Heat and Light

I wrote a little thing below. It was up to 34C again today. My conclusions are as always very provisional.

If Scotland contends with everlasting daylight at Midsummer and the weeks that follow here in Tuscany, at 1500 feet above sea level, we contend with everlasting heat.

Even though darkness falls by 9:30, it is as if the oven of daytime is on the Devil’s timer. We lie stretched out on top of the bed, the heat gathering and roiling in the confines of four thick stone walls and our high-ceilinged terracotta roof.

Afternoons are no longer afternoons but a weird, jumbled slumber, riven by strange dreams and the interruptions of the World Service playing out over the internet.

The concomitant is the night where wakefulness lurks in the steamy corners. Dogs, wedding parties and the three-miles-hence outdoor disco compete the yammering of sleepless nighttime insects. It is something of a relief when the first birdsong starts and light glows behind the Apennine dividing line at 4:30. The rumble of the first train to Arezzo follows at 5:00.

You have to time everything to perfection; the run to the shops; taking the rubbish down to the bins on the road; working out when and how and with what sweat-soaking-up equipment you can face the steep terraced garden that flintily mirrors the rising sun.

Each day I cut a little bit more of the big field, choosing the section that still has its guardian of frail protective shade. Nevertheless, it is hot but not mercilessly so and although everything is soaked with sweat within 15 minutes, there is a way of managing the heat, the flies and my glasses.

If it weren’t for the bugs and flies, I would do it all in just a pair of shorts, boots and a straw hat.

But that is the kind of fantasy that urban dwellers bring to the country. You’d need skin like leather to not be excoriated by bites and rashes from malicious plants; the apparently gentle stroke of outstretched bramble; the poisonous end of broken Old Man’s Beard that was once used by beggars to disfigure their arms in the hope of better alms.

We had a friend out at the weekend. He was rapturous about the house; saying that if there were a house in his Tuscan dreams that he could inhabit this would be it. But then added that when living in the lower Arno Valley near Florence he loved the Italian year except for that section (a mere four months after all) between May and early September which was, in fact, hell.

So we waiver about selling up. Whether it were better to be in damp Galloway, looking out towards Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Lake District, waiting for the next great Atlantic depression to roll in and bring life-giving rain and beautiful, cool 3000-mile-wide air.

Or whether it is better to stick it out here for the next two years with the melons that taste like melons and the bounty of our gardening efforts and take the heat in our stride accepting that afternoons will be that long, disgruntled slumber, broken only by glasses of ice-filled white wine knocked down recumbent in on the sofa in the penumbras dark while watching the young lads of the Tour de France fighting to the last breath in the terrible afternoon heat of our burning planet.