Matisse as a kitten and Houdini

Here is Matisse as a kitten.












On the right is Houdini, one lazy summer day at Poggio.

12 Poggio December 2003

Poggio, December 2003

Monday 1

Liza arranged a lunch for all her friends so they could meet her younger sister Dim, who wore a skirt and was dressed in blue. I was in brown and also dressed in a skirt, which I mention because it is a rare event for me. Dim wore a necklace of highly coloured miniature parrots. A necklace a child, or any good friend of mine, might wear.

Justin the watercolour painter was there. He’d ridden his motorino in from a small town where he’s now living. He said it had taken him an hour and he looked as though he needed to be thawed out. “Long time,” he says to me, but there was nowhere for him to sit at my table. He used to sit on the street in Rome and paint and sell everything he painted to passers by as soon as it was dry. I tell him I’m to go into Rome with Katherine to see the Toulouse Lautrec exhibit.

I tell Pat that I’ve not yet figured out how to stay at home and be paid. She says, “When you have a pension this happens.” I’ll probably never have a pension. Artists don’t stop working. I remember being told that. I also remember a life drawing teacher shouting in exasperation during a class in summer school. “Why are you looking for a job? This is your job. You are painters. You are never without work.”

Tuesday 2

I went to Rolando’s art class. A man I’d not met before was there. His name begins with B and ends in ino. He paints realistically. Takes photos, which he copies, placing a few unrelated images in the same painting. We all seem to be painting from photos, mostly the paintings bear no resemblance to the photo.

I enjoyed the drive to Viterbo, except when I came to what I call the bad bridge, which is built at an angle. Going one way you can’t see the cars coming from the other direction. Coming from the other the same thing but at night the blank grey wall, lit by headlights, looks exactly like mist lit by headlights. It has confused me more than once. This time there were a few cars, unusual on a Monday. One car was stopped at the side of the road and the driver waved me on.

On the left hand side of the road, not too far along from the bad bridge was a huge pile of flowers. Someone, maybe more than one person, had recently died there. It seemed that the people in the cars had to do with the flowers. Round the corner by the bar, up the hill on the right there is a cemetery that I’d never noticed before. Walking towards it there were many people, a broad cross-section of Italy; young, old, middle-aged. All going to the funeral in the clothes they happened to be wearing that day to go to work.

I am at the art class and have to leave early because I want to feed the horses at 5.30pm. Silly really. Maestro says he likes the painting I’m working on. It is a shame when I myself am not so sure and am struggling with it. I struggle to maintain enough enthusiasm to continue on a certain path and not suddenly start painting something else.

Wednesday 3

My Australian colleague called to book a ride with three other people on Saturday. I’ve decided to take the Saturday riders to a friend’s riding stable: Caino. Actually Caino is the nickname of my friend’s father. He’d been kicked off a bucking horse when a boy and had landed in a tree. They had meant to call him Icarus, but they got the name wrong and called him Caino. The name stuck. The son now runs the riding stable at the top of a cliff out by Canale Monterano.

I found a robin trapped in the kitchen fluttering against the windowpanes. I caught it in my green jacket and finally let it fly out the window. It was unharmed, unlike the blue tit that had been caught by Matisse.

I’m being paid the last payment for my work. Money seemed easier to hold onto when we had lire instead of the euro. I also felt a lot richer. Anyone would, I suppose. One million sounds a lot better than one thousand. Six hundred lire sounds better than three hundred euro. My bank account looks depressing and I can no longer call myself a millionaire.

A lemon sky and I wonder where my grey wool hat is.

Thursday 4

I put the halter on Nutmeg. Doesn’t count. I tricked her. I put feed in a bucket and had the halter all ready loose in my hand. As she ate I fiddled around her head and got it on her. When she raised her head from the bucket to take a breath from eating, I got the noseband over her muzzle. I told her she looked very beautiful with her new halter on. Actually it is Pepita’s old one so must now get her a new one. I want to teach Nutmeg to lead today.

Cherokee is out there looking for food. She seems to be hungrier in the morning than she is at night. Maybe they need to eat more because of the cold.

I am wondering where I can take my Australian colleague and friends to ride. Remo’s cousin used to have a place over by Anguillara, but he fell out with his father. All the horses used to come out of their stalls to drink water at the same time. Then they would all go back to their own places. All without any human intervention. Or you would unsaddle them and let them be and they would go for a drink of water and back to their own stalls.

Friday 5

I have a headache since last night after I went out to check the horses. Pepita was nowhere to be seen. She’d lifted up the bar between Nutmeg and herself and Sully’s stall and squeezed herself through. It was raining and I found Pepita eating the leftover hay in Sully’s den. I chased her out.

I complain of a cold head and am still searching for my grey hat, which may remain on my head indoors and out throughout the winter months. I’d been wearing my hat at Maestro’s. I had to take it off because he gets two wood stoves burning and a fire in a huge fireplace in the main room. I got my old spot back. This is crunched in with the long timers in the smaller room with a very efficient wood stove. Maybe the light is better in there. We all get an easel and stand or sit to paint in oil. Not too much room to move around.

I’ve bought a beautiful bosal from Donà, the local saddle shop. It is white rawhide with plaited cotton reins. A girl’s bridle for a girl horse. It cost a whacking 90 euro. It is more for show than for being used. It is very beautiful and I wonder about just hanging it on the wall.

Saturday 6

Vincenzo the landlord shows up. “Come stiamo?” How are we? he asks me lightly joking with me. Then he starts apologising. He tells me he called to say he was coming but that the phone must have been off the hook. I tell him that I have Memotel, which is a telephone answering service and would take a message even if my phone was off the hook. It is very difficult to explain all these new innovations. I’m beginning to suspect that this elderly gentlemen in his too short trousers can write his name but would be hard pressed to read what he’d written.

Vincenzo says he has an electrician who is installing a burglar alarm at his house. He wants to ask him to make an estimate on changing the wiring in the house I’m renting.

Later, Mara rode by leading a young boy on the overfed pony Polly. She told me one of her horses, Ricca, had died of colic. I knew that horse and she was always getting colic. I saw her once in such pain. These horses lived in a field or waited standing in stalls to be ridden. It was while she was standing in the stall that I saw her arch her back downwards. All muscles tense. That time Mara and I were with her and were able to give her something to relieve her pain and, I suspect, save her life.

The folks coming for the ride wanted to know how the horses would be. They wanted to add another woman to the party. I booked them into a restaurant so we could eat something before getting in the saddle.

Pepita escaped (again) on Friday. She ignored a bucket of feed that I rattled at her. I decided to chase her and made her canter around until she was fed up and wanted to get back to the herd (of two others). I was able to catch her and then took the opportunity to lead her and teach her “whoa”. She listens. However, I still don’t know if I can tie her and leave her.

Sunday 7

The ride was wonderful, the weather was cool and it didn’t rain. The hills rolled away into the soft grey sky. I rode a black horse that acts up in the same way as mine will on the way home. I am aware that I may be the problem and not the horse. I feel myself stiffen and hold too tight to the reins. I resolve to watch myself when I next get onto my horse.

The people were OK and I didn’t lose my temper. One of the crowd had to get off his horse to be sick behind a bush. They’d all been out drinking the night before and had probably had made a long night into the morning. It was about this time that we were joined by a man I’d ridden with before. A few of us had gone to Civitella Cesi on horseback. One man rode Paprika, who was stolen during the BSE crises and horses were being stolen for meat. Later her owner died. A mutual friend said he’d never got over his horse being stolen.

R, one of the riders, rode with me in the car from the restaurant and after the ride back to my house. Where we all met up for hot tea or hot chocolate. I’d bought a lemon cake from the supermarket and it was dreadful. I have frozen it. Maybe it will improve the flavour.

I really liked the man who led the ride. They also train folks to be guides on horseback, and I want to do this. He said that I could bring Merry if she was ready to be ridden. We could learn together.

R had told me bad news about future work. No one wants to invest in agriculture in Iraq and five to eight hundred staff members are to be released from service.

Monday 8

A holiday Monday and it feels like a Sunday. Porgy was barking and it never occurred to me that he was barking at the horses. All it would take is one kick from Sully to his silly head and he’d be dead. Going on the same concept as tying a dead chicken around a dog’s neck to stop it chasing them. I tied Porgy up beside Sully while she ate. I saw her make an ugly face at him and at one time she laid her bared teeth against his head. I knew I couldn’t go into lunch and leave them to it. When I went to put water in the buckets I saw Sully stamp her forefeet beside Porgy and felt that he may have had enough. So tied him up at further away from her.

Tuesday 9

The wind blows and teaches me all the places the cold comes into the house. I dress to feed the horses hay and immediately after I’ve done this come back inside again. I find Matisse on the closed cover on the toilet. He can no longer watch the shadows play on the bathroom window as I have covered it with a thick and heavy towel to keep the cold wind out.

Wednesday 10

It took about twenty phone calls, but finally Remo and Lele showed up to help me with the vaccinations. I don’t know why I bothered call them in the end as I could really have done the job myself. I had been afraid that the vaccination for the foal would have been different, and it wasn’t.

In the night I hear the heater work overtime. Pat and the electrician tell me that it costs less to keep the heater on all the time and to keep the temperature at a constant and even low temperature. I think differently. I will turn it off all the time and only turn it on when I really have to. I think this will save fuel. They argue that the heater must work longer to heat a cold house up. I watch myself. When the house is really cold the only warm place is in bed and that is where I go. I don’t actually have any energy to do anything else, not even work on the computer. In the end it is warmer outside even with the wind blowing.

My French friend AM turns her heater off at night and sleeps with her bedroom window wide open. She sleeps under a heavy rug made of many pieces of goatskin. As a child I used to imagine being at the North Pole on a sledge pulled by huskies. Someone would be wrapping me up first in silk, then in thick soft wool and then in soft furs, and then I would fall asleep and be pulled through the cold northern night in my dreams.

Thursday 11

Went to the dentist, who is more beautiful than I remembered him to be. He is young, his hair sticks up on his head as though spiked by the wind. He has an artists way of doing his dentistry. I’d been told to go to younger dentists in Italy, because they are now trained longer than they used to be.

I bump into a colleague from Anguillara who asks how can I continue with these short work contracts. After a while, he adds, “They must weigh you down”. It’s true that at the beginning I feel quite positive and then I start to worry about whether or not my contract will be renewed. It makes it difficult to concentrate sometimes. I’m not very Zen.

On the radio I hear them talking about Iraq and saying how it seems that someone is sitting down and planning attacks on humanitarian aid workers. “This has never happened before,” they say.

Friday 12

Here I am at Christmas time, with no job. Once, I was told by a friend that she knew I was to be offered a temporary post. Someone had seen the paper work. It got stuck in someone’s desk drawer, she said. However, I was glad to be out of that particular department at the time. Maybe it was a lucky break.

Marco the maniscalco came on the dot of 2.30pm. He charged me 10 euro for doing both Sully and Pepita’s feet. After, I put the horses in the field with the electric fence and it works. Porgy got zapped twice and came to me to comfort him; sweet.

Saturday 13

Remo rode Merry on the campo. She has to look at everything. He says he will take her out in a group. He tells me that the next time they go out in a group I can be the one on Merry. I’m not so sure.

I think of going Christmas shopping, which means going to the upstairs discount above the supermarket, or looking for newer, unread books on my bookshelves.

I’ve been turning the heat down to 10-12°C at night. In the morning there is a smell of mould in the bathroom and I see it spreading on the underside of the tiles over the bathtub. The engineer for the house tells me the bathroom was added after it had been built by him, or he’d followed its construction.

Vincenzo will show up today. He told me that he usually builds a fire after the first rains. He is talking about the huge hill he’s building in the field, over which he’s placed a sheet of plastic so the rain will not wet the pile and it will light easily. I told him that we have had days and weeks of rain. He moves his hands and shakes his head as though to clear it. I think he means he’ll light his fire after these long first rains have ended.

Sunday 14

Matisse gets me out of bed at 6.35am. I let Porgy out and Houdini comes in. Matisse pounces on him and gives him a body hug, which may come with a bite. Houdini sometimes spends an hour or so inside playing with Matisse, but today it seems he has another place he wants to be.

Matisse is intent on burying his food in the floor. I’ve bought very expensive Hills D/D prescription diet because he is scratching a lot. The woman in the pet food store says that sometimes this is caused by a food allergy. I’ve been buying the highly coloured – inexpensive – red cat food. Maybe this is it.

I spent three or four hours waiting for Remo to train my horse. The next appointment was walking up the driveway. A man with white hair and a beard who has bought his granddaughters a stallion to ride. I think I wouldn’t have done that, even though Remo seems to have a magic touch with stallions and they behave themselves as well as a mare or a gelding when he is done with them.

There is something heavy bouncing around the garden. I am hoping it is the dogs and not an escaped horse.

Monday 15

I wake in a bad mood. I thought I was going to write a Christmas letter to anyone who might want to hear from me. I hate Christmas. Hate is maybe too strong a word, I am indifferent perhaps. I buy presents for people I know are buying presents for me. There is no point in sending anything to Mummy because she won’t get it. I think the problem may lie with the Jamaican and/or Italian post office.

There were five vacuum cleaners lined up in the storeroom beside the house. I’ve now taken them to stand in a line beside the rubbish bin out on the road. I have hung the faded plastic hula hoop on the plastic knob sticking out of the side of the rubbish container. Maybe a child will take it. It looks like some sad time traveller. I was too small to really enjoy a hula hoop when it came into fashion, but I remember by elder cousins played with it while shrieking and giggling.

Tuesday 16

I awake with a headache. It is biting cold. Matisse is battering at the window wanting to be let out.

An electrician came to do a quote on the re-wiring of the house. He drives a BMW. I don’t think I want an electrician who drives such an expensive car to be writing up an estimate for a job. It makes me nervous. He barely glances at the house and tells me the estimate will be ready in the afternoon.

I find Matisse eating the outside cat food. He refuses to eat the expensive kind that is drying up in his bowl. Now he is contentedly washing himself on the back of the sofa-bed.

I’ve given all the kiwi fruit away to Pat and Rolando. I’ll pick the rest growing upstream from where the dead cat is buried and store them in the crawl space in the store room. How Vincenzo got there I don’t know.

A chill wind blows strong enough to make the curtains move over the closed window. It is painful where it lands on me, like a cold knife plunged to the bone.

Wednesday 17

At one in the morning I find the two male dogs, Porgy and Navaho curled up in the barn. I tried to keep Cherokee in, but she was whining and so I put her out. She looked at me with her big brown eyes. Sorrowful and questioning. She has a huge tumour and no longer follows the male dogs on their excursions through the woods.

I think Cherokee was once used to following the previous tenant, the one who abandoned her, around the house. Once she’d come into the house and immediately gone into the studio, which used to be the bedroom and curled up on the floor. In the kitchen poor Cherokee goes into the corner where there is now the washing machine, as though she expects to lie there.

I sat in the barn waiting for Navaho to come back, but more to feel what it was like, and experience why the dogs sleep there. Amazingly warm for an old tin-sided barn. I suspect it depends which way the wind is blowing.

Thursday 18

I wonder if my brother, Peter, is planning a surprise visit. He’s been very quiet. He may well be thinking the same thing about me.

Friday 19

Navaho has not been back for two nights. Cherokee showed up last night after I got home and I’d decided to take Porgy out to see what the dark lump was beside the road. I brought her into the kitchen and fed her, and then again, and twice more in the night. She is so thin. Today she is walking around. I’d got up in the night to give Cherokee yet more food and I put on the heat, so by late morning we were all sleeping like babies.

As Matisse leaves when I open the door to let Cherokee out, I’m reminded of what Rolando my painting teacher tells me. I must let the animals live their own lives, with as little interference from me as possible. I’m there to feed them, give them water. I don’t know, I think I’m also here to worry about them too.

I’ve been interviewed for another editing job, at least a month’s work.

Saturday 20

Went to Remo’s where he was preparing the sand field with the tractor. “Ten minutes,” he says. Two and a half hours later he is on Mary Rose’s back, but it didn’t matter, it gave me such joy to see her. She looks so elegant and as though she is thinking about what she is doing. Remo seems to be preparing her to spin. Remo tells me he will take me to a good store to buy Western gear when I’m ready. I said I cannot ride my little horse looking like a rag bag.

I’m not good at Christmas. I think of buying small gifts for people, like a bottle of rum and tropical fruit. Who knows if the family I would buy this for would even eat tropical fruit. I thought of putting all this in the little red basket I have, but I see that it has been taken over by Matisse.

In the night I hear a sound in the garden and remember times I’ve opened the bedroom window and found Cherokee there. She has been going down hill for a while now with her tumour. It is very cold out there. I think of getting her into the car and taking her to the vet. I could lift her front legs in and then her back. She is very large. Maybe I should pay someone to come to visit her.

Sunday 21

I thought of giving away my ivory netsuke, the little working man and the man with the horse. I picked them up and they were warm as though they had recently been handled. The little working man smiled up at me and I put both ivory sculptures back in their safe spot.

I have taken Cherokee to the vet, who told me she has bronchitis and gave her a shot of antibiotics. Cherokee staggers. The vet said it could be this but it could also be the tumour has spread to her lungs. The part I can see is as big as an apple. He tells me there is not much he can do. I can only make her comfortable. He talks of her staying in the barn. He may think of a barn with brick walls, filled with sweet-smelling hay. I now don’t have much faith in the tin-sided barn to offer much protection to a staggering dying dog.

Later in the day after a dog walk with Porgy, I found Cherokee had collapsed in the field. I got her into the kitchen slowly encouraging and half dragging her there.

Monday 22

Cherokee is still alive. She circles the kitchen walking kilometres. I pick the food I’d set down for her off the floor since she walks through it as though not seeing. She scatters the contents in the bowl. Porgy looks at me from his place under the kitchen table.

I told Anthea about Cherokee and she tells me she has only just put Esposita, her Marimano dog down because of a tumour on her chest. I tell her that Cherokee circles the kitchen and gets stuck in a corner and won’t move. “Maybe she’s in pain,” says Anthea. “She makes no sound,” I tell her. Then Anthea tells me something I never knew. “They don’t”. They don’t make a sound. Dogs that whine and bark all through their lives don’t make a sound when they’re in pain.

Down at Remo’s I play darts. They are playing with light-weight children’s darts. Not the heavy kind I remember from my parent’s bar, the Old Pimento House in Jamaica. Marco the blacksmith was there with his sweet daughter, Ilena, with an angelic tiny face. I watch a young man ride his Arab gelding as it rears and bucks and he rides out the storm with elegance and doesn’t fall off or shout. We are all given Christmas gifts. A horse shoe with a pine cone and dried oranges. It is pretty and seems filled with good magic. I put it up on my bedroom wall.

At Poggio, someone drives up to the corner of the garden and whistles. Maybe they wait for the dogs to come barking and running. No one will go. Porgy is under his table in the kitchen, Navaho is missing and Cherokee is silently circling the kitchen.

Penny calls, she’d been on my mind because she’s the one who has sat and watched her pets die at the end of their lives. She has never put any of them down and disapproves of it. I wonder if the veterinarian would release Cherokee from her pain.

I tell Penny that I used to think of my brother’s house as a “safe house” a place to go when I needed to feel cared about. It was easier when I was in New York and he was in Florida. “You can come here,” she tells me. And I know that I can. Somehow I am much more stuck with all the animals. I don’t feel able to just close up the house, get someone to feed horses, dogs and cats and disappear to England for a couple of weeks to get my bearings again.

Penny tells me someone is building in her garden. She is ordering trees to shut them out. Magnolia and Cypress all the way from Tuscany. “Will they grow in Sussex?” I ask. She tells me the gardener says to move them in the winter so they have time to acclimatise. They may even grow better with the extra English rain.

I notice that Matisse sits on the left hand side of the bed and he blinks at himself in the mirror. From this vantage point he can also keep an eye on me without even turning his head.

It was only two weeks ago that Porgy and Cherokee were walking around outside the gate together. Maybe I’d not notice how ill she was for a whole week because I thought the dogs were being fed by the neighbours. Cherokee had not been eating and I’d not been concerned. Now she drinks milk, laps it up. She’s drinking my expensive goat’s milk very slowly. I see Porgy eyeing it. “Give it to me,” he seems to say, “I’ll show you how fast a dog can lap up goat’s milk”. And he does. He places one paw in the centre of the bowl so it doesn’t run away from him and finishes the milk in seconds.

Tuesday 23

The Maestro was very pleased with my painting. “Very painterly,” he says. One of the students comes and asks if the man in my painting is eating an apple. The maestro returns to look into my eyes. I wondered if I should feel hurt by this comment. The man in my painting is playing a tiny wind instrument that is held in both hands like a harmonica, it can’t be seen. I know it is there because I took the photo, which I am now working from. The man was one of my male friends. I may even have been in love with him, but he was never in love with me. He was as I have painted him mercurial, and his eyes are laughing.

About painting, I learned some time back that people’s comments should be listened to. They often tell me more about the person doing the criticism than it does about my painting. It all really depends on who is doing the talking. I will always listen to Rolando, Maestro. I will sometimes listen to Pat. I will always listen to Liza, because her advice is worth following.

Sometimes the comments about my work make me embarrassed, as though the person talking does not realise they are giving so much of themselves away. I used to read the children’s books I wrote at schools, then the children and I would take huge sheets of paper and coloured pens and we’d create books together. Some of the stories they told me would make my heart skip a beat, or cause me to hold my breath. These children were not always from the richest or prettiest part of town.

I go to visit Mara carrying a stupid mug with a grinning horse on it. I find Flora is on her friend’s horse just about to go looking for her husband who is riding around bareback in the woods on her horse, Orazio.

I have stopped writing the Christmas letter because I have no Christmas feeling and my letter would be filled with questions. Maybe people wouldn’t mind that so much, especially friends. Although my friends would want a personal handwritten letter from me and not one they shared with a lot of folks they’d not met and had not much wish to meet.

Cherokee continues her clockwise circles of the kitchen. She stops in corners and under the stepladder. I know she sees because she focuses on Matisse as he flickers across her vision. I try to feed her and her tongue comes out and doesn’t pick up the food. Is there a point in continuing this life of hers?

Wednesday 24

I took Cherokee to the vet. He says there is not much we can do. He tells me to leave her in the hay barn. I did and when I went to look she was no longer there. Maybe she went to look for Navaho. Liza was here and we exchanged Christmas gifts. I heard Cherokee bark. Two short barks, as though in some kind of distress. I didn’t run out to look. Later I went, when Liza had gone, she was nowhere to be found.

Isn’t it better that she is outside? In the kitchen she would circle always in a clockwise direction and then flop down asleep. I think the vet must have thought the barn would be a warm one, filled with hay and animals sheltering from the cold. A warm barn. Not the windy, draughty place with the flapping tin sides.

Pat tells me Cherokee had probably gone off to die somewhere. I smelled her outside the kitchen door, even with the tramontana, the cold wind from the north, blowing. Strangely, I smell her more outside than inside the kitchen where she’s been existing for the last few days. I never knew that I would learn the smell of a dog. In the summer I learned their barks and could tell one dog from the other. It is a cold day for Cherokee to die.

Thursday 25

Christmas day and I wouldn’t know it. Matisse and I bump into each other. There are at least five good sized rooms here and we always seem to be in the same place at the same time and going to sit on the same spot. Now he is lying close to me with his right paw hugging my leg and his nose up against me. I am thinking angry sad thoughts and spiralling down into a pit. I feel two paws on my face, “Wake up,” seems to say, my furry friend. “There’ll be lizards to chase in the spring when the sun shines.”

Friday 26

Santo Stefano, Boxing Day. Matisse gets me up at 6.39am. He is battering around the house waiting for me to let him out. It is feeling like a very sleepy day out there. Quiet, cold. No sign of Cherokee or Navaho. I hear a human cough on the other side of the hedge outside my bedroom window. Then a car came by, probably to pick up the cougher.

The water outside is frozen in the taps. I fill the horses’ water container filling a bucket in the kitchen sink and pouring it into the container. They gather around to drink.

Peter calls and I miss the call. He’s left a message. When I call back his phone is busy and I call him on his cell phone. Debbie, his second wife answers. “He’s on the phone with his sister in Jamaica. Who is it?” “His other sister,” I tell her. When he calls back he tells me he’s been sick with bronchitis. He is losing weight. Has lost weight. He tells me he doesn’t get sick pay. I’m surprised. I thought everyone in America got paid when they were off sick. What kind of a country is that? At least he is getting a pension. I hope.

He tells me the Department of Transport rules are changing on the 4^th of January. I’m surprised that he even keeps up with these things. He apologises for not sending me the cowboy boots I’d wanted for my 50^th birthday in June. I tell him not to worry about it. “It was your 50^th birthday,” he says. People from Jamaica visited him and Debbie for Christmas. I don’t tell him that I’m on my own. Not such a bad thing, as it is my choice and I enjoy the country quiet. I know I have friends just round the corner, celebrating in front of their fireplaces or snoozing through the afternoon.

I take Porgy on what I think will be a two hour walk, it takes twenty minutes. I don’t know how the same walk on horseback can take so much longer, maybe because I don’t walk from A to B and meander because its not me who’s doing the walking.

For lunch I cook mushrooms with cream and butter. These are the huge feathery mushrooms I’ve been growing in the cellar on my mushroom block. I don’t need to eat anything else all day.

Liza calls to thank me for the present and to tell me about her Christmas lunch at a local restaurant with a bunch of friends. Dried up salmon and lamb. Some kind of vegetable. A sorbet between the first and second course and…NO DESERT. I know the place. Two televisions blaring at opposite ends of the room both turned to a different channel. The sound of voices and the tvs bounce of the walls. I get a headache and my teeth hurt just thinking about the noise.

Saturday 27

Divine. I don’t know that even my father would have succumbed to such a breakfast. Coffee with a dash of Tia Maria.

Today I opened the studio and it was a pleasure to see the tidy shelves. Now I have to concentrate on tidying up the right hand side of the studio.

Horses gallop around the garden. Pepita threatens to crash through the fence, she didn’t succeed. Matisse complains about the food I put down for him. He doesn’t like beef with rice. Only fish, fish, fish.

I went to Anthea and Luigi’s open house. Luigi wearing his red Babbo Natale hat. I’d found a couple on the road with a black Labrador, who finally showed up. Another couple was there, the man works for the BBC covering the Pope. I may have even heard him on the news. Lena was there with her two youngest children. Her husband and elder son were out all day somewhere doing boy stuff. She wanted to kidnap me and take me to see an exhibition in Bracciano. I just wanted to go back to my house and hide from the cold and the wet and the wind.

I take Porgy out for a walk on the lead. At the holes in the fence he turns to look at me with his paw raised. Poor baby. Maybe he’ll find the missing Navaho and Cherokee.

Sunday 28

Navaho is back. He must have come in the night. Porgy “told me”. As we went out he makes a sharp right and I see that the door to the cantina is open. Navaho comes up the steps. Of course there’s no Cherokee. He licks my hand, “Breakfast?” Just like any man who’s been out for the week chasing a woman in a fur coat and the right kind of perfume.

Later Matisse looks out the window. He’s heard a sound. Maybe it’s Navaho in the cantina. I only hope he doesn’t knock over my highly productive mushroom block.

I find a photo of all the dogs together in the spring. Do I really need a puppy?

Monday 29

Rain. Can I face the road to Viterbo in this rain? Navaho has gone again. He’d come back to be refuelled and now he’s gone again. Porgy gets taken on walks on the lead. I don’t feel like being dog less.

Mirto calls and tells me she spent Christmas serving a Christmas dinner to the homeless. She talks of moving out of Rome.

Tuesday 30

Navaho has again returned. He looks sideways at Porgy who is now tied up to the table leg in the kitchen so he won’t eat Matisse’s food. Matisse skips out into the rain. I take Porgy for a walk and he doesn’t want to go because it’s still raining. I walk him around the house. Bop Bop. There’s Matisse trapped behind the huge plastic sheet I’ve used to cover over the porch. I let Matisse back in by opening the living room door from inside the house. He comes in slowly as though doubting that he is entering the place he now knows as home.

Wednesday 31

I begin to prepare the rooms for the electrician to begin his work. He is supposed to up date the wiring and put in an earth. If the electricity is in order I can think of doing a bed and breakfast here.

At Remo’s I hear that someone has had four horses stolen, and another person five. Remo and Lele now take it in turns to sleep in the car down by the horses. I know that I’ll be up at every sound in the night looking for horse thieves in the night.

11 Poggio, November 2003

11 POGGIO, November 2003

Saturday 1

It is warm enough to sit outside. Grey skies and a warm wind, which I think is carrying yet more rain, which causes the trees to speak. I hear the wind can confuse you, especially the sirocco. I prefer it to the cold, biting tramontana. I love the sound of the wuthering sound the wind makes as it goes through the cover on the chimney. The rain no longer comes in after Claudio climbed up there, hurting his back to fix it.

Breakfast, and I want to heat up my roll. Here I am reminded of the breakfasts we used to eat in Hove in England. On a Sunday we would eat porridge, hot rolls from my father’s bakery and a boiled egg, which is missing today. I have eaten so many eggs I don’t think I can face another one for quite some time. I’d bought eggs and then a neighbour had given me more. This always happens. I buy eggs and am given them as a present. It does not seem to happen that the eggs come along to a fridge devoid of eggs. Eggs magnetise eggs. I wonder if it is the same with money.

Sunday 2

The dogs are barking. Someone goes around feeding the stray dogs, mine included. I’ve been told it is Louisa’s mother who feeds the stray dogs and foxes so they won’t go after the chickens. Some say this doesn’t work.

I put the heat on in the hopes that the dark laundry hanging on the radiators would dry and then I fell asleep. I need a day inside the house. I know that going to see Merry at Remo’s is a high point in the day, but I would rather find my brown wool skirt, paint and clean the studio. Even Matisse may not get out today. I do not know if I will sleep. I seem to want to put myself into that suspended state to consider my options.

My colleague calls to tell me he can’t come out riding because he’s working. He tells me it’s the first time he’s had to work on a weekend, which I find hard to believe knowing he comes from a cattle and sheep rearing family. Here there are flood rains and mud flows down hillsides. Riding would not have been much fun. Down at Remo’s I’m told that Merry and another filly had to be moved from their boxes because water rushed down the hillside, through the little window at the back of the box, which is built into a hillside. By the time I saw her she was dry and calm.

Mary Rose misbehaves at the end of her rope in a way I have not seen before. Rearing and bucking when I take her out to eat grass. I let her out onto the sand field so she could get rid of some of the kinks. She blows hard like a stallion, lifting her head with her tail held high. She rears and bucks, not to threaten me, she’s playing. I think they want us to join in and of course we can’t.

In spite of the grey day, back at the house, I wash the white laundry and hang it on my new resin clothes drying rack. Then, I saw fire irons in the same shop and bought those too. These cost 15 euro. In the market they were 50 euro. I have paper to burn and lots of wood, but I still don’t feel like building a serious fire, which I feel I must fire sit until it goes out, which can take at least three hours.

Matisse caught a blue tit, as it was still alive I tried to save it. It flew around the kitchen battering itself against the window. I kept Matisse out of the kitchen; he seems to think I’m helping him. Finally I caught the bird and threw it out the open window. He hid himself in the ivy over the fence. One wing, although not broken, had lost a lot of feathers; I found most of them in the bathroom.

Monday 3

I heard the horses in the night. Maybe I had not put the fence back securely enough. Nutmeg was on the wrong side and would not come through the space I made for her. She chose another place where there was barbed wire, as she came back through the fence she pulled it all down. I need to buy electric fencing to replace the barbed wire. I will call Roberto who is supposed to fix the fence. I suppose no one calls or comes because it is raining.

I must wean Nutmeg. Now I understand it is something that you do before rather than later. It is how sweet, how sweet and then how dangerous, because the tiny foal has turned into a giant overnight. I have not got a halter on her and I need to worm her.

Porgy seems to be able to release himself when tied. I’ve seen him do it. He scratches ever so carefully, and if he is very lucky he undoes the catch and he is off the lead and free. He seems to have a plan; he has that kind of look about him.

My contract has been extended until the 21 November. I am certainly not doing very much. What I do gets changed fifty million times and sent out with spelling mistakes that I don’t get to change because I’m not the last in the line to look at the document.

Am feeling very tired because of all the dreams. Boys with cats, horses. Remo and family, moving furniture for a man, who was about to leave and then hay fell and I think it fell on the man Remo was saying goodbye to, saying his wife was a witch. All this was mixed in with a telling of 1001 nights that I was listening to on the BBC. Then there was Mara who had a café with horses to rent. A very busy night for dreaming.

Trouble with horses. I feel out of control with my life. Fences are down. I need a secure fence. How long am I here? How long do I have a job? Where do I go from here? Symbols of my life, downed fences and horses with barbed wire marks across their bodies.

Tuesday 4 and Wednesday 5

No entries.

Thursday 6

I have been feeling as though I am coming down with a cold. Then suddenly I feel better, as though something turned out right. Was it my colleagues emails commenting on my writing style, one says I have a bouncy style, another calls it poetic. Or maybe it was someone telling me that Friday is tomorrow. Or was it finding my travelling buddy Marina on the train. She always travels in the same place so that her friends will know where to find her. Continuity, something I am not good at.

Remo tells me they lost the grey cat. He had a bad habit of climbing into cars or into the cabs of trucks. Most times he was brought back again. This time he has gone for good.

I go see a colleague who has to review the work I’m doing. I tell him I can’t send him the whole document with photos and graphs because it will crash my machine. He points to his, another old clunker. He is in a senior position and has to process vast quantities of material and the powers that be can’t get him a good computer. He has an outdated machine, just like the one on my desk.

He tells me he sees a lot of mistakes, and I wonder if he has been sent the correct version. I am still working on it. I know that several versions can be floating around. I don’t leave documents I’m still editing on the share drive because my work has disappeared from there, but I don’t tell the pale-eyed man.

Vincenzo has been here. The water hose has been moved and brush cut from somewhere.

Friday 7

No entry.

Saturday 8

I have found a very busy person who answers all my emailed questions; however silly they may seem to someone who does not have to edit. Heaven. I am filled with gratitude.

I hear the rain. It is a grey drizzly day, the sort of day that if I was at Penny’s house in England, we’d go to a shop and buy inexpensive clothing. Once I bought a bright orange fuzzy jacket and a pair of zebra striped slippers, which were huge on my feet. Penny’s well-tailored sons looked at my purchases with some alarm.

Sunday 9

I heard a horse with a loose shoe. It was Sophie on Toby coming round to ask me for supper.

It is a soft, quiet. Remo was here telling me to put the fillies in the field and keep the mother in. They have chosen the other way around. He tells me all the horses look good, but that I must separate Sully and the foal. This seems to be something I find hard to do. He tells me that Sully’s udder will drip milk for a while. I am to check that it does not get swollen. I have read that I don’t have to milk her and that the milk will be reabsorbed into her body.

I have bought a mushroom block and put it in the cantina. It looks like wood shavings stuck together, but I’m told that I must place it in such a way that the mushrooms can sprout all the way around six sides. I placed it on an old bookshelf that I found lying on its back in the dark.

Shooting season and guns are going off in the woods where, further away, I know they are hunting wild boar, which are raised to be shot, like pheasants.

Monday 10

I am suffering from a cold, can’t be that bad because I had a huge lunch. A colleague from Belize joins me and tells me how his country is only a strip of land along the coast and how it used to be an outpost for pirates. “Paid by the British,” I said.

Pat is back from America. She tells me her bag was searched by the government. She tells me the elderly are being used as mules. They are? She says people like her, with white hair, are suspect.

Tuesday 11

When I left for work in the morning I found a red car at the side of the road without licence plates. I called the carabineri. After about 18 rings they answered. I was glad that I didn’t have any kind of real emergency when would have needed them to answer quickly. I am put through to Bracciano. I tell them it is no emergency and am handed over to yet another voice. I tell this man about the car.

Later, I call Judith. She tells me she saw it being taken away on the back of a truck. I worry all day because the dogs were barking as though at someone. I then start to worry about the horses. I have a pretty rotten day.

I buy a small torch to put in my bag, which cost 7 euro. It hardly works. I should have tried it out in the store. However, it seems to speed me getting into the house because I can now find the lock in the kitchen door to place the key.

At work, I am creating a data base. I cut and paste. What I paste is completely different from what shows up. I call my Dutch colleague to come and watch. He says this is about the strangest thing he has ever seen. I’m glad that I’m not imagining things.

Driving along the road to Poggio I see a fox cross the road in front of the car. It stops and watches the car as I drive by. It seems so unafraid and seemed to glide across the road as though its paws barely touched the ground. I do not know if it is male or female.

Wednesday 12 to Friday 14

No entries.

Saturday 15

It sounds like rain. The cats are inside. I hear Matisse “talking” to Houdini. One of them is busy clawing the back of the sofa. I think it is Houdini, the babysitter.

Matisse goes across the road. Sometimes I try and stop him and he rolls around in the middle of the road. Or he lies there blinking at me, his anxious care-taker, before he saunters off into the big woods.

Sunday 16

Remo tells me he is working slowly with Merry. He tells me she wouldn’t let him get on his back until recently. He didn’t try while I was watching as there were too many people around.

While talking to the electrician, down at Remo’s, I was startled when a crow flew onto my shoulder. There was a wave of good feelings, a flutter of wings and then he was there. The electrician came and took him off my shoulder. This was the first time this tame crow had flown onto my shoulder. Maybe it was because I was eating a piece of bread.

From where I sit on the bed, I can see Matisse sitting on the bathroom mat looking up at the window. Although you cannot see through this window, I think he watches the shadows of the leaves outside as the move in the wind.

Monday 17 to Friday 21

No entries.

Saturday 22

I got through my last day at work. Many colleagues asked for my home email. I went to say goodbye to my boss who was rushing out of his office. He put his arm out. I don’t know whether he was to put it on my shoulder. He said, “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.” I said, “Goodbye” and he shouts, “Send me your home email,” I said. “You will loose it!” “I know,” he says, “but send it anyway,” and like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland he dashes off to another meeting.

Sunday 23

I return from my errands and find Vincenzo rapidly picking all the kiwi from the vine. I didn’t think this fair since I’m paying for the water which kept them alive all summer long. I was very angry and I know he won’t understand why.

I complain to Pat, who reminds me I’m supposed to be looking for a house to buy. “With what?” I ask her. She reminds me that she didn’t have any money when she went looking for the apartment she lives in now. Do the work. She tells me. The money will come. Pat is always telling me exactly what I tell other people. Why I can’t take my own advice. I don’t know. Hard of hearing at close range, I guess.

Guns pop far away in the woods.

I think of going to my doctor for a check up. The last time I was there the secretary was telling people off for lining up in front of her. She made them line up beside her. Perhaps she never thought of it. If the line forms beside her then the person next in line can read what is being entered in the computer for the one in front. Maybe I can call and make an appointment instead of going in.

Monday 24

I’ve been amusing myself by practicing looking fierce. I don’t know when it might come in useful. I tried out the look in the supermarket and had the staff jumping to help me. It seems overly effective, and better take another look in the mirror to see what I look like. I had to speak calming words to them because all I needed was a new plastic card so I can take part in discounts and gaining points for consumer items I’ve never wanted to buy, ever.

I’m down at Remo’s. He gets on Merry’s back. She doesn’t like this. She keeps one eye on me. I ask him later if the horses act differently if the owner is around. I never got an answer because he may not have heard my question. After, I took Merry to cool down, to eat grass.

Coming back along the lake road I find a little dog that has just been hit by a car lying in the road. Possibly by the people in the car that passed in such a hurry. I saw it look at me before it died. I took the little dog and buried it in my garden under the rose bushes. The dogs kept a respectful distance. They seemed as concerned as I felt. The neck was broken. I know I wished to feel some kind of reaction as I lifted it up off the road. Even if it had been gratitude at being held gently in the last seconds of life.

I had seen the same dog on Saturday being let out of a car by a couple. At the time I thought they were letting the dog out to pee. Not such an odd place, because there is enough of a grassy edge to the road, even though the cars rush past.

Tuesday 25

Porgy is sleeping in the kitchen. In the mornings when I go in to make my coffee he rolls over on his back, with his feet in the air, and grins at me. I rub his white tummy, which is not as clean feeling as a cat. He then leaps to his feet to go out, I open the door and Houdini comes in. He turns his nose up at Matisse’s leftovers. He has a point. Those particular leftovers have been there for two days.

I had a dream. The radio was on and was bothering me. Dreadful, chaotic music and a hyper announcer. I tried to turn it off. No use. Tried to unplug it. I managed that but the music continued. I woke up enough to realise the music was on, the radio was on. I was then able to turn the radio off. Phew, it turned off. No magical continuing mad announcer.

Wednesday 26

It is raining again. I go out and the horses are wet to the touch. They have shelter, but stand around in the rain. I will keep them in the stalls today. Feed them hay and feed until the sun shines again.

I watched Merry being trained. Remo sent me off to buy giant plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner. This was so I could give her a bath and wash her mane and tail. Being an Appaloosa she is not exactly graced with a full and flowing tail. Or mane for that matter. It sticks up in the air making her look mischievous. After her bath he put a red blanket on her.

I remember when Remo was training Federica’s horse, Akim. The first time I saw her ride him I saw this Arab stallion arch his neck and step out so carefully. I felt he was different to when Remo, the trainer rode him. There seems to be a feeling between Federica and her horse. Beautiful to watch.

Porgy was not interested in what I gave him to eat. He looked at me and gave a healthy burp. So, I expect my neighbours have been out feeding stray dogs and foxes. How can I explain to Porgy that he has done nothing wrong. It just makes me apoplectic when the dogs don’t want to eat the food I go and buy with my hard earned money. As Roberto once said, I should just let the neighbours feed my dogs. They are not exactly mine anyway. They came with the house.

Thursday 27

I was very depressed about going into Rome. I went to see Flora in her shop. I think we had our best visit in years. As I went in I told her how depressed I was about coming to Rome. I told her she was the only person who could cheer me up. We spoke about anxiety and security. I realise that I have never felt secure. Not in the close your eyes and go to sleep and don’t worry about a thing kind of security.

Flora tells me she remembers feeling secure with her family in England. Growing up. Now, she tells me, her sisters give her that feeling. I think there are five sisters all together, including Flora.

I used to feel a certain security when I knew my brother was with Patrice, his first wife. I had, still have, a lot of my books stored in their attic. I gave them to my nephew, but he wants me to be there before he will trawl through my boxes. There are books there that I would not mind reading for the first time, or again, for the third time.

Went to the gynaecologist. He tells me to call him, to come and see him and not to make an appointment. He tells me that to make an appointment only costs me money. To nip in and see him costs nothing. I forget all the things I want to say to him. He seems so busy with mountains of pregnant women waiting along the corridor and here he is offering me free question time.

He batters on like an express train. Is this why husbands and wives or women with their friends will go together, so there are two sets of ears to listen.

Recently, a friend asked me to go into a specialist with her. I was amazed that she couldn’t remember a single word he’d said to her. I did. This is why I’d been brought along. My friend, being an ex-nurse knows that people go deaf when a doctor is telling them something. They may be afraid to hear what is being said to them.

Friday 28

It rains torrential downpours for seconds and then nothing. Outside I hear the birds singing and then nothing. No. The birds are singing. Maybe they know the sun will shine today. My cat would like to be outside. As I get dressed, and am wondering how many layers to put on, the heavens open and the rain comes down, again. By the time I go out to feed the horses the rain has stopped.

I have bought Gabriella Garcia Marques book, his almost autobiography. I went into the snob bookshop in Bracciano. The woman pulled the hardcover book off the shelf at the same moment I found the soft-cover book. The words are the same. It is not a present. Even my friends would accept a paperback book from me. One even gave me a used paperback book. A very funny cookery book, written in the fifties for single people. She said it was out of print and she’d searched ages for it. I read it every so often. It has some good ideas and is very funny.

This book tells you what you must cook for a house party when you have overnight guests. Tells you how to fix all the meals over the weekend. It is written for an England that may have disappeared. An England I knew as a child when I went to stay with school friends whose parents lived in a manor house on acres of their own land. In this friend’s house I learned to eat my pear with a knife and fork.

The dogs are barking, there is the smell of my old fire from a few days ago. The minibus turns on the corner, leaving dense clouds of diesel fumes, which is one of the drawbacks of living in the country where the bus turns. At least I don’t feel isolated. One day I’ll take the bus into Bracciano. Although I no longer like to shop there because it is too difficult to park and I have succumbed to buying food in a supermarket and not from the butcher, the baker, the fishmonger, the market for fruit in season.

Saturday 29

Matisse is looking at me with a concerned expression. It is Saturday, one of the days the dogs go wild. I think someone creates a dog feast for them. Once I followed the dogs through the woods. At one point they seemed to think I was joining them, until they realised I was cross that they had escaped once again from the hectare of land, which obviously they felt was not enough for them.

My painting teacher, Rolando, called and I’ll start back with my painting course on Monday.

I’m beginning to think Matisse is the most intelligent being living in this house, me included. He peers into my face when I’m angry with the dogs or the horses. He has no fear of me. I was angry with him only once when he insisted on walking on the computer keyboard while I was working on a document with a deadline. I’d picked him up and dropped him on the floor. He hid for hours, and I was the one in the end who felt punished.

Now my cat asks to go out. He reaches for the keys dangling from the lock at the kitchen door. As I’m mopping the floor I notice how Houdini begins to look worried. Matisse puts one paw around Houdini’s neck and licks his ear. Is he telling him not to worry, that I’m not planning on attacking him with the wet and dripping mop?

Sunday 30

There is another dog in the garden. A huge brindle dog, seems quite young but it didn’t want to come near me.

I’m hibernating. I feel like diving inside myself and being quiet. I don’t look forward to the long drive to Viterbo by myself. I don’t mind going, it is driving back by myself in the dark in my old Ford Fiesta. However, I put my bag together for my painting class anyway.

I call Pat and tell her I’m wearing a skirt. She tells me not to tell anyone because it might shock them because I wear skirts so seldom. Anyway, Pat tells me Liza’s sister says she, “Wants to dress like Rosemary”. How is that? I ask Pat. “You know,” says Pat, “Like you’ve just come in from seeing the horses.”

10 Poggio, October 2003

10 Poggio, October 2003

Wednesday 1 October

Happily I’m taking a day off to get the hay. I was going to let Lele go on his own, but I think he’d prefer if I was there to handle the money.

I’ve not been talking to anyone at work. I put my head down and work at the computer all day. I’m aware of people going for coffee a lot. I know they have to do this if they want to talk about anything at all, even work, in some kind of privacy. Sometimes the best place of all is a noisy cafeteria.

I have had responses to the e-mails I sent to my old yoga group in the States. Lore is still weaving; she tells me that Phil is teaching. Good for him, he was always such a sweet, kind man. A friend in Denver writes to say she is still in touch with an Irish friend, Marion, who stopped talking to me once I flared up at her. I feel that I’m looking for a teacher again. Now I have my painting teacher, though while I’m working I can’t go to the Monday afternoon class, which starts at 3pm in Viterbo.

Had a meeting with the accountant who wanted to offer me another job without pay. Maybe it would have led into something paid. I had to explain that I couldn’t accept anything else right now because my life was taken up with getting up at 6am to get on a train and go into Rome to get back at 7pm.

Porgy has been ill from the bites, so I’ve been keeping him in the house. Matisse went into the woods last night and I thought that was it. I was glad to see he hides in the bushes when cars go past. I was not happy to see him lying in the road. When I went out to lift him off the asphalt he again melted into the woods. Later, when I went out to look for Matisse, as I closed the gate onto the road, I heard a sound, which turned out to come from my little cat. He was inside the gate and me on the outside. “What you doing there?” he seemed to say. Maybe he was showing me the little hole beside the gate he uses to come in and out. Did he think I should crawl through it? The previous tenants must have made this for the cats or hedgehogs, as it is a perfect hole with a brick base to it. The old hedge must have been pruned carefully so that cats, or hedgehogs could go in and out as they pleased without being followed my a nosy dog.

Thursday 2 October to 4 Saturday October

No entries.

Sunday 5 October

I have not been writing consistently and have been feeling disoriented. There was a torrential downpour last night; if I’d been out I would have been drenched in five minutes. I don’t know what the horses did. They seem to be dry except for Nutmeg the foal, who seems to have a coat marked by rain drops, although she is quite dry to the touch. She allowed me to scratch her on the ears. I tried to take Sully’s halter off as it had somehow come unhitched. It is safer if she isn’t wearing one because the halter can get stuck on a branch and cause some serious problems.

I tried to put a halter on the foal. Ha ha! I got her in the pen but Pepita got in too and started galloping around, slipped and fell on the wet ground. She looked at me as though it was my fault. Once I’d been lunging Merry and she reared and fell over backwards. Heart stopping. I think they are so big that they must break in two. No. They get up; look at me with a certain amount of respect. Pepita seemed embarrassed.

Overhead there is a lemon yellow sky and I’m having an inside Sunday. I’ve been painting. I’ve gone as far as I want to go with the gouache. I’ll have to wait until I paint the dammar varnish over the top before I paint in oil, the painting is too damp. Now I have my colours back. Suddenly I’ve snapped back into painting like myself again. In this case I may have the head to begin a large painting.

Found Matisse on the other side of the road. I don’t know if he was chased there by Trusty, or if he just hangs out there because it is so much fun. There must be a lot going on over there if you happen to be a cat. A husband and wife were outside the gate when I went out to look for Matisse after lunch. The man was ugly, but kind. He said I’d frightened him. His wife was sweet looking. I let them in to pick up chestnuts. The man tells me that you have to eat this kind out of the shell with a fork. I don’t like them so much, neither do I like the hazelnuts, which make me cough; although I will eat almonds by the handful.

Breakfast is a roll with butter and marmalade. Almost a childhood breakfast. Sunday we would have boiled eggs, hot crispy rolls that my father would have brought home with him from the restaurant bakery. These would be warmed in the oven and then spread with melting butter. Honey or marmalade would be added.

Monday 6 October

A lemon sky tinged with blue and apricot. The sky is touched with orange and gold where the sun catches the clouds. I am sitting on the earlier snail train that arrives later then the one that leaves after it.

Sitting on the snail train going into work. I think of doing a series of cloud paintings. Annie bought a very stylised cloud painting from me with a landscape. A large painting copied from one of my small oil pastels that I’ve been doing on the train. I want to paint clouds, I also want to paint water. My most successful water painting was the one I did based on the sketch I made of a fishing net just eneath the surface of the water. Anne Marie in France bought this.

On Sunday I enjoyed painting. I saw that Matisse spent a lot of time climbing outside on the trellis. Then he came in to climb on the wire rack I use to dry my clothes on. He knocked it over and expressed a certain amount of concern as to its well being – sniffing and patting at it with his paw. Did he want it to get back on its feet?

A man sits with birds in a cage on his lap. The feathered creatures mutter to each other. They sound more like my cat Matisse. A cat making bird sounds. He also makes a sound like a horse whinnying.

I have left my bright red jacket hanging in the closet. Did I really need it? I would have preferred one that didn’t cost so much. However, it is light and warm and maybe it will last a long time. Today I’m going into the office dressed in clothes to feed the horses. This means comfortable jeans, reining boots, a shirt and waistcoat, the kind you can ride in with big pockets. Poor cat got left inside. Does he really look worried when I leave, or is it me feeling worried?

Tuesday 7 October

Matisse was back in minutes after I let him out. I can only assume it was wet out there in the long grass. His fur was cold and his feet wet. He now sits beside me taking up most of the chair; he has me well trained. At night I sleep on one side or the other sticking an arm out, he crawls under the covers and turns around to rest his head on my outstretched arm. If I sleep on my stomach with my face turned away from him he climbs out and taps me on the nose with a paw until I wake up and turn on my side again.

I am made to think of me and the horses, of what I’ve read (John Lyons, The Perfect Horse). Control one part of the horse and the rest will follow. In this case it is control one part of the human and the rest will follow. So, after the cat tap on my nose I turn obediently to the left or right, and little cat again climbs under the covers, turns himself around to put his head on my arm.

I’m keeping Porgy in at night. I sleep better without the bark provoker roaming around. I know he prefers to be running around outside and barking his head off.

The bathroom is beginning to smell again. Annie says it is a drain smell and not a cat smell. She says she had the same problem at her house in Marina Velca; the drains would smell.

One of the mares I’ve had in partnership with Remo is being sold. Her name is Cornelia, a pretty dark red colour with white markings, an Appaloosa. I feel a bit sad about this. If I’d been able to continue to work I’d have been able to keep her.

I worry about my own future.

Wednesday 8 October

I’m on the train travelling backwards. At Bracciano, while waiting a girl peers at me suspiciously. She watches me write my diary out of the corner of her eye.

I’ve left little cat in the house. He seems to have adapted to not going out every morning. Houdini, the orange cat, now comes in. Matisse hides, watching him eat, then leaps from his hiding place bouncing over Houdini. Maybe the older cat tells him that he doesn’t want to go out today because of the rain, wet and wind.

Returning from Rome I find Marina, a colleague from work, on the train. I like her. She finds me amusing and, when she doesn’t have one of her many headaches, is pleased to see me. I make her laugh. She asks good questions about painting and asks how artists see things. I tell her that when I started at art college I was amazed at how I began to see things differently. Light and shade, shapes. The world popped out at me as drawn or painted. I felt that I saw. I wonder if I have got so used to seeing in this way that I no longer remark upon it. Or worse, do not notice any longer.

Colours also. I told Marina that a painter friend names the colours she sees around her, as I will. I draw in pencil and write in the colours that I must use. This surprised Marina. Maybe people who don’t paint don’t think in terms of named colours. Right now I look up and see pink in the clouds. Last night I would have used burnt sienna and ultramarine to get the right light in the clouds.

At work a desk top publisher shows up to quote on the hydrology book I’m working on. She shows me a book she was paid US$11,000 for. I find this excessive. I don’t know of course, since this is the first time I’m having to get quotes on a job from desk top publishers. Maybe it works out if you are doing an enormous print of 11,000 books.

Thursday 9 October

Porgy has been sick all over the floor. I’d fed him too much I suppose. Tonight I’ve given him less, or maybe it just looks less because the bowl I’ve put it in is so big.

I’d returned from Rome to find the landowners looking for the rent. I told them I’d send it on the weekend, because I didn’t have the money on me. The house stank of drains as I went in. I looked down the toilet and now understand what Claudio, my builder friend, means. He’d been explaining about the S bend in the toilet and when the water goes below a certain level the pong from the drainage system comes floating up through the toilet. My next door neighbour had explained the same thing. He says it happens in poorly constructed areas.

I hear scratching and see that Matisse is now in the wastepaper basket. This used to be one of his favourite toys when he was a kitten. Made of wicker he could make it roll across the floor with him inside it. Now he is getting into a paper bag. This is also a lot of fun because it crackles as he moves.

Mara tells me her sweet little cabin at the stables has burned down. This was one room with a fireplace. She tells me her father, on the night of the blackout, didn’t put the fire out in the fireplace before he left for home. This little cabin is filled with memories, some good and some quite sad, like the time she told me Pupa the cat had been ripped to shreds by the dogs next door.

Friday 10 October

When I returned from work I found Vincenzo lurking about with a big blue plastic sack. It was lumpy and full of goodness knows what. He was subdued, polite. His wife was again using Lei, when she spoke to me.

Saturday 11 October

In the early hours of the morning I hear cats fighting. Matisse is still and silent as he listens. Being a cat, of course, he doesn’t say very much, but there was a stillness about him, and I would say he was worried. Someone had been hurt. Daylight, and there was Trusty-who-doesn’t-trust anyone, with a wound on the side of his neck. Houdini was limping. The sounds had come from under the bush outside my bedroom window. The orange cat brothers had been fighting.

I’m writing this while sitting at the stone table outside the kitchen. It is not exactly warm. I have my summer-weight jodhpurs on and reining boots that have not yet seen a horse.

Matisse is under the gas tank. Someone coughs. Horse or human? The horses are eating peacefully in a clump together. I move them up and down the fence now so the ground gets a chance to heal. The grass is already high in the garden.

Matisse has now moved to the old water trough in front of me. Again he has gone around the house. I wonder if I’d been inside if he’d come to look for me. I notice that the traffic along the road has increased. The next door neighbour’s dogs are barking. I need to cut the rotting grapes down and put them on the compost heap. They were unsuccessfully full of pips. The others were wonderful. Small, sweet, Muscatel.

Is someone illegally cutting wood or is it further a field?

Mara tells me that her little hut burned down after the blackout when the lights went back on. She tells me she managed to save Flora’s expensive saddles and burned her hand.

It is so misty now that I cannot see much beyond the edge of the barn, which is less than a stone’s throw away.

At work one of my favourite colleagues is leaving. He turns to look at me and I wave. I would have shaken his hand but they were full of multi-coloured suitcases.

Sunday 12 October

I wake up with the cat at 5.59am. How does he know? He had tried all his other tricks and none had worked so he jumped on my chest and startled me; he is usually so careful to jump over me. I hear explosions as I wake and wonder why. The military are sometimes doing exercises and you can hear the explosions on the macchia grande.

I put the horses in the garden, they were eating quietly at the back of the house, then Sully and Pepita went through to the front looking for more grass. Nutmeg went berserk. She wouldn’t follow me past the cactus plant, which must have pricked her. She galloped around and then went under the pole that Vincenzo had propped up with an old step ladder and a metal rope tied to the roof of the lean to. I looked at her this morning and realise that she must have crouched down at the gallop in order to get under this obstacle, because she is a very tall and leggy foal.

A man drove up looking for chestnuts and I collected some with him. I ate some for supper. They are small because there has been no rain; but still taste good. I cut down some of the grapes because they have gone mouldy. The dogs have quietened and don’t bark at the people as much as they used to. I wouldn’t mind if they did. In the summer it was continuous with the joggers on the road. Maybe they are all barked out.

Matisse is stalking in the wet grass. He stops every so often to nibble at a grass stem. An apple just fell from the tree and startled him. It may be Trusty I see over by the old water trough with the worried expression on his face. I don’t know why Trusty and Houdini should be so different when they must be from the same litter, they look so similar.

Matisse is now washing himself at the end of the stone table. I’m sitting outside and it is not warm. I’ve already had my coffee, which was very good this morning. Now I think of eating one of the left over brioche from yesterday. However, I realise that I don’t really like them. I think of my American friend Pat, who can eat two when at the bar. I wonder if she will lose weight when she goes to the USA for a holiday, as I did when I visited my brother in America, because I didn’t drink wine or beer for three weeks.

My neighbour’s horses are in the field next to the one I rent. I wonder how long I must keep my horses away from the chestnut trees. I better ask. I expect someone needs to come and pick up all the chestnuts now lying on the ground. Quite a job.

I hear the washing machine in its final cycle. I can hear everything I piled on top of it being thrown to the ground. I’d better remember that for the future and not put any china or glass on top of it because it shudders as it hurls itself into the final cycles.

Monday 13 October

Matisse has one eye closed and I worry that he may remain this way for ever more.

Vincenzo was here with a lock he wanted to use on the gate. He wanted to use his on the inside of the gate and mine on the outside. I frankly got confused just listening to him. In the end I took charge of the conversation and told him that I would put my lock and would give him a key. This seemed to please him. He wouldn’t hear of me giving him a lift home, because he said he was waiting for his wife to show up. So I left him alone on the road waiting for her.

Found Marina on the train who seemed withdrawn. I made her laugh when I told her I’d found someone to do the flowers for my wedding and another person to cater the food. I paused…but “I still have to find the husband!” Good to see her laugh after her looking so down. She cheered up enough to advise me to buy my curtains at Ikea as I’d been talking about buying a sewing machine. “Much cheaper”.

The horses are acting hungrier as the days get cooler. I hear them clunking around in the barn where they all stand in a clump. I must make more room for them, so that when Merry returns there will be room for four.

Tuesday 14 October

Matisse has not been going out much. I let him out this morning, he saw Houdini come in and followed him. Houdini comes in to stuff his face with food. I think he is too old a cat to be thinking of playing tag around the house.

Porgy and Cherokee went missing when I fed Navaho. I took up their food and would not have fed them, but Cherokee returned and literally asked for her food. I think they must have gone for the last pee and pooh before being fed and settling down for the night. I was later than usual because I’d been kept at work looking for documents that were required in the morning for a meeting.

Wednesday 15 October

Today there is a stink of drains. There is a wind and Claudio says there will be a pooh because of the evaporation from the famous S bend. The smell is almost unbearable. Others tell me to pour water down the toilet; I’ll see if that helps.

I hear the horses’ hooves on the hard ground in the barn. I’ll move the wood pile and the junk and make a larger space.

I have just read that five species of Italian donkey are almost extinct.

Thursday16 October

It was some kind of birthday for the Vatican so I could only get prayers on the radio. The folks sounded like a bunch of buzzing bees. I imagine the faithful around the world who hear the buzzing bee sounds know what the words mean in their own languages.

A colleague seems to be inviting himself out here for a ride. I’ve not been for so long because I’ve been waiting for Merry to be trained.

I went for the mammogram. A man did it. He was so kind and impersonal as he placed my boobs between the freezing cold plates of the machine. I think handling so many breasts must make you inured to them. In the same way that an artist may only see light and shadows when they have a naked human in front of them. Well, it is a lot like that for me when I am actually painting. I become so absorbed in what I’m doing that it comes as a surprise when the model, male or female, suddenly gets up for a break and they need to get their circulation going again.

I caught the technician looking at my breast. It was the look of a person trying to put an object in the right position. I could have been a bowl of fruit. He had a machine that develops the negatives on the spot. He puts one in and the other is already ready. He did an extra shot of my right boob, which sometimes has a painful cyst.

As I’m preparing to leave work a colleague comes with his baby. I sense him rather than see him. He gives out a sensation of gently whirling light, so it took me a while to get untangled before I could actually see who’d come to visit me.

Judith called about hay and I told her to ask Lele to help her the next time. The hay I bought from the same farmer she told me about is dreadful. I didn’t go and have tea with her on returning home because I let Matisse out so that he could play; but he was more interested in inspecting the car. I’d left the door open because I’d already done my Saturday shopping.

I have a dreadful headache what with the pong from the drains.

Friday 17 October

Matisse is thumping around in the bathroom. He was in the tent under my legs, but he got prickly and it is like being in bed with a cactus, so he got thrown out. He is now in the waste-paper basket battling with the newspapers I put there. Bits of paper are bitten off and spat out into the air. This waste-paper basket is an old friend of his, when he was a kitten it used to be left empty on its side so he could roll across the floor in it, or scratch it to bits. No damage as it is made of raffia.

It turns out that FAO finance folks have sent my money to New York. I’m told they send all the payments to New York before they get paid in Rome. It is more than a little demoralising because I’m down to 100 euro.

A young Muslim female colleague at work chats to me. I like her spontaneity. She is American. I wonder if I’m slightly jealous of this young woman who was supported by her family while doing a Masters in something useful.

Came home in a funny mood. I was fine until Pepita tipped her feed onto the ground. She seems to think she should be fed first, when I feed her mother Sully first. This weekend I’ll be tying string to the buckets so that I can hang them from the fence posts. Sully somehow alerted me to the fact that some of Vincenzo’s fence posts are wobbly in the ground. Now, how does a horse do that?

I dream. I come to the same place in my dreams. Always on a hill top by a freeway. I have been there at least three times already. I feel I’m working towards something in the dreams. As though that life in the dream is more valid than life we experience as real. In fact I wonder if the day to day work life is the dream. If we can influence the passage of our dreams – from negative to positive – we must also be able to do this in our own lives. I am becoming convinced of this, because it all feels like dreaming. All of it. I feel I am about to see something important for me. Soon. Maybe tonight.

Saturday 18 October

Matisse has already been out and come back in again. I think he’s hungry. I’ve shut him in because there are many cars parked in the woods.

Is it raining? Or is it is the wind in the trees I’m hearing and not the rain. I see the sky is grey and heavy with rain. I’m wearing my pyjamas under my jeans and sweater. A little warm, although my legs still feel cold. I will have to pull out all my clothes out to find the winter clothes and put away the summer.

Matisse has just startled us both by knocking over the rack where I dry my clothes. He went back to take a look at it. Now he is up at the window trying to open it with his paw in the crack between the window and its frame. I don’t want him out with all the movement and all the cars along the road. People have come in droves looking for chestnuts and mushrooms.

Sunday 19 October

Vincenzo and Margerita were here to talk about redoing the electricity, but without their electrician. They had opened the gate on the chestnut field and come up. Frankly, if you’ve an appointment with someone renting your house I would expect them to come and ring at the front gate and wait to be let in. My electrician friend took over. He stayed later for coffee, while I had a tea. He was full of ideas, perhaps too many. “What if we just install a “salva vita”, an earth?” I asked. Michele was horrified, he said he would talk to his lawyer friend. He tells me my landlords are dreadful people. He tells me that people with money, or worse, who think they have money are dreadful. We seem to agree on a few things. We talk about the nobility, we forget that many of them had to go out to get a job in order to keep the farm.

As Margerita is leaving she spits out, “What about the dogs?” and how she is going to send the “guardia” to pick them up. I feet sad. This is what my sister Melanie did to me. I was away for a few days and when I returned home all my motley pack of dogs had been given away. It was just before we were robbed. I may feel this happened because Foxy, the little bitch dog, who was not there to get the other dogs barking and biting.

I went to Remo’s to visit Merry and take her for a walk. We visited the cows, unfortunately at the same time fighter jets flew by in formation overhead. I hope she doesn’t associate cows with fighter jets in the future. I made her stay in one spot until the jets had finished swooping overhead. They make a sound like tearing paper; almost silent until they’ve passed. One day they’ll create something that is totally without sound. Maybe they have done so already.

Donato, Remo’s father, asked me to take pictures of the foals. He is buying the film. I told him I don’t have any money because FAO sent my money to the United States of America. I wonder how many other people have this problem getting paid.

Matisse has just come back in, all wet. He is staying in.

Monday 20 October

I still have not been paid. The money has now been transferred from New York. Now we have to see how long it takes to get back into my account in Italy.

This morning I found Nutmeg and Sully and no Pepita. Later she materialised on the other side of the fence. I don’t quite know how she got there. I heard a sound in the night and knew it had to do with Pepita, but was too tired to get up and check. Too warm. Too asleep. In the morning I smelled pipe tobacco. Again I was too warm and too asleep to look out. I awoke twice in the night. Once at 1am, when someone may have been coming home from working at a pizzeria. Or maybe it was my neighbour, who owns heavy equipment and works all hours of the day and night.

Matisse wanted to go out and took one look at the wet and Trusty sitting out there and came back in.

I called Roberto and asked him to help me with the fence because Pepita is continually getting out. He tells me he will come on Saturday. If it rains he won’t because they won’t be able to do any work. Reasonable enough. The ground is like chocolate pudding with puddles reflecting the sky.

I saw a huge bullfrog. Granny, I thought. Once, at home in Jamaica, I asked Anita the cook if she would help me move a bullfrog from the bathtub. How it got up the straight tiled sides of the bath tub I don’t know. Jumped? They seem more like crawlers than jumpers. Anita told me the bull frog could not be moved because it was “Mrs de Roux” as she called my grandmother. Strangely enough I found the bullfrog making its way down the passage and out the glass panelled door onto the veranda and so into the garden. Who knows?

Matisse is quietly watching something. He gives himself a quick lick and goes back to studying the wall.

Tuesday 21 October

Matisse goes out and then follows his pal Houdini back into the house. He toured the roomsmeowing his head off. I don’t get it. He meows after he’s been out all day and he meows after he’s been in all day. He then attacks my legs. I don’t mind if I’m wearing jeans. But when I have bare legs or arms it is a bit much. He gets this wild look in his eyes, then it passes. I get into the bath and he becomes the bath time cat sitting on the bathmat keeping me company. He is either curious about the bubbles, or he lies on the bathmat washing himself.

I get into bed. Matisse is creeping up on a fly. One of the best fly catchers in Lazio, if not the whole of Italy. He eats them up. Pat says one of her cats does the same. He crunches them up, maybe they are like raisins. I see Matisse eat one and go and look for another. Amazingly quick. We humans are too slow. I think that for their size and shape they must be more intelligent than we are.

I see cats in the parking lot. I’m sure I recognize the two my neighbour brought home and then decided to abandon. She could not handle two small kittens living up in her kiwi vine. She had a lot going on at the time having just been diagnosed with leukaemia, so I will forgive her.

I don’t think my contract will be renewed because there are no more jobs.

Wednesday 22 October

I am sitting up in bed, while Matisse is trying to bury his feed plate. He just took a dive into the wastepaper basket. He seems calmer tonight. I came home and there was no sign of dogs or horses. It has rained for days and the grass is growing.

I picked up my mammogram. They had written my name Allison Grace Mary. I thought it was a sign. Grace. Not grace as in walking gracefully. Grace in the way of the spirit.

I have been nostalgic for New York. I am reading Enzo Biaggi’s La mia America, and I was craving hot dogs and didn’t know why; until I remembered the book I’m reading.

The man who has been so silent at work is now talking to me. He was very concerned when I came in and said I’d lost one of the horses. It sounds worse than it is. He was concerned in a genuine way.

I hear the rain. The dogs did not come to greet me when I returned. I found them curled up in the barn. I thought for a moment that they had all been taken away. There they were, happy to see me and poor Porgy yipping.

With all this rain Merry will not have been taken out and worked.

Thursday 23 October

I am very tired. Maybe I just want to go back to my dream with all the Buddhist monks. I wonder, in painting, if I could just let go of all the reality and just do my dreams, like I used to paint story. Once I painted a series based on the Goose Girl.

A male colleague at work called me dear today. It was in the exact way a brother will call a sister dear when he is trying to annoy her. I don’t envy his wife with her husband away six months of the year. My colleague tells me she is used to it, because she used to work as a civil servant and understands the routine. I would want someone at home. Someone who could ease the tightness around my heart. Someone who could make me feel as secure as my cat must feel when he is curled up under the covers and knowing that there is food in his bowl.

Friday 24 October

No entry.

Saturday 25 October

It is that time of year again when all the clocks go back one hour on Sunday night. The horses will be used to being fed an hour later, because they get fed an hour later on the weekends. Kurt was shocked when he was here. However, he didn’t have much sympathy for my craziness about my cat.

On the train returning from work there was a man in an expensive suit who seemed to be trying to pick me up. Some of these people in expensive suits should take care of their teeth. Maybe he does this to get rid of people on his seat. So I left saying I’d seen a friend go upstairs (on the train) and I wanted to sit with her. I found a woman and said, “You must be the friend I’m looking for!” and explained about the man. A man turned in his seat to look at me. He laughed and winked. I was not feeling that attractive. So why doesn’t an unmarried…well it’s the age. Most men are married and there are more women than men and that’s the demographics of the situation.

Today I take Porgy to be castrated. A beautiful husky has come to visit. However, he seems to think Navaho is a bitch and won’t leave him alone.

I think Vincenzo must have been here in a violent mood because the horses’ gate was left open. Also the gate into the field.

Sunday 26 October

Porgy, for the first time ever, left food in his dish. I’d taken him to be castrated and he fought the medication and I was packed off for an hour.

Roberto came to take care of the fencing. I gave him the money and he seemed reluctant to take it. He looks ever more good looking, and may be one that improves with age. He says silly man things to me like when am I going to sell the horses. He has a point. I am now covered with hay because I’ve just fed them. Pepita broke out of the field. She is a nice horse but has a total disregard for fences. It may have been her that popped the wire. Roberto tells me I should put an electric fence in. I already have most of the poles and will need to replace others. Roberto tells me he knows someone who can come and see the horses and who will give me a price. I wonder if it is the same person that Remo knows.

A nice man came to look at Rais, who in 30 seconds saw everything that was wrong with him; that he had worked too much; that he needed to be re-shod. Someone else had told me he needed to work more.

Little cat is beside me in his sphinx pose. He works hard to get me out of bed. How can he know its 5.59am? I had put the clocks back last night.

After putting the dammar varnish, turpentine and linseed oil medium on the gouache under painting the colours change. I don’t know if I’ll need to do anymore to it. I’ll look at it again in the morning.

The beautiful dog has gone home by himself. Dogs bark. Maybe a persimmon has fallen to the ground. I have experimented with picking them unripe. They are OK and ripen off the tree but are not as good as those that ripen among the dark leaves.

Monday 27 October

Matisse, of course, wakes me up at 4.59am, which is 5.59am in the old time. I get to work early.

A colleague’s contract has not been extended. He’d been arguing with his wife about putting their son in school. Suddenly uprooted again. He says, “You didn’t hear?”

Of course Porgy is subdued. I tried to be nice to him, but maybe he is in pain. He showed up just as I was putting the food out for the other dogs. I am feeding them too much or Cherokee and Navaho need Porgy around to stimulate them to eat. When I came home I found a can of dog food standing up in the road. Not one of mine. Not a brand I use.

Porgy is staging a palace rebellion. He did not come when I called. He refused to eat. So I took his food away. He looked hungry, because he can’t help himself and just has that hungry dog look. Every rattle of paper and his eyes roll in my direction. So I gave him his food and he ate it lying down.

A colleague forgets to invite me to a meeting. Another asks why I wasn’t invited. My boss looks at me. He is amused. He knows me better than any of them and knows I wouldn’t have wanted to go.

I meet my neighbour on the train who tells me a sweet story about how his mother had fallen over backwards into icy water in Scotland. She had heated up so much climbing back up to the cottage looking for help that she didn’t in the end need any help at all. He adds that his grandmother had died at 97.

Tuesday 28 October

Today my American Muslim colleague tells me that she thinks I’m the funniest person in the group. I like this. She explains that she tells people, “With Rozes you laugh at her words. With me you would laugh at me.” I don’t agree. I think she is endearing and her words are funny. I don’t think I laugh at her but with her.

I felt I was dressed oddly. I had my yellow ochre shirt on and my yellow ochre jeans with mud on them. A man looks at me and smiles. I notice my reflection as I pass a window and my hair is sticking up like antennae.

Met my neighbour on the train who explained a lot about land leases and tenure. There was a man with a soft face looking at me and I wondered if my hair was sticking up on my head again.

Porgy spent a couple of days in the house. Last night and the night before he didn’t eat. Maybe he is eating elsewhere. I just want to know if he is OK.

Now, when I come home my heart lifts because of my cat, my horses and Cherokee, the female dog.

I have a month of hay left. I go through a bale a day. A hundred bales would have been about three months.

Talked to Annie. Her daughter Caroline goes to Milan to live with her boyfriend. Annie says that Caroline is very much in love.

I had been doing a course with the Open University and I didn’t finish it. I’m feeling sad about this. I didn’t feel I could be working and doing the course at the same time. I found the Brazilian man who also took the Discovering Science course we did in our first year. It was great, we both agree and he tells me that he has not enjoyed the other courses as much.

At work I watch my male colleagues, and hear them on their cell phones with their wives who may be half a world away. What do they feel so far from home? Their contracts are extended and when do they get to go home? I don’t know if I could stay so far from home. Although I am far from Jamaica, somehow Italy feels like home (or does it?). Anyway, I’m not married to a person living on a farm half way around the world.

I don’t feel 100 percent. I ate bad liver on Monday and have not felt well ever since. I ate in the cafeteria. Today I age gnocchi, little gluey balls of pasta with tomato stuff on top. The cook has changed and I think I can tell there is no passion there and no taste buds. Maybe he or she smokes. This is why I prefer the grilled meat that they cook in front of you.

Wednesday 29 to Friday 31 October

No entries.