No stone unturned

Dear Reader,

Imagine my chagrin when I unthreaded the oil press this beautiful morning to find such green unfinished business beneath the pressing plate

Clearly my frangitura is lacking. The olives are supposed to be ground to a subtle paste. Not too much on the kernels - the old stone mill wheels (molazze) left a gap between their terrible weight and the press floor to avoid this.

So I set to with a False Acacia pounder to crack down and pulp, adding back to the mix the largely vegetable water (50% to 75% of the olive’s weight) I’d extracted so lovingly last night. And then to press again.

It was a thrill, with all the problems of the press, to see fat globules of oil emerging. Through the day I rearranged the blocks to squeeze my last ha’pence from the olive cake.

Not that there weren’t other jobs done in the interim, the longeurs of my quest for oily gold.

And still yet. Despite ingenious decanting and filtering the thimbleful of finished green oil eludes me. And destiny itself.

But I am bathed and anointed in the stuff by my too close proximity. And so am I rendered full of life giving phenolic whiffs and antioxidant potentialities. I am your latter day Ancient. Your massaged Olympiad. (See driver for details.)

(Although I rather suspect that the getting of olive oil was so laborious in its many phases that it was left to slave and feudal servant to do the actual getting while Biblical scribes and Ancient apothecaries listed its many gastronomic and healing properties.)

And so the day passed. Agonisingly close to closure. At one point I unpressed the press and took the remnant olive cake to the fire to stop the madness.

I have always had a yen to pan for gold in the Merioneth streams up in the steep barren valleys in the old artillery ranges behind Bronaber. Gwynfynydd and the blueberry hoards at Bedd Coeddyr.

But this caper ran me a close second.

Long live the gold that we chase in our all too human folly.