A MORNING DRIVE IN TUSCANY!

This morning I had a scheduled visit to my acupuncturist Dr. Fu Man Choo!!, and quite apart from a bad neck I ruminated enroute that I was lucky to be alive and wouldn’t be if the Italian drivers had anything to do with it.

My impression was that Italians were supposed to be good drivers.   Didn’t they sprout Juan Fangio, et al, or were they all Spanish?   Maybe they are better on the race track than on the roads.   You take your life in your hands when you join them on their daily route to and from work.

They believe that Fast is good, Slow is for wimps.   They have just been introduced to roundabouts near here and someone has told them that this traffic hazard has to be entered at a speed no lower than 80 kilometres and it is imperative to carve up anyone either already on it or just about to enter.

This should be done whilst on the telephone to your Mother or texting your girlfriend!   Failure to be doing one or the other will result in a fine.

This is also their mindset when entering a main road from a smaller side road.   They wait until you are dangerously close to their point of entry and pull out like a bullet and immediately slow down to adjust their phone to their ear.   Once comfortably adjusted they increase speed just as a corner approaches and then gun it.   This gives them a quick buzz of adrenaline and they are now ready to scare a few more poor unsuspecting tourists.

When they have caught up the more sedate drivers they see how close they can manoeuvre themselves in order to read the maker of their sunglasses and insert themselves half way up the poor mans exhaust pipe.   At this point it is imperative they flash their headlights several times just to intimidate the poor fool completely.

Their best game is to play, “Guess Which Way I Am Going”.   Someone also told Italian drivers that it is cissy to use your indicator.   Many points are garnered if you enter a roundabout at eighty kilometres an hour and then without warning dart to one side of the road and then the other as if you are about to leave but then change your mind and in doing so, totally confuse everyone around you.

These habits are bad but the one that frightens the life out of me and did this morning on the way to my doctor is their penchant of driving on your side of the road instead of their own.   The guy we bought our car off was leaving and going back to Australia because he said he couldn’t put up with the Italian driving for another year.   He said he had been nearly killed many times and now before they could intimidate him, he just drove straight at them if they had as much as a millimetre of their tyres over on his side of the white line.

I now drive as though in a tactical battle with a whole country full of people trying to kill me.   The roads around here have been designed by someone who has never driven, lined on both sides with billboards that distract even the most cautious of people.   They have put zebra crossings just over the brow of hills, just after a roundabout when one thinks it is safe to accelerate, and in the middle of nowhere when the speed limit is 70 kmh.   I often hear the siren of police and ambulance from the road leading to Arezzo and I think how that accident could have been avoided if only the road had been properly designed.   

It is a deathtrap and is lined with bunches of flowers left by the dearly departed.

Someone should not only improve the roads around here but also the standard of driving.

A MORNING RIDE IN TUSCANY!

Hi Girls,

Suddenly felt an urge to catch up with you all.   I am left here sans friends, sans husband, sans alcohol, sans much food and needed to stretch my arms out to wherever you all are.

So here’s a rather long and boring essay on my lonely Sunday in Tuscany.

It has rained for two days now so this morning with the sun shining Kiwi and I are full of plans for spending the whole day in the sun and fresh air.

Kiwi has found her seat in the sun panting for an 

hour out riding.

Last night we had a beautiful sunset, an 

Almost full moon.

It was beautiful this morning so off we set for an airing and we had an energetic , if eventful ride in the hills below Cortona.   Pure blue sky as you will see and not a breath of wind.   Olive pickers still out and the countryside almost waterlogged after a week of solid rain.   We needed it so no complaints.

The usual idiot drivers out in their hordes.   They never slow down even when they see a horse and a dog in front of them and I take a lot of pleasure of waving them down and telling them how dangerous is their behaviour.   One would think that as men of the land they would foresee the dangers of speeding past a prancing horse, if not to the animal, to their damned car!   

The other thing that makes life unpleasant on a horse are the multitude of dogs that on hearing the clip clop take it into their heads to hurl themselves at the fence of their enclosure and go ballistic for a good five minutes until we are out of earshot.   Luckily Salino is used to noisy dogs from his days at the stables with Paolo so he takes it in his stride but nobody even puts their heads out of a window and tells Fido to shut up.   I suppose if they saw me lying in a pool of blood they would take some notice but even that is debatable!   Not very friendly the folk around the farming community of Camucia.

And don’t get me onto the subject of drivers not tipping their forelocks when you have stopped in your car, backed up for them for hundred yards to find a passing space large enough for them to get by, and then just driving off without a nod or a smile.   If they could hear the invective I throw at them through my half open window, they wouldn’t do it twice!   Did their mothers never tell them to say thank you?

I rode across the big open field behind Villa Sodo.   You will know it from the front as you drive from Sodo on the steep road to Cortona.   A very imposing villa from the front and from the back it’s almost like a village.   Oh for some of their outbuildings, I could even keep a few pigs.   

We were jogging along with not a care in the world when I took out my phone to take some better pics and right at the apex of the field and miles from any large rock I dropped my camera.   After much encouragement to Kiwi to pick it up and give it to me I bit the bullet and dismounted.  Bad idea but necessary.   Could I get my fat body back into the saddle, could I hell.   Salty didn’t help by doing a version of Swan Lake around me as I hopped on one leg with the other stuck in the stirrup.   

I hopped and swore but no luck and had to walk all the way back down to Paolo’s filthy field where he has every clapped out piece of agricultural equipment he has has ever bought and then dumped.   Old hay ricks falling into the ground, tiles, old bathtubs, sinks, tyres, bricks, you get the picture.   The first pallets I balanced on flew up at one end and scared the horse and I was just about to sit down and cry when he took pity on me and behaved long enough for me to hoist my now exhausted body on board.

All the way home I was trying to invent a way of remounting when bereft of anything to stand on.   My best bet would be a rope ladder that hooks over the pommel of the saddle and dangles to just the right height to get ones' foot in, just like the ladder they have on the outside of a speedboat.   Maybe I could make one!   Or buy a jetpack!!!   I might make a fortune out of the invention.   I bet there are a lot of old women riders who once grounded can’t get mounted again!!!

Salty laughing at my antics trying to remount.

The foothills of Cortona.

It’s always a revelation to me as to how much one can see from the back of a horse.   You car bound people don’t know what you are missing.   This morning I saw into several bedroom windows, everyone’s back gardens full of more orange marrows than will ever be consumed, noted what should be showing in my Orto and what I have forgotten to plant.   On a sadder note, I have seen how many little cottages that have become empty and abandoned in places out of the way of roads and milling people.   

There is a beautiful little cottage and a fairly large house just near a delightful bridge up in the hills that used to be full of animals and bustling old people.   Now silent and empty with weeds growing where well tended gardens used to thrive.

It seems it is not only the shops that are failing in Camucia but the countryside is taking on an emptiness I don’t remember before.

Salty insists on practicing emergency halts from time to time and the first time he did it I nearly shot over his head.   I couldn’t see what was alarming him but I am used to him now and know that when he sees an oak tree he is aware the road is covered with acorns and he dearly loves an acorn as they would say in Cornwall.   This morning he did one of his emergency halts and I looked for the tree but saw none.   He had seen something I couldn’t.   There was a chap completely hidden up an olive tree on a ladder.   He wasn’t pleased when I asked him to come down from his ladder while we passed but there was no way Salty believed it wasn’t something that he should be mortally afraid of and to go back would have taken half an hour.

He sometimes throws out the anchors when sunlight turns to shadows or at a large black dustbin but I always put that down to his bullfighting days in Portugal.   I think he sees black bulls coming to get him.

Paolo has spread all his old horse manure over the olive terraces across the river behind our farm and the cingiale have had a fine old time muck spreading!   This morning as we rode by I thought mushrooms had grown all over it.   However, it turned out that someone has spread the muck with old pieces of bread and some corn.   I suppose they are going to ambush the pigs tonight whilst they rootle amongst the manure.   Now I know why Kiwi comes back licking her lips.   Better keep her in tonight.

My spinach is doing well.

Home again after a lovely morning out.   Hay and corn for Salty.   Ribolita for me.

Sorry if I have bored you but wherever you are I hope you have had as life enhancing an hour or two as I have.   

I still wish you would all come back and we could go for a slap up pranzo somewhere.

I send much love,

Thelma.

Xxxxxx