Crosses to bear

All clearly have different crosses to bear in property transactions: a friend selling a N Yorkshire farm with endless wrangles about water supply and maintenance easements; a neighbour in the south east who discovered their purchase did not include title to the property; my nightmares with underpinning in South London.

I finally tackled the eneaten preserves today. Mainly gherkins and jam and frozen cherries. Lots of very useful purpose built preserving jars.

The rains here are surprisingly intense, a thunder bolt from 1.7km away out of the blue as I carried camping chairs shoulder high in the wet. Tomorrow we have an orange warning for rain and hydro geological phenomena- ie land slips. It’s a huge issue in the steeply eroded fractured rocks of the geologically young morphology of the Appenines.

It quite hard to maintain a sense of escape velocity - that necessary thrust to get beyond the gravitational pull of the safely familiar- when the timetable and countdown keeps slipping.

I’ve beenListening to a biography of James Joyce, reading one of Eric Blair (Orwell), scouring BBC sounds for listenable drama and comedy, an interim of the chilling sad tale of a tank regiment from D Day to northern Germany (Brothers in Arms)l read by Al Murray. Waugh’s ‘A Handful of Dust’ and re-relistening to scandi noir spoof Angstrom on Sounds. Lot of time to fill, lot of anxieties to be headed off at the pass.