The High Casentino in Snow

I dithered and swithered about attempting the Pass. It was a balmy 6C in Fiesole but with the fierce Tramontana blasting I wondered what the snow conditions would be at 1000m.

The snow line was at about 750m and the temperature fell to 1 below at the top. I guess there was six inches of snow and the ploughs had been out.

It amazes me that gritting and ploughing is all done on a very local basis - chain-tyred trucks and little flat bed vans with grit hoppers. And they use white salt which looks like snow. But all was well.

I dropped down 500m to the house to take a quick look around. Someone had knocked a big concrete flower tub off a low retaining wall - they must have taken a skid on our very rough track although the snow had melted. Then I skedaddled back through the snow with fleeting sun (I've bunged in a few extras).

Back in the midriff of the Arno valley you'd not have known there was snow around.

I'm holding off from going down to the doctor for my Certificato di Anamnestico. I'd like to think this is a Certificate of Forgetting - something Fernando Pessoa might have dreamt up on the Lisbon bank of the Tagus. And would be most useful in the desperate times.

Instead it is a drug and alcohol test. 

Hey ho.

Good luck to Yvette Cooper and her A50 extension amendment and, although I have lots of questions, good luck to Stella Creasy and her amendment to bring some kind of deliberative democracy (ie Citizens' Assemblies) processes into Brexit decisions (more on my Twitter feed FergusMMurray if you can bear it).