Early harvest start - and an unexpected visitor

Casa della Meridiana, Gallo, Abruzzo, Italy, Sunday, 7am:  We arrived here late last night, after picking up a hire car at Pescara Airport and stopping for a pizza on the way up the Sangro Valley. There has been a change of plan. We are going to start picking today.

The reason for this is that rain is forecast to arrive on Tuesday morning. It’s a drastic change of plan. Our co-pickers Shelley and Hugh are in Rome for the weekend pretending to be Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. They will curtail their Roman Holiday and take the bus over from Rome this evening, and I’ll pick them up in time for supper.

Bobbie and I should be able to pick two or three trees by ourselves today, and all four of us will do the other eight or nine tomorrow. We can finish the job before the rain comes, and get the olives to the mill on Tuesday morning.

It’s going to be a difficult schedule today. There’s no food in the house except some frozen croissants and a carton of UHT milk, so one of us is going to have to drive to the supermarket for supplies. It’s Sunday and the only shop open anywhere nearby is a 20-minute drive away, so that’s going to take up an hour of the day. I also have to visit the oil mill, a 20 minute drive in a different direction.  And then I’ll have to drive an hour to Chieti Scalo to collect the rest of the crew.

This is the view that greeted us this morning at dawn. The sun comes up across the valley and today it promised good weather. The mountains in the distance are looking south towards Molise. Acres and acres of olive trees stretch for miles as far as the eye can see up the valley. Our own handful of trees are just below the house.



My motto here is ‘expect the unexpected'. And here’s today’s piece of the ‘unexpected’ - a visitor. This little chap was sitting in our garden when we arrived. He (or she) is lovely, friendly, affectionate, quite a beautiful animal - and hungry.  Presumably a stray, abandoned quite recently by the look of it. What a shame.  We found a tin of tuna which it gobbled down. It looks like we’ll have him (or her) for the week.