Ruins, wild goats and a grey Fiat

 The real journey in Sicily began in a car. A not-very-comfortable, faintly tatty Fiat in battleship grey. We picked it up at Catania airport, drove south for 40 minutes, saw the red oil warning light, stopped at a petrol-station cum café. Several phone calls and a coffee later, we drove back to the airport, to be told all was well and it was the computer. We drove off again. The picture on the left shows the last stretch of two-way road, with a wonderful set of stations of the Cross leading to an imposing - what? Church? Convent? Sanctuary? (it was called that). After that, the road became single-track, without passing-places, rounding a gorge and crossing a worryingly small bridge until I suddently recognised the road I'd followed on Google Earth. We found the entrance, dogs barked, I phoned the number we'd been given. How did we get in?

But we did. We had arrived at Borgo Alveria, a collection of buildings on the site of an ancient monastery, destroyed in the earthquake of 1692 but rebuilt using so many of the original stones that we kept finding stray heraldic devices in the middle of the garden wall, and bits of pillars randomly deployed as garden ornaments. Our room (above) was amazing: I could have climbed some of the walls, and the bathroom was a cast iron cube in the corner with a glass ceiling through which you could see the rafters of the entire room. At night, lights came on in the grounds until midnight; after that it was dark and totally silent. During the day the most noticeable noise was that of the cicadas. It was blissful.

There were two Notos in our area - the baroque town twenty hair-raising minutes away by car (see above) and the other, Noto Antica, which was ten minutes from our door on foot. It wasn't just because we could walk there that I loved the latter - a whole walled town, destroyed by the earthquake and just left there, the inhabitants told to abandon the shanty town that they made in the aftermath of the destruction and some of the stones removed, as far as I could determine, to use elsewhere. We walked for hours among the vegetation that would suddenly reveal the shape
of the Jesuit college or some great palace, and we saw hardly a soul.

The picture on the left is of the partially reconstructed Porta Aurea taken from inside the gates, and the one below of the castle and prison to the left of the gate inside. I fear we were perhaps odd in our attitude to our surroundings - we preferred walking in the wooded area around the ruins, a sort of natural parkland which started opposite our front gate and wandered down towards the old city through a variety of trees - eucalyptus, conifers - which smelled wonderful in the sun. There were wild goats that popped up to look at us, cicadas by the thousand in the trees, birds singing and sailing

 above us, and lizards darting everywhere.On Sunday the stone tables and solid BBQ areas near the road were thronged with families enjoying a day out together - some of them stayed for hours, and the small children played quietly or slept in shady corners while the men did manly things with fires and grew increasingly vocal. We didn't walk in the woods on Sunday ...

We did make a couple of excursions. We felt people might remark our oddity if we didn't see anything but our immediate surroundings - would they think we should just have stayed in Scotland? So we drove to Ragusa Ibla, a four-hour drive for two hours in a town that
apparently features in Inspector Montalbano. We missed the best road

on the way there - the sign for it was hidden in a tree, a common feature of route-finding in Sicily - but persevered over a massive viaduct and through the fringes of the modern town till we found the proper car-park, with the steps up to the old city just as we'd been promised. This was another earthquake story, except that the inhabitants of the old town of Ragusa insisted on staying put. We also spent a fascinating day in Palazzola Acreide, where extensive Greek ruins sit on top of a hill, in Akrai. And yes, it was to Akrai that we toiled up the hill in the midday heat, and we spent a wonderful time wandering round the Greek Theatre from the 3rd century BC and various catacombs and carvings.

A common feature of all our jaunts was angst about the car. Not only did the oil warning light stay on throughout the week; when we were in Palazzola Acreide - actually in a sort of housing scheme on the outskirts, where we had originally thought of abandoning the car because there was plenty of parking space - we discovered that the footwell on the driver's side was ... wet. Very wet. Wet and slippery. After a brief period of panic we decided it was water from the air-conditioning, which we ran constantly. Its jet must have become blocked. We never found out. And then there was the matter of where we left the car. Our first trip down to Noto saw us more or less abandoning it in the second street we passed that seemed to point in the right direction. We had walked two blocks downhill when the thought struck us that we might never find it again. Back we toiled. I took its photo. I noted its number on my phone. I dropped a pin on Google Maps, thereby discovering the name of the street - for signs with this helpful information are rare. And we noted that the building we had to pass on our return seemed to be a prison, housed in a former monastery. I took to following this routine every time we left the car anywhere. A dusty grey Fiat in Italy is hardly a stand-out, after all.

That all sounds very stressful. I know. On day one, it was. But by the time we left I felt sorted. The sun shone, the mellow stone was the perfect colour, I discovered granita, my Italian, supplemented by French, seemed to be working. The car was never comfortable, and the road was always a challenge, but our hilltop Borgo was heavenly and the company right up our alley. When we snuck out in the rosy-fingered dawn (Homer was right, by the way) I didn't want to leave.

I'd have wanted to leave even less had I known how we were going to get lost finding the road back to Catania, and the twelve-year-olds on the moped who finally got us back onto the right one, but that's another story ...

The mouse's tale

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. And if you're old enough to remember where that opening comes from, I trust you're enjoying retirement. But à nos moutons - or in this case, nos souris.

Once upon a time, there was a small mouse. He - or was it a she? - might have been called a church mouse, except that he never made it to the church. No, this little mouse lived in the Rectory, in a small room under the stairs that had once been referred to as The Bishop's Bedroom but had, since the days when the hapless Bishop indeed slept there, become a dump. As the person who lived in the house gradually dumped more and more in the way of unwanted debris in this room, the little mouse found it a refuge, though there was always the dread, the flaring fear, induced by the Rectory Cat.

The joyful day dawned, however, when the Rectory Cat set off with its owner to live in a rather less damp environment, and the little mouse was free to roam and to breed and to enjoy the crumbs left by the parishioners who had returned to using the house as a hub for social activities. Free, that is, until it became apparent that the old junk was going to have to go, to make way for the junk of the next incumbent - or even, Heaven forfend, a visiting bishop. And so it came about that a hard-working and selfless couple turned up one dreary day and put all the junk in their car and took it to the tip.

A few days later, the selfless lady noticed that a packet of biscuits, left in the car against a peckish moment, had been nibbled at. Her equally selfless husband denied any snack attacks, and their suspicions grew. Eventually they found a tiny nest in a corner of the car, under a seat where no-one would look. They did not, however, find the mouse.

Several suggestions have surfaced among the faithful as to how to deal with this phenomenon. It was thought that a cat in the car could be messy, and might damage the upholstery; poison or a trap seemed likewise messy and distasteful. To date the most enterprising seems to be a trip in said car to the incumbency of the former inhabitant and the former Rectory cat.

After all, it is their mouse.

Randomly, on All Saints'.

One of the questions in a recent survey to discover the degree of one's addiction to blogging was this: do you look at life in terms of bloggability? (Actually I made that last word up - the original question, lacking it, was much more long-winded). And I had to admit to the second top indicator in that area. But sometimes the blog comes as an afterthought, a sort of coda to a series of events, as it were, and that's today. The astute reader may have noted a lack of blog fervour on my part over the last week; this was due to a horrific bout of what has now been identified as Campylobacter infection - big on Google if you really want the details. But what bothered me a bit was the length of time it took to identify the cause - from my submitting the required specimen on the Wednesday morning to the phone call from the surgery on the following Tuesday. Mercifully, I've had this before and knew that starvation and rehydration lessened the impact - but it did affect the treatment and it'd have been good to have known for sure by the end of the week. I'm better now, and the 4 lbs I lost in as many days have, sadly, re-established themselves.

And yesterday served as a sad reminder of what we do to ourselves. A fatal pile-up on the M8, closing the road for 7 hours, a diversion via Grangemouth, the sudden malfunction of our own car's engine somewhere near Moodiesburn (horror) and the effect of her first injections on a smiley, tranquil baby all made me want to hide in a corner rather than blog, actually. And we have the decorators in the hall and all life is covered in dust.

And if you want to find out more about what drives a blogger, have a look here - a link for which I am indebted to Neil, whose revamped blog is happily enticing him to post on it more frequently. And with that little bit of nepotism, I shall leave it for today.

Forthcoming attraction...

I feel moved to enlarge on my last post, which, being moblogged, was of necessity terse. For I don't think there can be anyone else of our acquaintance who buys cars the way we do - though the moment I write that I realise that the owners of the many, many Renaults seen today in Inveraray must share this with us.

We turn up, slightly late, at the garage which is also the local Renault agency. I am barely out of our current car when it is whisked off for its MOT, leaving us standing on the oil-stained workshop floor. It appears chaotic - sparks flying from some repair job in one corner, a car up on a lift in another. We are sent off to have a coffee till Peter is ready to spend time with us. By the time we return it is quieter, and once Peter has despatched someone to deal with the man with the dog we go into the office, a gloomy cubby-hole in a corner of the workshop. The accountant is in the outer office, so we close the door. Mr B announces that we want a specific model of car, with a specific engine size. Great sucking in of breath indicates that this is surely too speedy a machine for us - do we not want something smaller? cheaper? more economical? I wonder if perhaps Peter wants to make sure we live to buy another car from him in the future. We find out that there is a new model coming out - one with better clearance, one that might not scrape its bottom on our lane when there is more than one person in it. But there is no information (quote!) and we are sent off, this time for some lunch, while the specifications are found.

Lunch is found in a pleasant tearoom (yes - a tearoom) and we return to the garage. Peter is at his lunch, but has left us two closely-typed pages of info on the new car. We repair to a bench overlooking Loch Fyne to peruse same. Grass is growing through the slats of the bench. The sun has come out and it is warm. We soon decide that this is indeed the car for us and go for a walk, round Inveraray Jail, past the Piskie church. We pop in to look at the church, where we once worshipped for a year or so. The dusty pampas grass has been removed from beside the altar, and the flowers on the wondow sills are not plastic, but little else has changed. There is an odd smell, brewed God knows how long (quote!) We are glad to escape into the sunshine.

We walk along behind the garage, admiring a black Clio over which the swallows have shat messily. Peter has returned. He now seems resigned to the fact that we want to spend money and be able to overtake sometimes, and we fill out the details. We bodyswerve the bright orange special edition of the car and choose black. I always like a black car - I could've lived in the '30s. By the time we leave we are all cheerful. Our car will come sometime this summer. It's called a Conquest - a Scenic Conquest.

It is, apparently, a city country thing.

Which car?

Buying a new car in Argyll is unlike any other retail experience. Right now we're sitting on a bench on the shore of Loch Fyne waiting for Peter - who has sold us 7 cars to date - to come back from lunch. As ever, he doesn't want to sell up anything too fast or too expensive, but we've spotted a new model and fancy it rotten. For one thing, it looks just the job for our lane, which is the nearest thing to Passchendaele (spelling?) you'll find outside a war zone. Watch this space - Jeremy C will be back!