Level 2 Chi Kung sitting down. Microcosmic orbit.

After the fabulous weather we had in late spring and early summer, it would be churlish to complain that it is chilly today, even though we are still in the middle of bloody August, but hell, my knee is hurting so I’m going to go right ahead and be churlish. It’s a deeply unpleasant shock to come back from Italy and find London feeling distinctly autumnal. Over the spring and summer we had gradually gone from a 13.5 tog duvet to a 3.5 tog duvet and then finally to a thin patchwork quilt (bought at the Great Wall in 1997 and chosen partly for thinness so it would fit in the suitcase home). Arriving home in the early hours, neither of us had the energy to find the duvet, and, as a result, we froze all night. Nick is already talking about draining the pool but I am hoping (against logic) for a last burst of good weather.

10:30 and we have successfully checked out. Sadly, due to a quirk of fate (a takeover I think), the hotel which administers our holiday apartment is not the nearest hotel, but one a few hundred metres down the road. Still, with the help of a pressure bandage (which has reduced the swelling) and the support of a strong husband, I made it down the stairs and along the street, and am now installed in the lounge area of the hotel foyer: in the shade, sitting on a comfortable sofa, with free WIFI and as close as possible to the ladies’ room. Nick has taken the children swimming to fill in some time. So far, so good.

One of the more interesting bits that came up on a John Grinder course I did a few years ago was his suggestion to pay attention to the songs that run unbidden through your head. After years of having ‘We’ve got to get out of this place/ if it’s the last thing we ever do’ and UB40’s ‘If it happens again I’m leaving / I’ll pack up my things and go’ on rapid rotation, it’s interesting to note that it is now more likely to be ‘Ajax’ shoulders moved boulders / Helen’s hips launched ships’ (by the wonderful Peggy Seeger) or ‘That’s my daughter in the water / everything she knows I taught her’. In fact Dash got a bit offended when I kept singing that last one and I had to come up with something that mentioned sons post haste. Sadly I couldn’t use the McGarrigle’s ‘First Born Son’ (which is fun to sing) because a) Jack’s the firstborn, and b) the person described in the song is a redneck arsehole. Fortunately another McGarriggle song fitted the bill, can’t remember the title but it goes: ‘It’s the sun, son, shining on the water…’.

Attempted level 2 Chi Kung sitting down, with all elements requiring legs imagined. Had to be out of our holiday apartment by 10am and finally arrived home around 2am Italian time, 1am UK time. It’s frustrating that airports seem to be designed not for smooth passenger flow but to force travellers to pass through as many ‘duty free’ shops as possible. The irony being that of course they aren’t really duty free anymore if you are travelling within the EU – I guess that’s why they have to maximise the captive audience. Annoying when you are in pain, dragging several tired children, and just want to get on the damn plane. Knee pretty sore by the end, but home safe with no further damage done. Phew!

Sherlock very excited to see us.

Attempted level 2 Chi Kung sitting down, with all elements requiring legs imagined! Still surprisingly strenuous. Microcosmic orbit.

A dull day trying to keep the injured knee elevated, then culminating this evening in trying to pack by remote control – though Kate and Dash are doing their best to be helpful and even Jack joined in, it is an incredibly frustrating process. Finished A Casual Vacancy – a good read with a sad ending.

Slightly dreading tomorrow as we haven’t been able to secure a late checkout, so we have to be out of the hotel by 10 am and we don’t fly until 9:10 pm, so a long day to fill in and I have yet to walk without using a chair as a zimmer frame – so not sure how I will negotiate the stairs to leave the hotel, let alone any of the other walking required.

Level 2 Chi Kung. Microcosmic orbit. Jade egg.

Took Kate and Dash swimming in the pool. On the way back, I called out to Katie to take care and hold the hand rail coming up the slippery marble stairs with wet feet, failing to notice that the path I was on was slick with water where they had watered the flowerpots. I went down awkwardly, partially dislocating my knee. Kate was brilliant: finding the key where it had gone flying and unlocking the apartment, bringing me a towel (I was suddenly very cold) and then a kitchen chair to lever myself up on and use as a kind of makeshift zimmer frame. Ibuprofen, elevation and an ice pack (Popsicles the children rejected earlier in the week!) got the pain under control but the knee is swollen and I can’t put weight on it. Not sure if I am more gutted that I won’t get a final swim in the sea before we go home on Tuesday, or that I won’t be able to do Chi Kung. Feeling very cross with myself.

Level 2 Chi Kung (with hands on floor). Microcosmic orbit (with good energy in all the right colours.). Jade egg.

A perfect day. I took the children to the pool in the morning and Nick took them in the afternoon. Katie went from tentatively putting her head under to swimming underwater and touching the bottom. Just before sunset I took them swimming in the sea and the water was warm and the swell was just the perfect size for Katie’s favourite buoy game. My turn to take Kate and Dash out for dinner. Even the wait for food was relaxed, due partly to the restaurant’s generous provision of bread and grissini and partly to a hilarious conversation. I casually mentioned that even Dash (who is very fair) is going brown, whereas I continue to look like a total lobster. Dash, who is very literal and, for reasons I won’t go into, has an American accent, said ‘No Mom, you don’t look like a lobster at all. You don’t have those weird legs, you’re not crusty, you don’t have a shell…’ and warming to his theme I said ‘and I don’t have those pincer things and that’s good because I don’t think my children would like it if I came up to them [SFX mummy clacking hands like lobster claws] and saying “Hey, I need a cuddle”. Fortunately we are in child-friendly Italy, so the staff and other diners looked benevolently on the ensuing hilarity.

Ordered the smoked fish platter – two types of smoked fish and (pescatorians beware!) a generous helping of bresaola! All yummy. Takeaway gelato on the way home tasted extra good eaten looking out to sea.

When not in the water I carried on reading JK Rowling’s ‘A Casual Vacancy’ (I have temporarily given up on ‘The Burning Answer’ on the grounds that quantum physics just isn’t suitable holiday reading). I’m now up to page 140 and there are still only two sympathetic characters and one of them is the guy who died in the first 5 pages! She really is an acute (if pessimistic) observer of her fellow human beings though. I was particularly taken with this description of a woman who has married a violent and abusive man: “part of what she had loved about him, from the beginning, was that this rough and wild boy, who was contemptuous, rude and aggressive to nearly everyone, had taken the trouble to attract her; that he, who was so difficult to please, had selected her, alone, as worthy”. Wow, it’s really not at all difficult to think of women who have married, and stayed with, arseholes, on exactly this basis. Many of whom seem to actively enjoy their husband’s rude treatment of their friends and family as a kind of weird vindication of their own value.

Makes me feel grateful to Cee Payne, who, years ago, advised me to stop looking for a partner who shared my politics and look for someone domestically compatible, a man, in her words, ‘who patchouli oils his own floors’. I have yet to meet a guy who even knows what patchouli oil is, let alone puts it on the floor – but I took the spirit of the advice to heart, and it has served me well.

Did Level 2 Chi Kung and microcosmic orbit and took the children swimming in the pool while Nick walked up to the Sanctuary of the Avvocata, a small religious building on a ridge 1000m above the village. To be clear, he was in it for the challenging exercise rather than the spiritual experience! But he is now so fit that he didn’t find it challenging other than the plagues of biting insects. Dash and I having woken up very red and tender, I had decided that we had better seek the shade today, so we both swam in long-sleeved shirts and tried to stick to the shady side of the pool. This was a bit frustrating for Katie, as she seems to have inherited her Gran’s olive skin and is going a lovely golden colour with no sign of burning, so she herself had no need to stay in the shade, but is of course too young to go swimming unless Nick or I accompany her. I couldn’t think of any way I could take her swimming in the sea without getting more burned, and she begged, pleaded and nagged Nick all afternoon but, sadly for her, he is very adept at ignoring her.

Took the children swimming in the hotel pool. Level 2 Chi Kung. Microcosmic orbit. Took the children for a ‘quick’ swim in the sea except it was so perfect we stayed in for 2 and 1/2 hours. Until today the sea has been like a mill pond but today there was quite a big swell. I wasn’t sure how they would cope with it but they loved it and we had a great time – though Dash and I are now rather singed. Katie seems to be going brown whereas sadly Dash and I are honouring our Viking ancestors by rocking the boiled lobster look. Hey ho. Back to the room and into clothes for a trip to Villa Crimbone – not to eat at the eye-wateringly spendy restaurant but to visit the attached gardens. The drive to Ravello was interesting in a life- threatening kind of way. But Ravello was beautiful and the gardens were lovely. It is so lovely now that Kate and Dash can enjoy this sort of visit – just wished that Ann Eade
could have been there with us, as she would have loved it – though not the drive to get there! Home to takeaway pizza and now looking forward to an early-ish night. Ferragusto tomorrow, so we will be sticking close to home, and staying well away from motorised transport.

Level 2 Chi Kung. Microcosmic orbit. Swimming with the children. Bus trip to Amalfi.

I have travelled in matatus in Kenya, local buses in Tanzania and Zim (which, at the time, most whites regarded as a fairly reliable way to commit suicide) and rode (many times) in Harari’s notorious ETs (emergency taxis). And I have of course, many, many times, traversed the Hill. For South Islanders, no further specification is required. For the benefit of others, I am, of course referring to the Takaka Hill, gateway to Golden Bay, which I am now told is a ‘spiritual centre’ but which I knew more as the type of place where 13 year old girls occasionally boarded the school bus too stoned to speak (and no, I don’t mean me). Long before the road was fixed up and smoothed out and tamed to its current, fairly-civilised form, I was driven over it by a boy-racer with a death wish (no, not Nick), by a Newman’s bus driver who casually delivered newspapers as he drove (rolling them up and heaving them out the window as he wrestled the enormous bus around the hairpin bends) and have driven it myself in mid-winter on black ice, in a mini with erratic steering, in mid-summer in an unfamiliar sports car in a state of shock and grief… But I can safely say that I have never experienced a more hair-raising journey than today’s bus trip to Amalfi. It started off well enough – we zipped through Minori and Marmorata, hardly killing anybody. It was just the other side of Marmorata that we met a stream of traffic coming towards us, lead by an enormous bus, identical to ours. There was a shouted exchange between drivers, but with no way to pass and nowhere to turn around, something had to give. So we passed through Marmorata again – backwards and rather more slowly. We eventually reached a part of the road where, if our driver pressed our bus right up against the cliff, it was just possible for the other bus, and the cars following it, to edge past us along the very edge of the sheer drop. The waiting was obviously hard on our driver’s nerves though, because, before the stream of traffic coming towards us had dried up, he suddenly started moving forward, with the result that we quickly got stuck again. This time however he was not going to be the one who backed down, and I feared for the lives of the two women in the car and the girl on the scooter, who had to somehow manoeuvre around us. Even the locals looked a little alarmed.

When I see the garish ceramics on sale here (often at very high prices) I begin to understand why visitors to NZ who make it as far as Brightwater, tend to fall into Royce McGlashan’s arms and buy up the shop.

Housekeeping, who have been conspicuous by their absence since our arrival, showed up without warning this morning, so I took the kids to the pool to get them out of the cleaners’ way. The day was hot by the time they left, so I was grateful to do Level 2 Chi Kung in my wet swim suit as a way of keeping cool. Microcosmic orbit. Spent the afternoon reading about, and watching clips of, Robin Williams, while Nick took the children back to the pool. Took Kate and Dash out to a restaurant for dinner, then brought treats home for Nick. I had never thought much of Italian cakes/desserts before, but here they really are fab.