Yet another day of rain and sleet is assailing us here in Italy. The start of 2021 has not been very propitious what with the new covid mutant and the final act of the Brexit tragedy. At least, however, there are signs that the light at the end of the tunnel has not been a mirage. Things can only get better on the supposition that it would be difficult to have them get worst.
Actually, of course, staying in Longoio, a little village of barely twenty souls in a remote corner of the Apennine, is the best place to be in a pandemic.
Throughout the history of plagues the first thing any sensible person did was to clear out of overcrowded urban centres. Samuel Pepys, for example, fled to Greenwich, then very much a country retreat, and that wonderful compendium of tales by Boccaccio, the Decameron, is the result of a group of young people escaping the Florentine plague and seeking refuge in a villa on the surrounding hills.
(Early New Year’s Day at Longoio)
Blocked by the atrocious weather and by plague restrictions there is not much else to do but keep warm, weather the storm and read a good book (at the moment mine’s Goethe’s ‘Italian Journey’).
There will come a day, no doubt, when we will look back on these times with a certain nostalgia….
Oh Longoio
Mysterious to behold
I miss you dearly!
It is those damp winter cold days that make you yearn for those balmy summer days despite the unbearable heat throughout which I just managed to paint doors windows with yaucht varnish to protect them from these explicit rainy icy neverending winter moments. Now I need to do more painting but it is just too cold for the paint and the paint brush but as soon as the weather changes I am rearing to go. I ask myself what is this “new normal” ? It seems that it is just a sort of slowing down of our lives with ever increasing difficulties to surmount. This constant Memento Mori seems to make life pass us by as we are trying to reconcile with Nature. A new life seems to be emerging a la 1984 Orwellian style. Is there really an end in sight of this dreadful Covid19 world wide Pandemic. Some of us are brave lucky survivors and yet now we are being subjected to a worse more virulent invisible enemy. Is there hope for humanity when you realise that already 70% of animal species are now extinct. We can only pray and hope that this pandemic will soon cease and also that Nature resolves its difficulties with our intervention.
Thank you dear Sandra for your very pertinent comment. We are indeed living through hard times. Let’s try to do so however with a smile on our faces.