Talk talk turds

I woke up this morning and was immediately thrown into the fiery hell of having to deal with Talk Talk, our Internet providers, who, of late, have stopped providing us with our Internet. 

The situation has been getting progressively worse; it used to be that we'd suddenly drop offline half way through our favourite show on iplayer, but the day before we went to Italy, the broadband stopped working altogether and it hasn't yet come back to us. 

At ten o'clock this morning, therefore, I found myself talking to call centres, first in Manilla, then in Mumbai, slowly losing the will to live, primarily because every time someone went off to "check" something and promised to call me back, they'd do no such thing. An hour later, I'd call back to discover whoever I was talking to before hadn't made any notes about my call, and we'd be forced to start everything again. One bloke had me on all fours taking a screwdriver to my rooter!

I'm afraid I hate foreign call centres, not because I'm racist, but because those who work in them have very little concept of what it means to be British, which, when you're stressed, can tip you over the edge. They speak, on the whole, fairly  good English, but there are few shared values and little (much-needed) understanding of the geography, humour or basic set up of our nation. One chap today, for example, kept telling me (because the Talk Talk people couldn't come in person to fix the problem for a week) that I could try "getting a local technician to come to the house." "What kind of technician?" I asked, "an Internet technician" he said, "where will I find one of them?" I asked. Silence. Then more crappy guitar music on a two-minute loop, whilst he put me on hold to find out... 

When the conversation went into its third cycle I demanded to speak to someone in the UK - a request which, bizarrely, was granted. The relief was extraordinary. Finally I was talking to a person who could list the various shops where I could buy replacement parts, and tell me the prices I ought to expect to pay for them. It shouldn't have made a difference, but it did. He even sympathised when I complained about the music. " I don't mind muzak" I said, "but when the muzak loops after two minutes, and goes back to the start again, it's like descending into hell in a never-ending lift... The only thing which is worse than muzak, is muzak which doesn't have the decency to end!" He laughed and understood and the anger drifted away...

If anyone high up in a multi-national company finds themselves reading this blog, I make one plea; however expensive it proves to be, please bring the service industry back to the UK. 

350 years ago, Pepys heard on the grapevine that Sir William Penn was returning to London from Ireland. This was bad news for two reasons; firstly, Pepys didn't care much for Penn, and secondly, because his adversary was away, Pepys had started squatting in Penn's house - with piles of his possessions - whilst his own house was being renovated. 

All of this meant that Pepys had to find himself alternative lodgings, which he did, on Tower Hill. His maid, Jane, was sent to Penn's house to "sleep with" Pepys' belongings, and no doubt explain to Penn, when he arrived, what on earth had happened to his house whilst he was away. 

Still, the good news was that Pepys did his end of month accounts and found himself to be worth 686 pounds. His new oaths were working; he was making, and saving money, and was well on the way to making his first thousand - a figure you can probably times by at least 100 in modern parlance - all kept in silver pieces in a metal chest! These were the days before banks, remember...

Leaving Italy

We're on a plane heading north along the Italian Adriatic coast. Periodically, one of the Ryan Air air crew members attempts to sell us something in an incomprehensible accent. I wish they'd just shut up so the passangers can enter a trance to block out the hell of the experience. At the moment they're walking down the aisles trying up flog us scrunched-up copies of The Sun newspaper, which have plainly been read (and paid for) already by the passengers who were on this plane before us. Earlier on we were invited to buy lottery tickets, the proceeds of which "could" help children's charities. 

We're currently experiencing rather bad turbulence over The Dolomites and my palms are sweating.  

It felt incredibly sad to leave Italy. We spent the day on the beach once again, floating, swimming, eating and knitting, said our goodbyes to all our new friends and, of course, Julie, and  that was that. Holiday over. 

As we left the beach, a glorious dusky-pink sunset glowed in the Western sky, whilst the moon, rising in the south, cast a glorious silvery reflection on the surface of the sea. It was, we're told, the last day of the high Italian summer. The weather is due to break before the end of tomorrow. 

Every morning we took ourselves to a little pasticceria in Pineto to buy pastries for a breakfast on the beach. One of the young women who works in the shop took a real shine to me... She, like many Italians (we discover) really likes the English accent, and called me Teddy Ben. We explained we were leaving today, and she came out from behind the counter to give us big hugs. For the third time this week, all of the pastries were for free!

The Italians genuinely seem to be the most generous-natured people in the world. Sure, they get hot-headed when driving, and take ridiculous siestas, and the country almost entirely shuts up shop in August, but they fall over themselves to assist you if they can. Today, our friend Angelo, with the surreally low voice, insisted on helping me to blow up my fluorescent green lilo by frog-marching me to his car and handing me a foot pump. Sadly the blessed thing had a puncture, so it all got a little embarrassing! 

I learned something today: The heady Italian scent, which, on more than one occasion, has made me go all funny is actually a flower! It's a pretty little pinky-purple thing, which, like jasmine, starts to throw off a powerful aroma as the sun begins to set. The flower is called Bella Di Notte. Isn't that beautiful? I'd love to know its English name and whether it would grow in Highgate soil. We could grow some under our tree in the back yard to attract bees and butterflies.

On that note, I think it could be time for me to spend a fiver on a crappy cup of tea, and try to get my head thinking like an Englishman again. Without this mental gear shift, it's almost impossible to deal with the mayhem of London. 

I wonder if the city will be filled with people in wheelchairs? 

Shoes full of feet

Nathan and I celebrated our tenth anniversary today. Ten years! It hardly seems like yesterday that I came bounding down a flight of stairs, after a trip to the South of France, to find him in the bar of the theatre I was working in, waiting to be directed into a production of Taboo. I was his boss then... And still am! 

We celebrated the hugely significant anniversary by driving to Rome. Ah! Rome! The Eternal City. I was last here some 15 years ago, and it would appear to have lost none of its magic. 

We have had an incredible day. Julie frog-marched us around "her" Rome in the morning; Piazza Navona, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon and the Campo de Fiori. We drifted around in the blazing sun, stopping in coffee shops whenever we felt thirsty, eating pasta, and granitas made from fresh fruit juice. 

For the record, there are 136 steps in the Spanish steps, and the view from the church at the top is astounding. My favourite thing about Rome is its roof terraces. Usually high up on terracotta and ochre-coloured ramshackle buildings, they're often a blazing riot of flowers and dark green vines. Deeply inviting. 

We deposited Julie in a cafe, and I took Nathan on a trek around the oldest part of town. We climbed 124 steps to a remarkable cathedral perched on a hill above the Forum where the alter was surrounded by 30 enormous candelabras, and multi-coloured stained glass windows cast eerie rainbows of light onto the large stone floor tiles. 

From there we went to the English cemetery in Rome in search of Una Troughbridge's grave. Troughbridge was the lover of gay writer, Radclyffe Hall, who was buried in a crypt in Highgate cemetery next to her first lover, Mable Batten, in the 1940s. Una left a curious inscription on a plaque which says, "and if God choose I shall but love thee better after death." The quote, which is signed "Una", features in the second movement of the Requiem. Una spent the last years of her life in the Eternal City, but made it known to her family that she wanted to be buried in the Highgate tomb when the time came. Her wish, for very obvious reasons, was not granted, and she was buried 1000 miles away from the woman she loved so much. Very sad when you consider they were lovers for 20 years. 

Unfortunately, by the time we got to the cemetery, it had closed for the day. We spoke to the volunteer locking up, who said somebody else had asked about the grave, but they weren't sure where it was. I felt bitterly disappointed that, for the sake of arriving half an hour earlier, I'd denied myself the opportunity of looking for it myself, but I at least made the effort, and the thought was there.

From the cemetery we went up to the Colosseum, by which stage the heat was really beginning to take its toll, and I was feeling both heavy-footed and light-headed. 

We had supper in a restaurant near the Pantheon with two new friends; a theatre director called Anna and a wonderful singer called Evelina, who specialises in Sephardic Jewish songs. She was born in Libya, and hounded out of the country during the Arab-Israeli war in the mid-1960s. We've met some fascinating Italians on this trip and made some wonderful friends. 

They asked us about the wind storms we'd had at the beach a few days before, which they'd heard about in Rome. What we hadn't realised, in a form of  naïveté that only Brits could do, was that the storm was actually generating tornadoes and that the area we were in is part of the tornado belt in Italy. 

I'd made lots of films of the storm on my mobile phone which I showed to the group... And sure enough, there in the dark clouds hanging above the beach on one of the clips, was the small, but very distinct, and utterly chilling beginnings of a funnel! We were very nearly twistered out of that place!

Doing craft

I am now wearing a necklace which I’ve made out of shells I found buried in the sand on Itaca Beach. I guess these are the sorts of activities you do when you finally start to relax. It took a couple of hours to thread them, painstakingly, one by one, onto a piece of yarn; time, which, under any other circumstance would be spent panicking that I wasn’t doing something more constructive.

Italy smells rather wonderful. This is something I’ve only just started to realise. There’s an incredibly sensual cologne or perfume that people wear here which makes me go a bit cross-eyed and sleepy; particularly when it’s combined with the aroma of coffee and cigar smoke and the glorious musical cadences of people nattering in Italian. My dream-like state has been further activated by the arrival of the man, who I now know to be called Angelo, with the lowest voice in the world.

We went for supper last night with our new friends, a trio of film makers from Rome. One edits, one directs and one is a screen writer, so they have most aspects of the “behind the camera” process covered! They summer in a rambling house on the hillside above a seaside town along the coast. The house was built by Franca (the screenwriter’s) grandfather in the 1920s. It’s basically three floors of Italian bohemian decadence with roof terraces galore looking out to the sea on one side and the mountains on the other. The house was commandeered by the Nazis in the Second World War, and rumour has it that a German officer is buried underneath a tree in the front garden.

We were joined for the evening by a whole gang of Italian gay people - actors, architects, osteopaths, art dealers - and we had a number of slightly worrying conversations about quite how difficult it is to be gay in the country where the pope lives. Homosexuality here tends to happen behind closed doors. The clubs and bars are all in locations where people can slip in without being seen. Of course the unfortunate consequence of pretending gay people don’t exist is that many married men end up cheating on their wives with other men, people get black-mailed, people live unhappy lives and only the Pope feels truly happy. One of the couples we met last night had got married in Spain; but their union was worthless in the eyes of Italian law. One assumes that the Italians have signed up to various European declarations of human rights, and it will be interesting to see what happens when politics - out of necessity - is forced to start kicking these blatant breaches of human rights - in the name of religion - to touch.

We sat on the terrace behind the house and ate pasta and cheeses at a long trestle table, before retiring to an art-lined sitting room to sing songs around an out-of-tune piano. I don’t know if it’s just the Italians we’ve been meeting, but everyone here appears to love to sing. Perhaps they now have the same impression of the Brits, as Julie, Nathan and I will regularly burst into three part harmony. The great game of today was to lie on lilos on the still choppy sea, and sing rounds as the tide dragged us slowly back to the shore. As we hit the line of breaking waves, the singing and the lilos would disappear into foam, and we’d dissolve into hysterics at the sight of at least one of us being thrown off the lilo and into the whisked-up watery abyss.

Washing machine

Back at the beach, the wind is still high, and the waves are crashing relentlessly onto the beach. The sun is shining very strongly, and I feel as though I’ve been sand-blasted and then double-baked! High waves can be great fun, and we spent an hour body surfing, and allowing ourselves to be buffeted about like kittens in a washing machine. The beach is almost empty. For many Italians the summer ended yesterday. The middle classes have all gone back to Rome to start work again. It is, after all, only three months now until Christmas.

 

Those Italians who are still “summering”, like our new friends who we’re going to dinner with tonight, wouldn’t be seen dead swimming in choppy water, or sunning themselves on a windy beach like this. Consequently, the only people mad enough to be running into the waves were the English. I caught some of the staff here staring at us in disbelief; “it may be rough” I said, “but this sea is still calmer than any I’ve seen in England.” And with that, I poured milk into my tea, causing even more hilarity.

We’ve just played the Pie Jesu from the Requiem to Roberto and Rafaella, who run the beach cafe where we’ve been spending all our time. I wrote the movement on a little lime green keyboard on this very beach almost exactly a year ago, so it felt appropriate for them to hear it. They seemed to love it. There were cries of “Mama Mia” (genuinely... I didn’t think people actually said that over here) before I was proclaimed a genius. More friends were immediately called over to hear it again.  None of them, of course, understood the English lyrics, and weren’t aware that everything that was being sung had come from inscriptions written on gravestones, so their response was to the music itself. I may be too shy and embarrassed to even attempt to speak Italian, but with music I have a universal language... and I guess that’s a very special thing.

Storms

I’m in Atri again, sitting on a bench staring out across an alluvial plain, which rolls romantically down to the sea. The sun is setting. A beautiful wind is rustling the horse chestnut trees in front of me – who’d have thought they had conkers in Italy. Everything is bathed in a deep treacly light. This is one of the finest views I know. You can see for miles from up here across a series of olive green ridges. Little white houses with red roofs cling to the hillsides, and as the sun sets, a dusty mist descends. They’re letting off fireworks in a village somewhere in the mountains. At this time of year, every town and village has its own “sagra”, a festival which brings everyone out onto the streets to dance, listen to music, and share the local pasta delicacies.

I don’t feel very well. I’ve eaten too much rich food and the exhaustion of the last few months must be finally taking its toll.

It’s been a day of weather extremes. This morning felt like the hottest day we’ve had here so far. We went to the beach, and floated around on lilos, flicking cold water onto our stomachs just to try and keep ourselves cool.

There was a suspicious dark patch in the Northern sky which Nathan noticed first. A few minutes later all hell broke loose. A panicked tannoy announcement told us to “close your umbrellas,” and suddenly everyone was running around, the beach staff were knocking deckchairs to the ground and the life guards were raising red flags and blowing whistles to get people out of the water. It was like a scene from Jaws. And then the winds came, which turned the beach into the site of an intense sand storm. Everyone ran for cover. An entire beach of people found themselves sheltering in a tiny bar area as deckchairs and towels started tumbling around and a storm surge immersed the front row of parasols in angry sea water. The waves, which have never been more than little watery hiccups on this holiday, were now crashing onto the shore like exploding cans of Coca-cola. One thing I’ll say for Italy: It knows how to stage a storm.

When it looked as though the weather wasn’t going to turn fine again anytime soon, the sun-seekers began to leave the beach; battling through whirlwinds of sand to reach their cars as the rain started to fall and the lightning flashed.

 

Roberto, the beach owner, who has very much taken us under his wing, ushered us into a room where a table was laid out for all his staff. The metal hatches were battened down and huge plates of delicious-looking pasta appeared as if by magic. There is some embarrassment associated with being vegetarian in Italy. The Italians tend to assume things like chicken and fish are not really meat. In fact, someone told me yesterday that she was “almost a vegetarian” because she “didn’t much like pork.” The pasta which came around today had a distinctly sea-foody vibe. It would have been rude to ask for anything else, so I opted to keep quiet and munch on a few pieces of bread. Of course, as soon as I was spotted, the all-too-familiar noises of horror began, and Roberto’s wonderful wife vanished into the kitchen and arrived armed with a Caprese salad, a plate of vegetarian ravioli and some kind of cheese and tomato flatbread toastie.

 

Of course, because this is Italy, the storm vanished almost as soon as it had started. The only sign of it ever being here is a glorious freshness in the air and the sight of a number of trees which had been blown across the road on the way back to Julie’s. I wish I didn’t feel so tired though. That would be nice.

 

Pepys got up extra early 350 years ago to supervise the workmen who were building an extension on this house. He was pleased to see how many of them there were; “many hands” he wrote, “make good riddance...” Pepys went with William Batten to Deptford to pay off some ships and returned to London on The Thames after dark, a lantern lighting their way. Very romantic.

Dust storm

 

Atri nights

We're in the medieval hillside town of Atri. It's approaching midnight and the place is buzzing with young people including a phenomenal number of children. The young people here do what the old people do on a Saturday night; they sit outside cafes watching the world go by. It's all very sedate... Even card games are banned here!

We spent the day, yet again, sitting on the beach, eating fruit, drinking granita, playing card games and floating on lilos. 

Nathan got told off in a supermarket for not wearing a T-shirt this morning. The people here are incredibly friendly, but scratch the surface and you'll find a very strict set of Catholic morals, which often preclude overt displays of sexuality or behaviour perceived as such. 

There's a man who comes to the beach bar who has the lowest voice I've ever heard. It's the vocal equivalent of a bucket of chocolate burned slightly around the edges; rich, deep and a little crusty! He sat down with us this evening and almost sent me into a trance. He could make a fortune reading books at bedtime. He was amused by the fact that everyone was calling me Ben as it's not a name you tend to find in a place where every word ends in a vowel. When he found out that the name was short for Benjamin, he said the word to himself four or five times. I felt like I'd been given an Indian head massage!