Diario d’un Cuore Spezzato
(Diary of a Broken Heart)
I have never been to Tuscany. Not ‘real’ Tuscany. But then I have never had my heart broken either.
So I have run away, from everyone and everywhere I know, to the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. If you can call the heart of Chianti Classico country nowhere.
And not just to its heart, but to its head. My retreat is on the estate of the Ricasoli family. As in Barone Ricasoli. As in the man who created the original ‘formula’ (as it is somewhat unromantically referred to amongst those who wear their stained teeth like a badge of courage) for Chianti.
In his honour, as I write, I am drinking a bottle of something so serious I can’t see through it.
Friday
As I leave Venice at six on a soft pink morning, I have the Canale Grande entirely to myself almost all the way to the station. It is an extraordinary experience. I break another habit of a lifetime and take pictures. Which makes me feel a bit like a tourist, so I stop.
Even Santa Lucia is quiet.
I hate travelling by train in Britain. But here I am taking a journey from Santa Lucia to Santa Maria Novella … how could I hate that? OK it might only be the names that make the difference, but, yes, I am that shallow.
My Eurostar fills and empties in turn as we pass through Mestre, Padova and Bologna. Only the pre-recorded, ersatz friendliness of the voice telling us before and after every stop to “take your rubbish with you in the bags provided because a clean train is a nice train” grates.
She is right, of course. But her well-bred, dispassionate tones have something of my ex about them, and by the time we get past Rovigo I am hearing her words in my head as “I can’t tell you how much happier I am now I’m not going out with you ” and “I don’t understand why you are punishing everybody by refusing to be friends”.
I wish I’d brought kd laing and an iPod.
Of course, I don’t actually have an iPod. And music makes me cry at the moment.
Almost everything makes me cry at the moment.
I start reading the Da Vinci Code. Page 10 and I am not in tears yet. This is very good. I fall asleep.
Florence Santa Maria Novella is a humid human bearpit and I drag my luggage across to the carpark and get out as quickly as I can.
I have begged a lift, but the tiny twisty roads take longer to negotiate than the hour my friend has allowed for and, as he has to get back to work in the evening, I find myself deposited on the top of a hill with a church (closed) a trattoria (closed) and a tiny shop (open).
This is the village of San Regolo. You know that this hilltop is the village because there is more than one building on it. But not many more.
Through beaded curtains and behind an array of salami, Fabrizio is all Tuscan. He points out my retreat to me. It is on the top of the next hill. Oh to be a crow.
He surveys my luggage and his luxuriant eyebrows dance up and down his head like those of the cartoon man in the Dolmio commercials. I fire his enthusiasm for helping me to a further lift by buying 30 euros worth of his groceries (not very competitively priced, it has to be said but then, Fabrizio has no competition).
The charming wife of someone called Vincenzo arrives in a Fiat and a fifteen minute rollercoaster, half a mile of precipitous gravel and some simpatico conversation about the health of my Venetian friend to whose house I am retreating later, I am on my own hilltop.
It is like nowhere I have ever been. I look around me and it seems I can see forever. And it is beautiful. So, of course, I cry.
I wander around my hilltop in hot sun, even though it is by now five o’clock. Things crackle underfoot as I pass mulberry trees thick with berries that look disconcertingly like fat white slugs. But they are delicious. And go unexpectedly well with my local red (Rosso della Rocca: Fabrizio’s suggestion, 5 euros). There is a huge fig tree, flopping under the weight of its fruit, sadly unripe, I notice, and consider poaching … or making chutney …
There are exuberant eruptions of sage and rosemary, great lumps of lavender, humming with the fattest bees I have ever seen, little artichokes like giant thistles, each purple tuft alive with happy buggy crawly things, supermodel tall-thin stalks of wild fennel wafting in the breeze and grapes and grapes and grapes.
There must be twenty hectares of vine in this part of Italy, for every human being.
Does it for me. I don’t want human beings.
Although as the sky darkens, I begin to wonder. I am a city girl. Always have been. Big cities.
I have never, in my life, spent time in the countryside. Let alone on my own.
And now I am miles from … well from anything and anywhere and anyone.
I know it sounds odd, but the idea of that has always made me feel unbearably claustrophobic.
Claustrophobia, you see, is not a fear of small spaces, it is a fear of not being able to get out. And I have always needed to know I can get out when I want to.
I was always claustrophobic about relationships too, till this … till that one.
But I didn’t come here to brood. Well, not at least until after I have unpacked.
My retreat is a long, low stone building, a capanna, set into the hill. The ‘big house’ is being reroofed by the owners. Renovations are progressing in the time-honoured Italian manner. And boy, do the Italians honour time! The one month’s work is now in its third. The crane for the roof has lost a wheel. The electricity isn’t working any more. And the inside of this stunning old Podere makes No 1 The High Street, New Orleans look like Grosvenor House.
But my capanna is wonderful – warm and dusty, tables and beds draped in gloriously coloured figured velvets, a wonderful miscellany of the kind of furniture you wish could talk and tell you its tale, and windows festooned with enough cobwebs to make Miss Haversham feel at home.
Maybe I am become its Miss Haversham.
There is no phoneline, no music, no radio and a television that appears to be permanently stuck on standby. My God, this house is becoming a metaphor for my life!!!
But, I discover, on my hilltop I am not alone.
And anyone who rhapsodises about the silence of the countryside is either deaf or unconscious.
Talking of which, another glass of red, I think.
And supper.
Fabrizio has provided me with a fat blob of mozzarella di bufala and some properly ugly tomatoes. I chew a chunk of a local salami, cunningly mined with black peppercorns as I poke around the kitchen and shriek with joy as the dusty thing in the corner that looks like it holds petrol turns out to be quarter full of olive oil. Thick, green, grassy, fruity, blood temperature olive oil. Made here. And I mean here. I can see the olive trees from my window. My crusty tuscan loaf absorbs about a quarter pint of the stuff before I finish eating.
I read somewhere that olive oil has been discovered to have painkilling properties. Bring ‘em on.
Where was I – oh yes – the silence of the countryside. Bollocks.
My first evening here has been loud with crickets, rustling with all manner of things in the dry grass, raucous with swallows, fluttering with more moths than I have seen in my whole life till now and buzzing with absolutely the largest flying beetles to be seen anywhere outside the special effects department for Spielberg’s “Planet of the Giant Flying Beetles”.
They call them Christmas Beetles here. I bloody well don’t want to find one in my stocking. I admit to spending quite some time trotting around under my vine covered trellis flapping my arms wildly and shouting “go away!”, before realising that they are actually harmless.
And rather beautiful in a giant, antlered, threatening, beetley kind of way.
As the sun goes down – and here a tramonto really is tra i monti – it is all so heartstirringly beautiful that I wish nothing more than that we were together here. Oops. There is no we.
I think I frighten the beetles when I cry, because they go away.
And I carry on reading the Da Vinci Code.
One of the reasons I have this wonderful place is that I have agreed to film the wild boar that come to eat mulberries in the garden late on July afternoons. The rest of the year they come at night. But in July, the lure of warm ripe late afternoon mulberries is just too great and whole families troop along and eat.
The renovations have rather put a dent in the attraction of the garden for the average boar family. And the workmen only left today.
I sit and wait. But the boar don’t come.
Until the black of night. Just as I am finishing the Da Vinci Code (Mary Magdalen did it.) And all around my long low house I hear snuffling and grunting. They sound so human! I press my nose against the window and get a face full of cobwebs.
I turn out the two lights that work. It is very, very, very dark.
I cry. And fall asleep.
Saturday
My first morning on the hill. Crickets, swallows, strange things in the grass and stranger things in the air are all up and at it as I take my orange juice out under the vine. Little lizards scuttle huffily off the already hot stones as I re-amaze myself with my surroundings. I wander, cocooned in solitude and say hello again to figs and mulberries, lavender and fennel. I eat a peach of Roald Dahlian proportions and then indulge my inner sybarite by running a bath and flinging under the pouring water a bouquet of fresh lavender flowers and rosemary sprigs from outside the window. The perfume is intoxicating. Jo Malone eat your beautifully packaged heart out. And I have so much fun finding little bits of lavender in unexpected places for the rest of the day!
I decide the time has come to pop (I use the word loosely. To be honest, wholly inaccurately) back to the village, having forgotton to buy coffee and being in need of more Rosso.
I feel quite excited as I set off down the precipitous gravelly potholed path. The sun most definitely has its hat on and I suppose I should have one too. But I never go out in the sun, so I don’t have a hat … or a bottle of Factor 30. I have applied a little Superdrug moisturiser. It has C0-Enzyme Q and something else that is meant to erase your wrinkles in three weeks (well, according to the label, 84% of the 150 women who tried it out said that they thought that it did, so it has to be doing something useful). By the time I reach the bottom of my hill I can feel myself pinking. By the time I am half way up the next hill I am red. With exertion, though, not sun.
Who needs a Stairmaster here, I think, and push on up the 25% (there is a helpful sign to tell you it is so) gradient. I genuinely believe I can feel my thighs sleeking as I climb.
I stop, of course. Twice. Pretending to admire the view. Then, just around the bend I see a building … a sign … San Regolo. I feel I know how Amundsen must have felt when he reached the North Pole. Only hotter, of course.
In Fabrizio’s shop I am greeted like an old friend. A vivacious dark haired girl wants to know how I got on all on my own in the countryside for the first time …
I tell the entire shop my life has changed overnight. I almost get a round of applause. I buy wine, papardelle, coffee and a tiny bottle of something made from Balsamic Vinegar and Chilli paste. I buy warm beer, batteries for the remote control (in case the television could be persuaded out of standby) , a packet of something crunchy, rather enticingly called Charlie, and set off back down (and up) the road.
A sunbaked hour later, I am so calm and warm and full of fresh bread, aged parmesan and young rosso that the revelation that, because of the lack of electricity, the phone line in the big house is not working, leaving me without e-mail, somehow fails to elicit panic.
It should be confessed at this point that there are people in my professional life who are unaware that I have simply run away. They are under the impression that I am still in deepest Shepherds Bush, writing features on the arts, updating a guidebook on London and editing two television documentaries. They, severally, look forward to my e-mailed progress on all the above.
Regularly.
Now I seriously begin considering how long I might afford to stay here if and or when they all fire me. And I really like the idea, despite the fact that the new batteries have livened up the remote, which now has a red twinkly light, but do nothing for the television.
My reverie is interrupted by Vincenzo – he of the wife with the Fiat.
Vincenzo exudes the kind of testosterone-fuelled Italian-ness that makes you wonder what feminism really thinks it is doing. He is as warm as the sun we stand under together. He brings me a bicycle. And commiserates about the employment-endangering lack of e-mail connection. Although I can tell at a glance that Vincenzo has more Italian things to do with his time than bother about getting online.
He says I must come to his house and use his telephone line. He points out his house and, incredibly, it seems to be in the valley between my hill and the next, in the opposite direction from the village. Almost worth visiting just to see a house that is not on a hill.
He is sad that the boar have not been coming till night time and suggests putting out some food for them … “Fruit?” I ask. “Bread” he shrugs.
He goes. He is supposed to be draining the swimming pool down at the end of the drive, but the pump won’t work. We are now inextricably linked in our troubles, both left high and, in his case, undry because of the lack of electricity.
Vincenzo has phoned “un tecnico”. Neither of us is overly hopeful.
I take the bike for a spin, almost dislocating myself at the hip with an over-enthusiastic swing of thigh over crossbar. I say spin. It is more of a nervous wobble through the gravel down my hill and then a futile foray at the climb up to the village. I dismount as the gradient gets serious. I realise I don’t want to meet people that much, and wobble off back home.
My house welcomes me. I open the red and pootle round under the mulberry trees scattering bribes for boar. If they don’t come before night this time, there are about a hundred other species sharing my garden that will delight in the bread and pears with which I have tried to entice them.
As the sun starts to pink and dip I lurk in the loggia, camera in hand, the spirit of David Attenborough within me, my glass of rosso at my side.
An hour and a half later, convinced that David can never have had it this hard, I give up. Bored by the lack of boar, one might say.
I do something creative with the papardelle, garlic, onion, the oil and my little bottle from Fabrizio’s.
Were it not for the fact that I have promised my heart it will never have to do it again, I would say it was love at first bite with Signor Mazzelli’s Balsamic Pepper Sauce. I am so enamoured I have it on peaches for dessert.
And sneak a fingerful after coffee.
I am now reading something called Food of Love. Jamie Oliver apparently loved it, but I read it nevertheless. It is set in Rome. And is Cyrano de Bergerac with food instead of words. Cyrano’s is a story which has always reduced me to emotional magma. Unrequited, unspoken love.
My tears make my sunburn sting.
There is what sounds like an old man coughing outside in the garden. He’s wheezing a bit.
A dirty old Tuscan voyeur, eavesdropping on the townie on the hill?
“Scusi!” I say, I hope, imperiously. “Buona sera!” As I head out the door, I catch just the shape of my dirty old Tuscan. A big daddy boar heads off into the long grass and olive trees.
“Oh I’m sorry!” I exclaim, before realising how pathetic that must sound. Especially to a wild Tuscan daddy boar. Although he did, it seemed to me, squeal like a girl as he went.
I finish the book. It has a happy ending. I have more red.
I am sufficiently embittered by the good fortune of the fictional Roman cook to plunge straight into the last of my 3 for £18 airport purchases, Ben Elton’s Past Mortem.
The boars are snorking and the bugs are humming as I go to sleep.
Sunday
God I make good coffee!! The sun is shining and I am feeling so calm, so peaceful, I have to laugh out loud. I am in a bubble, hermetically sealed from real life. It feels good.
I wash some clothes, heavy and grey with masonry dust from lurking in the loggia. There is nothing of a dirt removing nature to be seen except some stuff you use for glasswear to keep it sparkling in a dishwasher. Fabrizio isn’t open today, so I squirt it into the dispenser of the washing machine and hope for the best.
My clothes don’t exactly sparkle, but neither do they seem to suffer any ill effects, and they smell wonderfully of lemon when they emerge from the spin cycle.
Vincenzo arrives to have a poke around the primordial soup that is the swimming pool at the end of the drive. We spot several almost certainly undiscovered life forms. He offers to take me to his telephone line and we set off, making Italian small talk and big dust clouds in the gravel road. Vincenzo notices I am happier. I tell him I don’t think I can go back to London. He smiles. Let’s face it, why would I? He stops suddenly to point out a short cut to the village. “15 minuti”, he says. “Attenzione agli viperi “he smiles encouragingly.
Vincenzo’s house smells of family and lunch. But his phone line has a strange three pin, old-Italian connection, and my hopes of connecting with the World Wide Anything are dashed. Vincenzo searches the house for a connection like mine, but to no avail.
We return to the hill, via a place where Vincenzo’s wife says she has met an entire family of boar in the early morning.
We drive past a little hotel and I wonder aloud if they might have an internet connection. Vincenzo drops me off and I go into damsel in distress (with laptop) mode. The young man with the spectacles and the nervous look could not have been friendlier.
When the connection in one of the rooms fails to work, he plugs me in in the hotel’s main office. I send my features and download 89 e-mails. I am delighted to find that at least The Cotswold Company still love me.
I walk slowly back to my hill through endless vineyards, having promised the charming young man I would dine there that evening, my custom in quiet times being by way of recompense for his help.
The giant space wraps itself comfortingly around me. I am amazed to find I am enjoying … luxuriating in … growing to crave being on my own.
Were I a leopard, round about now I would be becoming striped.
Then, as I stretch in the sun a figure appears and introduces herself as Elisabetta. She lives on the next hill and has come, bearing a bottle of Brolio – the Chianti of this very estate. We talk, we look for evidence of boar, and we compare restaurant notes from Venice to Rome. She is most perplexed about my television and abruptly disappears, returning twenty minutes later with a cute widescreen portable. We plug it in and notice she has forgotten the aerial. She tuts and disappears for another twenty minutes.
While she is gone my Arts Editor calls to say he is a feature short for the magazine this week. Of course I oblige. I have till tomorrow morning to file copy.
I am his perfect editorial fuckbuddy. I’m good, I’m fast and I don’t get complicated about being hit on at the last moment because someone he really likes has let him down.
It is how I live my entire life. My father tells me I have low self-esteem. I prefer to think of it as not getting ideas above my station. Well look what happens when I do! Although the misery that so devastated me in London seems to be turning out to be a force for great good.
Elisabetta returns, we drink Brolio and we talk. 
She returns my solitude to me at about six thirty and I walk my circuit, drink her wine, eat some of the boars’ mulberries, write some copy, shower and cycle off up the hill to dinner. I don’t even wobble as I bounce over the potholes up the hill.
I don’t, I realise as I get there, really want to meet people. But dinner is fine, the sunset splendid and at least the lone couple beside me didn’t realise I wasn’t Italian (always carry a local newspaper). I don’t talk to them because a) he is drinking Budweiser b) she is drinking Soave and c) they are cooingly discussing their wedding plans. My father nearly blows my cover by calling halfway through my Risotto con Zafferano, Gorgonzola e Salsicce. But I bark “pronto!” into my Nokia, shrug a “Scusi” at the lovebirds and take dad off to the far side of the terrace for a chat.
I feel a huge sense of relief as I cycle back, racing the sunset like some sort of inverted vampire.
The bike and I bounce along the track to the big house and across the grass to my home.
Only after I get there do I stop to wonder what would have happened had the boar been dining on mulberries tonight. Actually I don’t know, but I feel sure that ‘mad, emotionally scarred person full of risotto and red wine doing downhill racing on a borrowed mountain bike’ might have alarmed them more than they would have alarmed me. Or maybe not.
Despite popular myth, I don’t have tusks.
I stand in the boarless outside as the darkness deepens (and my goodness does that happen fast when it happens!) and let it wrap around me.
I have never felt like this. And I like it so much I dread already how much I will miss it when it is gone. I wonder if I should leave now, before I like it too much. I never did agree, you see, with Tennyson that it is “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”. And I most certainly don’t now. Under the circs.
I drink Brolio dregs and find Verdi’s Othello on TV. Love killed by illfounded jealousy. I open another bottle.
I write till midnight and decide to edit in the morning.
I have terrible dreams. Probably the gorgonzola in the risotto, I reason.
Monday
Amazingly, what I wrote last night still makes sense under the vine and over a cup of my finest breakfast coffee.
I tweak and sit and tweak and wander round the hilltop.
I cycle all the way back to the little hotel, but the non Italian manageress is here today. The kind of woman who makes you think that perhaps immigration could be a little choosier with their visas.
I do not, needless to say, enjoy the use of their phoneline.
Bouncing back down the dusttrack, I realise I am not worrying.
I then have to consider the possibility that I have been given a brain transplant in the night. I have a panic button with the sensitivity of a nymphomaniac’s nipple. And I find myself equally unworried about the 2,000 words waiting for a way to Edinburgh before lunch, and the fact that I am doing 30mph downhill on gravel and a bike with less than enthusiastic brakes.
I reach home safely and console myself with a glass of red and the last of Fabrizio’s parmesan.
One thing I do know.
I am out of both bread and decent nibbling cheese and so I head once more for Fabrizio’s, taking Vincenzo’s shortcut. I’ll think about the communication problem over lunch. I am halfway down a precipitous dried mudslide when I remember Vincenzo’s warning about vipers.
I gaze at my flip flops. £4.95 in the Muji sale and so not what the smart viper-avoider is wearing this season.
I trot on with my eyes glued to the ground, wishing I had any idea what a viper looks like.
I pass through field and wood and every step I take something moves in the undergrowth. After five minutes I begin to like this too. And – sadly – begin to talk to my unseen friends. In English. OK, perhaps I should have taken the Prozac.
I drink Lemon Soda with Fabrizio, discuss the glories of the countryside, and bemoan the brevity of my stay.
He announces that I must come back in September, when the ‘profumo di vendemmia’ is in the air. The grape harvest. Oh yes. Oh yes. It seems churlish not, yet again, to spend an egregious amount of money on very little, so I do. I cop a look at his paper, which purports to be the Nazionale, but is in fact, only the Siena section and set off home. Oops! Forgot to ask if he had any bright ideas about e-mail. Never mind. My way through the woods this time is taken with the confidence of a countrywoman. I am sure I’ll know a viper if I see one.
I don’t.
But I do meet Vincenzo, still worrying about the swimming pool and muttering darkly about the non appearance of the tecnico. We stand and shrug and smile and he offers to take me back to Florence when I leave. His wife has obviously mentioned the amount of bagaglio I packed into her Fiat.
I am delighted to accept and depressed to be going. And try to get him to say my name again. No one has ever made it sound as rollingly, curlingly sexy as Vincenzo. Can’t imagine anyone ever will.
Mid afternoon I really can’t be bothered to blight my day worrying about sending the feature to Edinburgh. I phone it in. On my mobile. Well, no landline because the electricity … you know.
Twenty five of your English pounds on their way to O2.
Hey … think how many extra minutes in my sun that got me!!
I stay out on my terrace extra late, soaking up what is left of my aloneness.
I lurk behind bushes and in doorways, peering hopefully at anything that might harbour a boar. I shake mulberries down before their time. And I cut more lavender and take a bath while sending welcoming vibes to the boar.
The boar are as scornful of my longing for their presence as you know who.
As I float among the lavender like a cellulite-ridden version of the Millais painting, and ponder that fact, I don’t actually cry.
And the boar, of course, don’t actually come.
I wonder if my one remaining tomato might up the porcine ante …
I have a glass of red as I consider.
Later, I watch a little bit of that film where Tom Cruise is a lawyer who gets in with a bad, bad firm. Dubbed into Italian, naturally. I have to switch channels during the kissing bits with his wife (can’t watch kissing nowadays. Makes me go all funny. And not ha ha), but it strikes me that Tom sounds pretty damned good in Italian. Gene Hackman does too. None of the other actors can take the proper machismo of the Italian tones. But Tom really rises in my estimation. He should consider learning the language. Could put paid to all those rumours about …
The boar don’t come at all. Or if they do, they wait until I am asleep.
TUESDAY
My last day. My last breakfast. My last morning sun.
I have to go to the village one more time.
I leave early and discover that being first down the scorcciatoia means that as you walk you are gently wrapped in the cobwebs that hang across the path from bush to tree and back. It is like being the human stick in some strange organic candyfloss machine. I start to feel quite guilty as an entire night’s work for a hillside of arachnids is devastated by my desire for the fastest way to a bottle of red and something nice for supper.
Fabrizio and his clientele are charmingly consoling about my immanent departure. I buy Fabrizio clean out of the balsamic’n’chilli stuff, have a caffe corretto Grappa and depart with a cheery ‘a settembre !’ , which makes me feel much better.
I distract myself by cleaning.
I sweep chunks of dust and grit off beds and sofas, clear the windows of an extravagance of cobwebs. The spiders of Chianti Country should really get the President’s Award For Industry. If only other Italian workers were one tenth as quick and conscientious as they, Vincenzo would be pumping away at the swimming pool, I would have saved £25 and the big house would be all lit up like a Christmas tree.
I wash floors and make full use of that nice lemon scented stuff which is really a lot more impressive than the manufacturer’s instructions would lead you to believe.
I have Pecorino Stagionata with Coppo Colla for lunch. Fresh bread and great oil and good wine. OK, I DO dip into the chilli. It is great on peaches. And fingers.
I do everything I can to make the day last. But it starts to fade and I read something small by Dorothy L Sayers to cheer myself up (Ben was OK, but clichéd and cheap, as always). My goodness that woman wrote well. I have Lord Peter and Bunter in the room with me as the sun goes down.
I sigh and go to pack. All is zipped and buckled. All neatly stacked at the bottom of my bed.
When.
From out of the bushes that divide my kitchen view from the vineyards comes a snork. And then a squeal. And then a boar. My big boar. And then what looks like three mummy boar and about six babies. I practically swallow my tonsils in an endeavour not to make a noise. I sprint round and peer out of the windows onto the lawn. The Family Boar are trotting and snuffling under the big mulberry tree where I spread my pears and bread. So my sacrifice was not in vain! I lurch down the passageway and unearth my video camera. The settings are all wrong and the microphone isn’t linked up but I turn over. I ooze myself out of the front doors and onto the terrace. And the big boar jerks to a standstill and stares straight at me. I freeze. She (for it is a she) takes a pawky step forward and waves her head. I have read somewhere that they can’t see very well. But they use hearing and smell. I curse Estee Lauder and pray I am sufficiently downwind. I stare at Big Mama as she stares at me and then she gives up and starts trotting and snuffling and nibbling again. I have won a stare out with a wild boar.
The family is never still for a second under the mulberries. And boy do these things move. They are nimble and twisty and turny, like the horses the picadors use in the bullring.
They are not as pretty, it has to be said. Even the babies aren’t exactly pretty. But it is really something for a townie to be that close to a wild, wild animal. More than something, it is a privilege. I wish I spoke boar. They talk all the time. Little squeals and grunts and puffs. They hurtle backwards and forwards and then suddenly someone obviously says (in boar) “right chaps, andiamo” and off they go, galloping across the lawn and back into the undergrowth. A few black backs amongst the long grass and they are gone.
I can’t believe it. Did they wait deliberately till my last night? And just come to say hello and goodbye? How did they know I had dismantled my camera?
I am, I freely admit, all of a tingle.
Sleep would be difficult anyway on my last night – although Vincenzo is picking me up at 7am and I can’t be late – but this makes it almost impossible.
WEDNESDAY
I am up at 5.30am to have my final coffee, put bedclothes in the lavatrice and wander round the Garden of Eden from which I am about to be cast. I go and look around under the mulberry tree. Bread and pears have gone. And a few little ‘deposits’ have been left. I grin.
I say ciao to the things in the grass and the fig tree and everything else I can think of. I look forward to those figs in September.
I leave sprigs of lavender on all the pillows in the house and a new packet of coffee in the fridge.
I stack my outrageous mountain of empties by the back of the house and scatter the very last of my bread for the boar, now I know they are here.
I used to think that being grown up would be like this – doing things you can hardly bear to bring yourself do because you know you have to. Even though your mum doesn’t make you.
I wish my mum could have known this place.
But my dad will. I am bringing him in September.
“Let’s hope there will be electricity then”, says Vincenzo pointedly, as he loads my bags into his car.
The first hour of countryside on the way to Florence is cloaked in rolling mist. I am glad because it means I can’t see what I am leaving behind.
Somehow I talk to Vincenzo for two whole hours. I didn’t know I knew that much Italian. Soon, I won’t.
Florence is still a bearpit. But I eat tripe, download 189 e-mails, walk round the flesh-fish-cheese-fruit’n’veg pots of the Mercato Centrale and get back on the Eurostar.
I don’t know what I will do in London. I can’t bear to go back. To the remnants of my life … the not very nice orange creams in the bottom of my personal bag of Revels.
As the Eurostar hurtles Venice-wards I being to plan my big move away from London. I feel better immediately.
I’ll run away.
I’ve never run away before.
But then I have never had my heart broken either.
