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

‘ Raccogliere le olive’ For the uninitiated, the olive harvesting in Tuscany goes on from October to December every year and peaks around tupping time, November 5th when absolutely everybody, whether they have olives or not, get out their nets, boxes, trailers and stand under their trees. It’s in their blood here and they can’t stop doing it and talking about it....everybody...everywhere! All the olives that are picked here are for processing, usually at the local frantoia, and pressed to turn them into a delicious green, peppery oil and it’s big, big business. You can forget that crap stuff you buy at the Lidl, this is the real deal. You need a few tools to do the job: Paletti = stakes for holding the edges of the net to stop the buggers rolling away. Cassetti = boxes take about 25kg and this year, with a bumper crop, one decent tree can fill 3 of these! Rete Olivastra= a bloody big net! Rastrelli = little rakes to use by hand to strip the olives off the branche...

Here you find us today in the Upper reaches of the Okavango delta... ... .through the morning mist a rare glimpse of a native hornbill and the eerie haunting call of a young lonely male Orangutan can be heard in the misty distance.... Ho..ho...only joking...not really....high up but still in Umbria. Quite atmospheric with the clouds still hanging about after all the recent rain...it’s been as wet as a tramps vest for the last few days! As the year starts to close, the wine and the oil has been pressed and bottled, the warm sunshine has retired and the vast woods have started to change to a golden colour, while large flocks of birds gather to fly off for their holidays and we find ourselves winding down with the clock... It’s quite a change from the summer and sorta feels quite sad.... Still.. .there’s more to the picture than meets the eye... . But look on the bright side....It’s Black ‘feckin’ Fridey!!.....Whoop, ‘Feckin’ Whoop!! You can’t esc...

Still on my tour of Umbria, today’s destination was the walled medieval town of Montone, a tiny hilltop commune with less than two thousand folk. It’s getting colder now but it’s lovely visiting these places at the end of the season when all the tourists have gone home! This tiny place was peaceful and quiet and incredibly clean and tidy and nothing in the way of a photo opportunity! A pleasant morning ramble up the tiny winding streets and a peek over the old walls to the bigger white topped hills in the distance and then back down to the piazza for a coffee. Today’s blog choice track is ‘Nothing in the Way’....a song by a guy calling himself, Ghostpoet off his 2015 album ‘Shedding Skin’...a great song and a great voice. Audio only I’m afraid here...enjoy. https://youtu.be/V0az9TZG9i4

Pack it up, pack it in, let me begin... Today was an autumnal stroll up to the monastery at the top of the holy mountain of Monte Corona in Umbria, past an abundance of parasol 🍄 mushrooms in what may be the last of the sunshine with my canine companions.  In the far distance I could hear the hunters ..... ...shooting at the Cinghiale in the dense woods... we plodded on... High up on the top of the hill it was built back in 1530 and it was the home of the Camal-toe monks (apparently!) until 1861  and now it’s become a ‘house of pain’ (apparently!) for the  monks that now support the brothers of Bethlehem, the Assumption and Frank Bruno!....you couldn’t make it up? But don’t take my word for it, look it up yourself like I had to here.... http://bethleem.org/ Along the way I asked myself some questions.... What is man?    What is the meaning, the aim of our life?    Which is the road to true happiness?    What, ...

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...