Bit of a rush on this morning. Someone organised a conference call for 08:30. AM. Honestly! Just chucked some clothes on and now finishing off the last bit of bacon under the grill. The simple things in life.
In the shed by ten past eight ish, cup of tea in hand. Each morning I now stop at the bottom of the wildflower meadow and take a photo. It will be good to be able to put together a timelapse video of the growing meadow. Won’t be perfect as the camera angle will change from day to day but it will be good enough.
Due to a North Easterly wind tis a little cooler today which suits THG as she is off out with the Pink Ladies Running Club. They meet every Tuesday morning in the Waitrose car park if yer interested. Yesterday’s forecast rain did not appear which was a bit of a shame. It must be a few weeks now since we’ve had rain. The farmers will be starting to get worried. No rain is, however, good for honey bees. One of the participants in the Monday afternoon pilates class is a beekeeper. She said the bees loved this time of year with so much apple blossom around. Rain ain’t good for apple blossom, apaz. Makes sense. I am optimistic that we will have a good crop this year.
My other farming activity is the grapevine which has very much started to sprout. We have never been very successful with growing grapes but last year I was given a tip that will hopefully sort it out. Once the new growth has reached a certain length you trim the ends off. The plant thinks it is under threat and pushes out lots of flowers and we all know what that means. I think these are eaters rather than drinkers but that will be good. We would never get enough grapes off our one vine to make wine anyway.I just hope the harvest will be after we get back from Malta in September. Would be just our luck for them all to ripen and get eaten by birds when we are away.
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Just to let you know I’ve spent most of the afternoon so far trying to book group tickets for Pompeii. You can book ten tickets online but our group is 38 people so I need to do it differently. You also have to provide names of everyone in the group! Group bookings usually get faster entry so it is worth doing.
Now this is a lot harder than it sounds. First of all I have to sign a contract with an organisation in Florence that has nothing to do with selling tickets and exists solely to get you to sign a contract that effectively just tells you the ticket prices. Only one person in their office speaks a bit of English and is very difficult to get a message across to.
Anyway I signed the contract, with a little AI help as it wasn’t particularly obvious that there was anywhere to sign, sent it off together with my booking letter containing all the names and received an answer in Italian telling me to call a certain number (+39 081 5379358 < you have to keep the leading zero). That has an option for an English speaking attendant (yay) but when you click one to speak to said attendant you get a message saying “attention please, wrong number selected”.
I messaged our tour guide to say “I am really struggling to get through to parco pompeii to pay for the tickets” only to get the response “know it’s hellish”.
I don’t think they want visitors. Must have tried over ten times. Maybe fifteen. I’ve asked our Italian Sales Manager Marco to call and see if he gets any more joy with the Italian language option. Lo and behold Marco got through. We’re not there yet though. Fingers crossed eh?
In other news I found Brian flat on his back this morning, arms and legs in the air. I wonder if last night’s fox visitor did it. 20:45, 03:20 and 04:21. The lad is now back in position doing what he loves best but it must have been a shock to his system. At least he hadn’t landed in the lake which could have resulted in a rescue boat call out.
A night of snooker watching with THG beckons after chicken fajitas for din dins. What’s not to like?