Telephone line—talk to Roberto, architect
| TO DO GENERAL | WHEN | BY |
|---|---|---|
| Italian residency—talk to Furio about deadline | ||
| Find out about language schools in Italy | ||
| Do a proper budget | ||
| Place to get married | ||
| Import car | ||
| Check on stuff shipped from LA | ||
| Buy desktop computer? | ||
| Sell bike | ||
| Write Italian will | ||
| Write English will | ||
| Do at least an hour of Italian every day |
Work was due to start ‘pretty soon’ on our Italian house. In Italian that seemed to mean anything from ‘this afternoon’ to ‘some time next year’. But we’d found a builder to do the work and an architect / project manager who was going to keep an eye on him as well as coordinate electricians, plumbers, carpenters, septic tank installers, all those folk. It all seemed to be very specialized—with particular experts, ‘skilled artisans’ we liked to think, to do one specific tiny thing, rather than a single gun-slinging cowboy who often typifies the Brit norm.
As for work, we still had very vague ideas about what we were going to do. We knew we’d make olive oil and we hoped we’d be able to sell it to shops in the UK. But neither of us had any background in marketing or retail or food production or really anything relevant at all. But we somehow hoped that because we were determined and accustomed to learning fast, because we had a hunger for new knowledge and a mortal fear of failure, that we’d somehow manage not only to get by but become successful and rich. Hoping to have our optimism corroborated, we decided to ask some people we knew for advice. An old family friend of Jason, who set up the chocolate company Green & Black’s, advised us that the olive oil industry is notorious for its deadly combination of low margins and high levels of competition—basically because any old Tom, Dick or Harry thinks they can chance their arm at it. He suggested we would need something earth-shatteringly unique in order to set ourselves apart from the myriad competition. And with that he wished us the best of luck.
One day I came home from work to discover that Jason had found us an olive tree pruning course. It always amazes me the things that he manages to find out—he would have made an excellent sleuth. On this occasion he’d unearthed a three-day course on ‘The Theory and Practice of Pruning Established Olive Trees’ in a church hall in a village less than an hour from our Le Marche future home. Hearing this information while drinking a cup of tea in a flat in central London, the murmur of traffic below, felt something like a miracle. We decided to sign up before the mirage vanished.
We didn’t yet have the full medical history of the olive grove but we knew that no real work had been done on it for a good decade. There’d been a bit of harvesting here and there—well, who wouldn’t take a few olives from orphan trees for a bit of free oil? But it would have taken more of an altruist to get out there with secateurs and saws and actually prune. So a pruning course was essential, both for the radical facelift that the grove needed, but also for us—to get our heads out of textbooks and into wellies and practical work. Encouragingly, we’d read that olive trees are generally very resilient and that despite the years of neglect, we should be able to get the grove back on track pretty quickly.
A week later we were in Le Marche. We’d decided to stay in a bed and breakfast near Loro Piceno as our house was still missing a few fundamentals like water and walls. The B&B was basic but functional. The ‘breakfast’ element consisted of a fruit tart presented on day one, and expected to do for the week. Hooray, we said, this place is definitely not Tuscany.
The drive from Loro Piceno to San Severino Marche where the course was to be held was one of those really sickly ones with too tight curves and pointy tufts of hills that make your stomach roll over, much to giggles from Rosie in the back. We were heading off to sign in, the day before the course proper. Italy still works by nature of this face-to-face exchange. It is normal to sign up for something like this, or even just to book tickets for a show and still have to physically show up. They haven’t (yet) developed our fixation for the ease of the telephone and e-mail and I suppose it is simply, admirably (?), because they aren’t in such a fret about constantly saving time. This sort of Italian habit is a good example of the sort of thing that is charming when one is on holiday and distinctly less so when one is not. For now we were still on holiday—sort of, a working one—so could swallow it, but rancour mightn’t be far off.
The concession they make to the need to communicate remotely is that fantastically archaic device the fax machine, which is still ubiquitous in Italy. I hate them, they are such rubbish and outdated I would rather have a pigeon appear. Even that word ‘fax’, ‘facsimile’, conjures images of the ’80s and of secretaries with big shiny shoulder pads and electric blue mascara.
For the pruning course, run by a local agricultural association, even the fax wasn’t an option, so here we were.
We found the place, at least we thought it was the place, quite easily. It was a completely empty church hall next to a completely empty, in fact locked, church. We were early, that is to say we were on time, so decided to keep the faith and wait a bit. Rosie was in one of those kangaroo pouch things on my front, constantly trying to put my finger in her mouth.
After about quarter of an hour, a very, very old man arrived. He was about 4 feet 10 and his trousers were on a battle against gravity, which might have explained his shuffle. It looked so improbable to us that he was there for the same reason we were, and to him it looked so improbable that we were there for the
