Day 84 Ladies that lunch

Cosa ci racconti?

Literally, 'what can you tell us?' But in the context of Valentino's restaurant at lunchtime it means 'what have you got for us?'

The waitress knows this, but instead of listing the dishes she says:

Once upon a time there was a princess, with azure eyes, light hair, tall, wearing a dress with flowers on it.

We all smile, especially me-tall and turquoise- and my super sweet friend-delicate and violet- wishful princesses that we are.

Day 83

I am hypnotised by my husband systematically dismantling a watermelon at the kitchen table, decisively slicing half moon after half moon, knocking the shiny black teeth out of the fat smiles with the tip of the knife.

It takes me back to the same table years ago, when we hardly knew each other, and I watched for the first time, realising that there is more than one way to eat a watermelon.

Day 82

Today we choose sleeping over sun-burning on the Sunday full beach and decide to have breakfast outside in one of our favourite pasticcerie, that I have been waiting to reopen for nearly 3 years.

Yesterday we were at the other favourite, Pirani, where people arrive in waves wearing sunglasses and weighed down with Saturday shopping; where the same woman at the till and the same busy baristas in waistcoats and the same constant clatter of cappuccino cups onto saucers, never stop.

The bar goes on. And it is hard to believe that we have been away half a year.

Day 81

Today I am spoilt for choice. After longing for lovely things to write about like a discontented hen scratching in the dust, I am suddenly overwhelmed, delighted by moment after moment like a row of fat peaches on a market stall.

I chose just two.

At lunchtime, on the pink-flowered terrace, I break the cherry curse and manage to eat one after the other after the other without once counting the stones.

And then as if to prove that superstitions are no more we stay out late with our wonderful funny friend, all the way past midnight, and we don’t turn into yawning yellow pumpkins, or even a droopy bunch of fiori di zucca, like the ones waiting in the fridge.

Day 80

I am writing this thousands of miles up where the sun always shines and the clouds are a grey feather duvet or a pristine field of snow.

I am in between lives.

The house I left in a hurry where I didn’t have time to put fresh sheets on the bed to welcome us home again at midnight in a week’s time, but where I did manage to empty the fridge into a bursting plastic bag for my mum.

And the other house, that is a bit of mine, where two firm flat beds wrapped in a sheet make one matrimoniale and where the red fridge waits for me to fill it and un-fill it with treasures from my market.

Day 79

What are you thinking?

Tomato.

I am thinking rose.

We are sitting on our terrace eating a last left over supper before we leave tomorrow. The first bud is pale pink pursed lips and we will miss its first kiss, but I hope we will be home in time for the tomatoes.

Day 78

At three o'clock everything stops.

We all take a long breath of hot oven air and hold it until the very last minutes of injury time are over and then it all comes out in a rush of relief.

But no car horns beep victory.

You almost wouldn't know it had happened. But then again, this is England not Italy, and this is only the beginning.

Day 77

The single headlight of the moon follows me all the way home, unblinking.
I share the midnight road with the moths, like flecks of ash from a far away fire.
In the sleeping village our bedroom light is still awake, an amber window to welcome me.

Day 76 Red Sky at Night...

The longest day dawns bright blue and cloudless.

'Why is blue a colour associated with sadness?' he asks me, while I clean my teeth. Then before I have time to answer, 'you're a poet you should know'.

But today I don't.

And I am still thinking about it, as we drive home late, the sky on fire, red for delight.

Day 75

While walking with an old friend in a town where I used to live I stop to smell roses, chasing a scent like a memory, but the neatly folded pink petals have no perfume.

Over dinner we talk about our grandmothers, and how we lost them long before they died.

On the way home, I stop again and breathe in another rose-looser, lighter- full of apricots and gardens and promises.

Day 74

On the late drive home we find red light after red light, but the sky is the colour of coral on the nearly longest day of the year.

Day 73

Tonight I'm embroiled again in the mystery of butter icing which has fascinated me since I was small.
I make it twice, once with coconut and once with lemon, and both times the transformation, from chalky crumbs to satiny cream, amazes me.


It is suspense I can stand, as I always know it will come together in the end, unlike an unbearable World Cup game.

Day 72

All the way home on the train after my sister dinner, I think about meringues and writing.

The huge pink tipped cloud meringue we shared, passing it between us, wasn't nearly as good as the ones we grew up on, perfect every time from our queen of meringues mother.

We talked about writing: how it suits me and not my sister, like a colour we can't both wear; how it is my element, belonging to me, like meringues belong to our mum.

Day 71

In the murmuring whir of the gym fridge, from my exercise bike throne, I watch a pair of white shoes pumping on the cross trainer. The heels don't quite touch down.

For some reason I think of the birds, heavy winged and daring, that wait in the lanes until the last minute before lifting their feather skirts up and away from the oncoming car.

I wonder what it takes to fly: what brain impulse, what muscle flex, what urgency.

I imagine them bending their bird knees and pressing down their yellow heels as the road trembles beneath them.

Day 70

This morning our parsley plant is in crisis, each stalk dropping deeply down to touch the window sill.
I am dismayed. My husband waters it.

Is that what it needs? I ask anxious and ignorant.

Well, there's not much else I can do, I can't give it mouth to mouth resuscitation...

We laugh more than you would expect and all day I am tickled by his quickness and the inescapable image of him kissing each prickly edged leaf back to life.

Day 69 Man versus Nature

From the office window I watch a building being slowly demolished, crunched piece by piece in the clumsy dinosaur jaws of a machine. It is amazing how fragile it looks, half eaten, with the momentous sky showing through.

I remember my little ash tree at home, still there despite the death threat having over it like the ominous power lines, and I imagine its roots rippling like muscles under the concrete.

Day 68

World Cup fever has stormed the streets, maurading like the plague and leaving deep red crosses above doors, windows, and this year even cars.
Yesterday, despite myself, I am infected too and I find myself in the pub, my voice blurred with others, 'Come on!!!' called out in frustration and hope.

Day 67

Yesterday I talked to my aunt, my sister writer, about the alchemical effect of writing on our lives.

We have noticed that on some days, miles apart, we use the same words, echoing each other, borrowing without realising.

And then mystically, hours after our conversation, we both write about necklaces, hers strung with treasured memory beads, mine with motorway cars.

I feel the thread of my life tugged by hers and think again about the invisible strings that join one thing to another, like a darting kite to the hands of a man.

Day 66

All day I look for poetry and find it in the most unexpected of places.

In a Friday night traffic jam, inching my way along the heavy thread of motorway, the cars are shiny heat beaten beads in silver, midnight blue and forest green, at times clustered close, jostling for space on the string of road, then spreading out, loosening...

On the way home, we are fewer, a precious necklace of diamonds and rubies, sparkling in the dusk.

Day 65

Stealing a few minutes in the station bookshop on the way home I crouch down by the poetry shelves. I put my hand on the floor to steady myself and feel the rumble of a train below in the deep belly of London.

They don't have the poet I'm looking for, but on my way out I pick up a postcard instead, reading:

All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it... Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being...'
William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets.

At the last minute I panic and think that maybe the postcard wasn't free after all and that poetry, and my hunger for it, will set off the screaming alarms, will brand me a thief.

I keep walking anyway, out into the fast crowds, my head raised, my heart expanding.

Day 64

This morning my husband holds up an unopened packet of biscuits to his eye and mimes a little teardrop falling neatly onto the line where the instruction clearly states Tear Here.

He hasn't done this for years and it takes me back to another kitchen at the beginning, another table where we sat across from one another and discussed the intricacies and idiocy of English spelling.

Even now, he still can't quite believe that tear the ripping verb and tear the drop of salty sadness, are spelt identically.

But are you sure? he asks incredulously as he eats biscuit after biscuit for his Italian breakfast in our very English village kitchen.

Day 63

Today I read back over my writing, choosing entries like lottery numbers, for tomorrow's poetry competition deadline.
I decide which lucky ones will be scrubbed like new potatoes, cut like long-stemmed flowers for a vase, polished like raw gems, until they are ready.

Day 62

All day at work I have a hollow Monday feeling. My tummy is a bottomless well, into which I throw everything I can find: taught skinned grapes, ridged crisps, melting maltesers, all like foreign coins into a wishing fountain but nothing fills me up, there is no echo of response.

I am hungry for something else, for writing, for words, for the time to sift them through my fingers like sand, like jewels.

Day 61

On Friday I made my first strawberry jam, finally finding the fruit and the time to fill the jar that has been waiting hungrily on the top shelf (and 3 other odd shaped jars too).

Despite warnings about strawberry jam being stubborn about setting, something magical happens in the pan with the help of a lemon, and the swirling scarlet lava gets thicker and stickier and slowly, surely solidifies. It must be beginner's luck.

While the jam is cooling in the jars and the house is still heavy and sweet with the scent of molten strawberries the door bell rings. The man outside gets me to sign the death warrant of a delicate but determined tree growing by our steps, which is dangerously close to the overhead powerlines.

We'll have to take your little ash down he says.

At least now we know it's name, I console myself, as I close the door and I wonder if I will ever be able to make strawberry jam again without remembering the death of a tree.

Day 60

Today when I finally get back, my tired toes feel too far away from my knees.

My sweet husbands bends down and tenderly undoes the straps of my sandals which have hot hugged my feet tightly all day, like a promise kept.

As I step out of the shoes and onto the soft snow relief of the carpet, I feel like a contrary cinderella, bare-footed happy to be home.

Day 59

This morning I swim endless lengths thinking bikini. In the mirror while I dry my hair I look at my ghostly skin and promise myself again that this year I won't burn, that I won't become a prickly pink flecked daisy marked by the sun.

Maybe one day it will be fashionable to have skin as white as a mozzarella moon.

Day 58

After work I meet my mum for shoe shopping and doughnut eating.

The doughnuts are sugar on your finger rings, shared on a bench.
The shoes are shiny patent sandals that make my awkward red rubbed feet look sleek.

At home after getting the seal of approval from my very shoe particular husband, I re-read the label 'Good for the Sole'. I am satisfied that they are.

But the doughnuts are a guilty hole heavy in my tummy which only disappears after a trip to the cool humming gym.

Day 57

An impatient day, sun beating through glass, car engine sighing. There is no such thing as a short cut.

But sitting outside in the last of the late evening light, everything slows in a good way. We eat dinner the colours of summer and the Italian flag. Two puff pasty squares heaped with pale coins of courgette, red slippery peppers, silky spring onions and crumbs of salty feta. A little mozzarella melted over the top for luck.

I think how my father-in-law might like this new recipe, this chance meeting of left overs, and I watch as the first star appears.

Day 56

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,
rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,
doctor, lawyer, Indian Chief.

(The old superstition says that if you count cherry stones, you know who you'll marry)

Today I ate my first cherry of the year, a juicy ruby plucked from the blue glass bowl where it floated.

I remember cherries in Italy eaten like this from a crystal dish of iced water at a sunny table.

I try to resist my old urge to count the superstitious stones. I tell myself that it doesn't matter, that I'm married, that I don't need to control every last thing.

But it doesn't work. At ten I stop and the last cherry, round red surprise, goes pop in my husband's mouth.