The weather has been marvellous, bright warm days with a little wind to temper the sudden increase in temperature. This is in contrast to the weather we arrived to last year which was grey windy and wet, nothing that recently departed Londoners find out of the normal but the contrast to this year is evident to say the least. Easter also fell earlier last year and we’d witnessed snow flurries on Easter Sunday as we sat in our Airbnb in Essex as we munched through my daughters’ chocolate eggs and other assorted goodies. This year we ate lunch outside on a beautiful 24°C spring day as good as some that we witness during the height of summer when in the British Isles.
So, with Easter and Spring upon us and our one-year anniversary with it, I thought I’d look back over the year and try and make some sense of the jumble of experiences, emotions and education that has been the last 365 days of our lives here. I won’t attempt a chronological analysis and will hope to express it in a more experiential way, as that is how it happened. Saying that I seem to have started at the end so I shall enforce a beginning.
Our routines had been thrown out of the window the moment we left our rented home in North London, from then onwards there was a series of tasks and obstacles to either complete or overcome and A mild sense of anxiety. Gone was the comforting feeling of arriving home and relaxing into our evening duties and a dinner together, a bedtime story and a bit of homework, possibly even a sprawl on the couch. As we finally left Haringey I’m sure we all felt this mild trepidation of the unknown, which was to be subdued by a month of sofa surfing and Airbnb-ing that at least added a little excitement to the anxiety. Nonetheless we weren’t going to feel the comforting hand of routine for a while yet.
One of our favourite routines of last year, was one that we had initiated in the hot summer months in a desperate attempt to be comfortable. This routine found its beginnings and shape around other people’s routines. PRANZO-LUNCH! The definitive meal of the day, the bright star around which the rest of the day orbits. It’s a serious business and must be treated with reverence whilst being discussed, the day preceding it, the evening preceding it and also the morning just before it. The morning discussion also signals the beginning of the preparation and reviews any amendments too the menu for LUNCH/PRANZO. Obviously, this amount of work and planning can be tiresome, as can the body’s task of digesting food, so closely following lunch follows the siesta. Now the duration of siesta depends on many elements and can be a decidedly tricky time period to try and define. If you’re wanting something from a shop or commercial enterprise, say in the vicinity of Buggerru-Fluminimaggiore then you’re looking at 3-5 hours from roughly 13:00. If you want to do a noisy bit of work, you’ll probably get away with firing up the angle grinder around 16:30 at the earliest. Funnily enough a strimmer has just kicked in, it’s noisy 2-stroke engine carries across the fields as I write this, I glance at the time and the clock informs me that its 16:28….
After our lunches and the inevitable washing and cleanup we would usually retire upstairs to rest, watch something on TV and hide, but not to take part in the main element of siesta…. Sleep! My wife being raised here and being culturally embedded has no problem with sleeping and will happily siesta with the best of them. I on the other hand have numerous problems and hang-ups with my siesta, I shall refer to it as my siesta as I don’t have a problem with other peoples (apart from not being able to angle grind at 15:00). My problems with my siesta are also culturally embedded and for that reason have become hard to exercise. It’s not really a thing to siesta in the UK (except for say a Saturday or Sunday couch based quickie!),so there starts the first difficulty. When I was drinking, I did use to indulge in a siesta or two. when I would come here on holiday I could really knock some back and then sleep it off (the local Mirto, the after Lunch/Pranzo alcohol slap around the chops was my preferred over indulgence. Mainland Italy is famous for Lemon Cello (also a thing here). Sardinia on the other hand is the place of Mirto and made from the Myrtle berry. It’s an after lunch digestivo, to aid your body in digestion and sleeping! In the UK when its nice out, you make sure that you spend a lot of time out. Many a mother has chastised their child for being in on a nice day and this is the feeling that nags at me the most during this post Lunch/Pranzo quiet time. Thirdly we live UPSTAIRS! We live in a roof, a roof that during those summer months soaks up the intense heat from our sun and stores so we can carry on being roasted, even when that bright star has gone to bring light and heat to the other side of our planet. The temperature upstairs can be oppressive at best and damn right brutal at worst. So, we came up with a beautiful solution to our siesta problems. We dug out our hammocks which we haven’t used in years, but had handily resurfaced during the recent move. We packed some books and swimmers and a few bottles of water and headed out in the van to a little pine wood (Pinetta) nestled out on the headland at Capo Pecora. It started as something different to do that stopped us from being cooked alive or annoying either each other or anyone else enjoying their siesta and it also tackled my guilt at being in on a nice day. In time it turned into a well refined and looked forward to routine with kit packed ready to go post Pranzo/Lunch. We’d arrive at our spot up above the sea, we’d string the hammocks under the shade of the large pine trees. If there was a breeze it would move the branches or silence the cicadas momentarily. My wife would swim and then settle into her hammock for siesta time, whilst my daughter and I would read or listen to the cicadas as they filled the air with their all-encompassing cacophony of chaos. After an hour or so my wife would be rudely awakened by the sound of chuckling and pinecones bouncing off her as a 10-year-olds face cheekily tries to convince you it is not the guilty party. You would think that this would get boring after the first day but throwing pine cones never gets boring, especially if the target is sleeping. Once we were all awake, we’d usually walk down the hill and have a swim in the rocky bay below. When the sea was at its calmest, we’d swim out to one of the rocky islands and take it in turns to dive off the outcrop into the sea.
This wonderful after lunch escapade was possible for the three summer months that the Italian schools are on summer break. Early June till early September, a holiday that’s so long you forget that it’s a holiday. This was our first taste of the academic year in Italy – a mega long beast of a holiday. My daughter had completed five weeks of her final year of Scuola Elemtare (Elementary School) on arriving in Sardinia. Then she had been gifted her three-month summer vacation and was waiting to start Scuola Media that September. This was the month that real routines would start, not the hot and lazy afternoon hammocking and swimming sessions that characterised that summer, but the day-to-day toing and froing of the school runs.
The school run in London was quite a quick affair and could be completed in 10 minutes at pace, especially if the morning had taken a turn for the tardy. Even on a tardy day there would be a straggle of parents encouraging their children to up their pace a little and get themselves through that school gates for 08:45. Here the scenario is different, for a start school starts at 08:00 and the school my daughter attends is in Fluminimaggiore and not the nearer school in the village of Buggerru. So, with the decision to send her to the larger school we had added 10km to the school run. The 13km trip to Flumini takes around 15 minutes from entering the vehicle, but in real terms we have to be out of the house by 07:35 as it’s a little walk to the van and we need to allow time for errant goat herds or 3 wheeled apisceddas (think Asian 2 stroke rickshaw and you’re not far off) trundling along the road that may hold us up.
During the winter months we again learned the importance of engaging in an afternoon activity and how the mind, body and soul suffered if we neglected this routine. It didn’t need to be much and we didn’t have to go far and we are fortunate in that respect to have an ample amount of outdoor options on our door step. After picking my daughter up from school at 14:00 we’d ditched the straight home and crack on with the homework sketch as it meant we ended up sacrificing the only daylight hours we had at our disposal. The consequence of those active afternoons was the usual mountain of homework ended up being finished quite late into the evening, but this was an issue we were willing to deal with.
Amazing Patterned Rocks on Spiaggia Sa Perdischedda Manna
Again Capo Pecora became our go to area, there’s an amazing tranquillity to the place that’s tempered by the sea smashing onto the granite rocks during the months when the sea is at its most animated. The rocky outcrops and sea stacks themselves are bewildering cascades of orange and pink hued granite, many giving the impression they are about to unload themselves down into the sea as the blocks teeter one on top of the another. Depending on the time of the year parts of the landscape took on a welcoming British moorland feel with wandering sheep and lush green countryside. The rapidity of the growth of the fauna during the Spring months meant the landscape changed dramatically month by month as new vegetation altered the vista and also our routes to favoured areas.
In the early months of the year we’d go out scouting for wild asparagus in the evenings, which although it can be a painful activity due to the brutal spikes on this hardy shrub, it is worth the effort to create a wonderful risotto with. Later on in another post I will describe Tizianos wild asparagus and pig cheek pizza Bianca, but we don’t have the time here. Bouldering and climbing came into their own as the year progressed and the evenings drew out allowing us more time to play about on the rocks and soak up the tranquillity. The visit becoming a weekly sojourn in the spring months and usually on a Friday as a nice way to start the weekend. We often picked a circular route that traversed the undulating bush and scrub that often resembles British moorland in the wetter months. These pleasant little paths and pastures changed as the months progressed and the rain appeared less and less. Stepping over old dry stone walls and through terrain that the local wild boar population have had a good go at turning over. We could reach the bouldering area and the main crag that can be accessed without getting wet feet in about 25 minutes. On the return leg we would follow the coastal path through the array of boulders and cliffs passing across The Baia Di Ouva (Bay Of Eggs)as it’s known locally with its egg shaped rocks. If you were looking on a map it would usually be named Spiaggia di Porto Tramazzo. The Coastal path winds a marvellous panoramic route and never fails to impress come rain or shine. Sunset being my favourite time to be on this path and at anytime of year, as the descending sun seems to paint the rocks a magnificent orange.
Now that we’ve been living here a year, a year that followed a very bizarre Pandemic and an even more bizarre Post Brexit experience in London. It’s quite satisfying to look back and see how we’ve dealt with the changes. Maybe the changes didn’t seem as crazy and out of the ordinary as they were, especially when they were held up and compared to the proceeding couple of years in London? I mean living here hasn’t just been all cosy and rosy and awesome beaches with epic walks and paradise on the doorstep. Where ever you live you have problems, all people do that is life! Big changes have big consequences, some foreseen and others not. Its how you deal with them and how you go forward in life that dictates how you are going to feel in any given situation. Applying for my residency and dealing with Italian bureaucracy is enough to test the patience of all the saints combined, fitting into a new community and trying to learn a new language are difficult and testing tasks. Watching those you love suffer as they try to deal with new and stressful aspects of our new existence stabs at your heart, but is it not these experiences that push us to be creative and to find new ways of doing things? To change and grow as people? We’re still finding our feet and we will be for some time, we still have new routines to find the rhythm of and situations both positive and negative to experience. We’re slowly furrowing our own little path and adding a little bit of our influence as we settle into and become a part of Sardinia.
Very nice, I enjoyed reading it.
Thanks Simone , there’s more posts available on the site if you navigate around it..
Lovely honest account. I also enjoyed that much.