Narrowboatboy’s Big, Bad Blog...Narrowboat & Travel blog based on Lancaster Canal

The quintessential image of Tuscany has got to be the fields and fields of beautiful bright yellow 🌻 🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻...during July and August this is most definitely a simply wonderful sight. "A  sunflower  field is like a sky with a thousand suns." said someone, once... A Sunflower is the only flower with flower in its name ??....really, does a cauli-flower not count?....and sunflowers 🌻  are the symbol of faith, loyalty and adoration. Even a beardy, suicidal, ear-less Dutch fella called Vincent Van Gogh liked them, it's just a pity he wasn't any good at painting as his childlike brushwork only managed to create some worthless and terribly horrid impressions on oily canvasses back in the hedonistic late 1880's...probably have turned out better if he had laid off the absinthe a bit too... I digress.... The scientific name for  sunflowers  is helianthus. "Helia" means sun and "anthus" is another word for ......Errrr....flower.?....i t...

Mosquitoes (Zanzari).....or as I like to call them....”Annoying Ba####ds” (Fill in the blank).... A topic that I haven’t covered yet but ‘Molto importante’ around these parts. It would seem from experience that these little ###### sleep for most of the day like students, then when I fancy staying up listening to dudes tunes and drinking vino Rosso they take exception and start attacking and nibbling, very annoyingly at your lower fleshy parts... What purpose do they serve?...I haven’t met anyone that has a good word to say about them... Local advice is that you need is to eat copious amounts of home grown garlic combined with fish oil....then various other solutions are banded around and before you know it you have a daily recipe intake of rendering waste, vitamins A-Z, tiger balm, skin O’so so soft, brewers yeast, local honey, caviar, smelly pecorino, FAM30 and then on top of this you start systematically rubbing yourself all over with iodine, calamine, chlorine, his...

England.... As I sit by the pool after a lovely week of +30 degrees sunshine, I settle down in a comfy hammock with a cold Moretti in hand and catch up with the news.... Oh Madonna...what a bloody mess! After a week or so of unprecedented tepid weather, Saddleworth is on fire, Winter Hill’s mast has melted so no doubt the tellys are off?, you can’t get beer to flow out of the pumps, slaughterhouses can’t kill any pigs, Asda have run out of pop and crumpets, the A6 in Cumbria’s has melted and folk can no longer get to Keswick, the national team can’t beat the massive footballing nation of Belgium and to cap it all the bloke who made the clangers has snuffed it.... Still, reading on, the met office has issued a warning ⚠️ for thunderstorms leading to torrential rain, hail, lightning and massive flooding to come soon... .....so soon be back to normal so stop moaning folks! I think you all need to get behind Micheal Gove’s Brexit ideal....what a twat! Sal...

Ok, so Iv been a bit lax in the bloggin’ department...have you seen me lately?...yep, Counting Crows...not going with that one though... I’m still here in downtown Tuscany, Italy doing the same stuff but for some reason I haven’t found the time or the inclination to blog about it....I always said that the blog was for ME so why should I care that I haven’t had anything to say....well I have been busy....massive BELM.....but Iv jumped ship to a small niche website called Facebook....I know, stick the red hot poker as far as it goes but it won’t make me feel any better about it....my choice, and less personal but I’m chucking a few ideas and ramblings into a Facebook page to try to promote the apartments that we are managing here under the Tuscan 🌞  Sometimes when I’m lying in a hammock by the pool, wondering where it all went wrong and trying to get some shut eye in the afternoon I think I should be writing summat....I’m feeling guilty now... I’m thinking I sho...

This week I’v had a ‘Masterclass’ in olive pruning with the great olive supremo, Danielle, the go-to-guru when you need anything tree related in or around Cortona. He’s quite a guy to work with and has kept me entertained all week with the ‘banter di l’olive’. Lesson 1: You can’t prune in the rain, that’s the first thing I learnt and my god we have had the rain. So we waited for a sunny day and got cracking with the ‘potatura dell ‘olive’...pruning of the olive tree. We have 250 trees in the Olivetti on grass terraces for harvesting olives in November in Tuscany to make the oil. Now in Spring, the trees need to be pruned and completed this needs to be completed by May 1st.  My mentor told me to get into the middle of the tree and start with the ‘succhioni’s’...the suckers, as the middle needs to be clear and airy and these little fellas suck up all the goodness needed by the tree. The ‘polloni’ need to be removed too, a separate name for the sucker growth on the tr...

This last week I decided to get some walking in so I have been out daily exploring the abundant tracks and trails that connect the forests around this area that cover the higher ground. I also had a companion to carry out this task, one with experience of all the sights, sounds and smells of the local forests, namely Rosita, a local Jack Russell.  These forest tracks are used frequently by walkers, Mountain bikers and enduro riders. Mainly though, the local hunters use them for seeking out the Cinghiale and deer and are vehicle wide so make easy hiking routes. Connections can then be made on smaller, interesting paths that climb up and down deeper through the woods frequently used by porcupines and hares....and lions and tigers and bears!...oh my! With a dog, a stick, a notebook and google maps loaded on th’ipad I set off on my mornings ramble to find and connect the paths. Using coloured spent shotgun cartridges as markers at junctions I traced and re-traced a...

Harvest 🌓  Having just had the biggest super moon of the year at the end of January it inspired me to look into its influence on the gardening front. Spending more and more time outside digging and weeding as the days get longer it gave me the idea that maybe I should be adopting some celestial wisdom by taking a leaf out of the past. A time when wise old sages like Arthur Aristotle, founder of the veg patch, claimed that the moon was quite important and we should pay a little more attention to it. The old theory goes like this....the moon has 4 phases during the calendar month and if you sow plants in the right lunar phase then they will grow stronger, be more productive, and in turn have more vitality and energy and resistance to pests. Having not been born with ‘green fingers’ or a classic wispy beard my previous method of ‘bung stuff in and hope’ I felt, needed now to be addressed with these new revelations. Around here they seem to pay attention to this ancie...