laws in Italy.

But sadly I don’t think it’s going to catch on, and I can imagine years into the future when the boys I swooned over as a teenager become Codgers v3.0. They’ll still be gathered outside the same bar, but instead of trilby hats and toothlessness, the look will be all about wrinkly celtic armband tattoos, battered birkenstocks and gadgety watches. Occasionally they’ll break into an old-time tune: sono il Firestarter, twisted Firestarter and sigh with the nostalgia of it. Meanwhile young Italian twentysomethings will file past them on the way to the trendier bar in the square, shake their heads and swear: “I’ll never end up like that.”

A scary kind of freedom

I’m sitting on the balcony at the moment, watching the last glimmer of yellow on the hillsides opposite my house, flapping my hands pointlessly at the mosquitoes and playing my favourite twilight nature game: “bird or bat?” This morning I filed my last piece of copy until I come home. And although I am sure there will be questions on that bit of copy, the intensity of scrabbling around for phone lines and internet connections and case studies stops here.

Today I wrote an email letting someone down, saying I couldn’t do work I had hoped to be able to do. I still feel a tight ping of panic in my head as I think about it. I wonder if that person will ever employ me again. I wonder if word will get around and I will get a Reputation for Unreliability. But it can’t be avoided. I’ve realised that it’s virtually impossible to freelance from here and make a profit. Reluctantly I have to let it go before it kills me and hope and pray I can get plenty of work when I come home.

So now it’s just me, the scenery and the Manuscript. And an ever dwindling purse of monies, of course. There’s no backing out now.