Attraversiamo

The second anniversary of T's death has been and gone. Not one day goes by that I don't think about T, so the anniversary of T's death is really a day (or two days) like any other; filled with the same amount of painful love, longing, regret, sorrow, memories etc etc. Recalling the exact detail of those horrendous 24 hours causes me more heart-searing pain than anything else, just thinking about it makes me cry. So I really believe that I've spent both anniversaries in the most perfect of ways. Last year I was with GB and his lovely daughters. We had a great day; I remember it well. The sun shone, the girls asked me questions that would ordinarily have been difficult but because of their innocence were perfectly manageable. We ate well and drank too much. We remembered T but not in a heavy, depressing way. Just in a remembering way - recalling him and times we shared with him. Tears were shed but there was much laughter, late into the night over one too many whiskies and a sky lantern. I felt supported and looked after and loved. This year I was in Italy with Chri and two of his friends, Massimo and Elvira, a couple I'd never met before. None of them were aware of the significance of the date until my emails made me cry on Saturday evening and I confided in Chri but, with hindsight, that was all good. The weekend was filled with food, food and more food. And a fair bit of wine. Lots of sun, sea and sand. And bucketloads of laughter and raucous giggles. I think T would have approved.

Upon hearing that Massimo is a better chef than Chri, I'd made a special request to be sous-chef on Friday night. It was great! I was told that we were going to open the white wine and, with the first glasses poured, Massimo and I were going to cook while Chri and Elvira made the beds and set the table. First of all we prepared the secondi - stuffed lettuce leaves (waaaaay more delicious than they sound). My first task was to beat two eggs. I combined them with mince and we added crushed pine nuts, grated nutmeg and parmesan and mashed everything together well with a fork. We should have added marjoram but there wasn't any. We then dipped lettuce leaves in a frying pan filled with boiling water, just for ten seconds or so, until slightly wilted. They were dried and we put a spoonful of the meat mixture onto the leaf and rolled it up into a little dim sum-like parcel. Massimo demonstrated with the first one, then I was in charge of the parcel making while he did the leaf dipping and drying. It was like a bad cookery programme where we'd be moving around the kitchen doing a bit of cooking, then Massimo would ask how we say a particular word in English so we'd do a bit of vocab, then carry on with the cooking. ('Corkscrew' was a particularly challenging word for the Italians to pronounce and remember. That and 'dwarves', but more about the small people later.) Hanging out with Italians as a non-Italian speaker is proving to be great and authentic teaching practice for me. We're doing vocab, pronunciation, grammar points and a bit of cultural stuff, all day every day.

With the parcels prepped, we started work on the primi: pasta with courgette from Massimo's garden, onions, saffron and cream. I didn't really contribute much to this course but I was recalled back to the kitchen to observe - Massimo clearly took his training role very seriously! Onions and courgette were finely diced, then fried off in some oil before adding the rest of the ingredients. Meanwhile, Elvira had completed her chores and made the antipasti - she toasted little rounds of bread, then added anchovies and cherry tomatoes to one lot, gorgonzola to another and parmesan to another. We ate them, then, while the pasta sauce was cooking, we started cooking the lettuce parcels. We heated up finely diced onion in olive oil, then added some water. The parcels were dropped in and we kept adding more water as necessary, so they were sort of being steamed (Massimo called it humidor, I think?), towards the end we also added a splash of white wine. The smell was divine! While they were cooking we had our primi pasta dish = big thumbs up. The pasta was cooked to perfection. (I'm going to invest more in pasta in the future. This stuff was dried but more yellow that the basic pasta I normally get. I'm pretty sure I've seen something similar in the UK but probably wasn't prepared to pay more for it. Now I will.) Next, the lettuce leaves were served on their own, in a pool of the stock/broth that had formed = delicious too! After we cleared away, Chri finely chopped some hazelnuts, mixed them with a spoonful of Nutella in four espresso cups and poured coffee over the top. A perfect way to end the meal! We then drank red wine while watching 'Eat Pray Love'. I can't think of a more appropriate film to have watched that evening - food, drink, soul-searching, Italy, India. It had it all and, cheesy as it was, seemed to speak directly to me.

I had a lie in on Saturday morning while Chri went and got the foccacia and reserved the sun loungers and Massimo cooked lunch for us to take to the beach. And when I say cooked, I mean cooked! He got up about 8am and made meatballs with the leftover mince and a delicious sauce with courgettes, onions and tomatoes. I simply got up late, sat in my PJs dipping foccacia into the caffe latte I was presented with and observed the last stages of the cooking. Plenty of distractions that prevented me from focusing too much on the fact it was the second anniversary of T's accident. We eventually made it to the beach and spent the day in the sunshine - swimming in the sea, drinking coffee, reading and eating. It was a good balance of quiet thinking time as and when I needed it, but lots of distractions and activity too. I was slightly perturbed when, while Chri was having a massage on the beach, Massimo told me that he couldn't have an all-body massage as he would rise. Er, OK, a bit too much information but I have heard of that happening to men! Turns out he unintentionally confused the Italian verb 'to laugh' with the English verb 'to rise' and meant to say that he couldn't have an all-body massage as he would laugh, ie he's ticklish, but I only found that out later. (I can hear you laughing from here, AB!!) I was in tears over that one!

Elvira and I ran home from the beach along the old railway line, so that was a good T-connection and made me feel slightly better about all the food I'd been consuming! We showered and headed to my favourite restaurant in Bussana Vecchia, the earthquake-damaged old village where Chri and I went a few weeks ago. Chri and I didn't need to look at the menu; we had exactly what we'd had the last time but substituted the lamb cutlets with sausage. And it was just as good this time round. Maybe even better, as the nutella semi-freddo we had last time had been replaced with an amaretto version. O.M.G! (Made me think of you, Margot!) I decided against raising a toast to T, but toasted him internally with every glass I drank over the weekend, and I drank a few! Chri also silently acknowledged the significance of the date at our first glass chink with a simple wink that said more than words could. I appreciated that.

Conversation was conducted in a mixture of Italian and English. At one point the others started talking about how tanned they were from the beach and they commented that I was more like Snow White. That prompted someone to say that no-one can ever remember the names of all seven dwarves and we spent a long time trying to think of their names in both Italian and English. I got to five on my own, they got to six between them but just couldn't remember the seventh and we couldn't work out the translations to know which ones we were missing. They asked the waiter. He didn't know. They asked the chef who'd emerged from the kitchen to pour us a delicious myrtle liqueur. He didn't know. They asked the lady at the till. And eventually, on our way out, the chef asked someone at another table and soon the whole restaurant was trying to remember. The roar when someone came up with the seventh name was quite something! Coming back down the hill from the village on the scooter, Chri slammed on the brakes and said, 'Did you see that?'. I said no and asked what it was. And he, through much laughter, said there had been a dwarf crossing the road! It was difficult to be melancholy after a night like that!

From Bussana Vecchia we went on to a red wine (Rosesse) festival in Soldano, a village in the hills near the French border. I had a minor internal panic on the journey when I starting thinking what if we have an accident and I die on the same day as T in a motorcycle accident. I was sad to think of myself dying, but the pain it would cause my loved ones, on that day of all days, was almost too much. Anyway, que sera sera and thankfully it wasn't to be and we arrived safely in Soldano. There was a great atmosphere, like New Year's Eve, with merry people of all ages wandering from stall to stall sampling the wine. I was intrigued by the doorways with a bottle of water on each side of them. I asked why people did that and was told that it stops dogs weeing in the doorways. I was dubious about this theory so was encouraged to ask various people we met. All bar one of my sample concurred with the theory, but no-one knew why it worked. One guy, who used to be married to a woman from Walsall, said it stopped cats weeing in the doorways. We think maybe he'd had one red wine too many! We got home late and all cried with laughter over funny YouTube videos of talking cats and dogs. T would have really enjoyed them - he was a sucker for things like that. I eventually fell asleep at about two in the morning with a fit of the giggles. Last time I did that was with T. So that was kind of nice too.

I had another lie in on Sunday while Massimo cooked lunch. We headed to the beach and spent the day in a similar fashion to Saturday, only this time we ate pasta with a tomato, onion, courgette and aubergine sauce. It was the festival of San Erasmo yesterday so Chri's village was out en masse (and by coincidence, Chri and I met on an Erasmus programme in Perpignan 15 years ago, so we had cause to celebrate too). The saint was processed through the village, prayed to in a very long-winded manner by a tipsy priest, then processed back to the church, accompanied by a band. We sat and observed, sipping our aperol and ginger ales (that I've been waiting to try since I first came here in June - I thought of you, Lynn, you'd defintely like them!). I'd been persuaded to stay Sunday night too, so we went home via the supermarket and had a delicious tea comprising cold meats, mozzarella, burrata and salad, followed by strawberries with sugar and lemon juice (the Italians weren't buying the whole black pepper on strawberries idea). I was in a pensive mood, and tired, but it was OK. We were meant to go back into the village for the San Erasmo fireworks at 22h30, but were just too tired. Instead Chri and I watched them from the balcony while the others watched a film. At the end of the display Chri said, 'Maybe it's a sign that we are looking in the sky this evening.' I like to think that it was.

I received a constant stream of text messages, phone calls and emails over the weekend. I can't tell you how much that meant to me - thank you, thank you, thank you. I love it that people were thinking of T. I also believe that the intense concentration of T-related energy created in various corners of the globe over the past 72 hours can only have been a positive and powerful thing. I'm especially grateful to my family for visiting T's resting place and leaving flowers (for T's rabbits!). I know I'm not obliged to visit T's grave to prove anything, but it does sometimes upset me that I'm always so far from it and it's comforting to know that T has visitors.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Those of you who know me well will appreciate why this was a perfect weekend for me. As with last year, I couldn't have articulated how I would have wanted to spend these two difficult days (I guess I don't really want to 'spend' them at all), but the hand of fate made that decision for me and it was a good one. I did so many things T loved - running, swimming, eating, drinking, partying, riding around on two wheels, joking, laughing, socialising, thinking, reading, contemplating and generally just living life. I dedicated my weekend to him, as I dedicate my entire life AT. I still endeavour to live a life less ordinary in T's name and what better motivation could I have?