Tag Archives: F Says…..

Christmas Things – update.

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So, on a lighter note than recently, the Italian Christmas stamps have been issued and I have ordered 50 of the non-religious ones, which are also the right price for Europe.

The one I have ordered is this:

Italian Christmas Stamp 2014

The religious one is this one:

Italian Religious Christmas Stamp 2014

I have also purchased, today, a Christmas-cum-birthday present for a very dear friend. It’s tickets to La Scala as once, when she was over, she said she had always wanted to go to La Scala. Having been there once, I knew that the best places were in the stalls and so I have bought 3 tickets (F, my friend and me). It’s not until March of next year but that should be fine. I hope.

For Best Mate, I also have to buy some things but I will do that in the next couple of weeks. One thing has to be done at almost the last minute.

And, apart from the present we have bought together, for each other, and the Kickstarter thing that I am hopeful will come before F’s birthday, at least, that will be it this year.

And I’ll let you into a little secret. I told someone about the possibility that F will go down and I will stay here for Christmas and they made an immediate offer for me to join them at their parents’ house. And, you know what? I’d prefer to stay home, just me with the dogs. After all, it’s not like it will be a fantastic Christmas this year and I quite like the idea of not celebrating it but spending the day, just me and the dogs, going for walks and watching some films. Seems bloody ideal to me. But the offer was very kind. I expect there to be a few more to be honest. And F will have this idea that I shouldn’t be on my own, of course. But it’s fine by me. It’ll be a day to myself and, in spite of myself, my head is already selecting the films that I will watch.

Who knows?

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“What the fuck?”

That’s what I wanted to say. But I didn’t. Everything has to be thought through before I say anything.

I think I actually said, “Really?”

It seems that I am right in as much that “everybody” doesn’t know, except that the “everybody” that doesn’t know is only the person that this really affects! It seems that the doctor has spoken to the family but not the person at the centre of all this (PaC.) Everyone is acting perfectly normally whilst PaC is in the room. PaC doesn’t know anything.

To say I was shocked is an understatement and I still can’t quite get my head round this. I asked that, should I ever be in this position, please, please, please tell me. Apart from getting used to the idea of it all, I would have things to do!

But I’m still in shock.

PaC doesn’t want to go anywhere at Christmas and doesn’t want anyone coming over (to eat). F said he would prefer me not to go down, for this reason. So, now I’m not sure what will happen. I’ve said I’ll do whatever he wants.

PaC is not eating. Has not been eating much since summer. Is thinner. I wonder, if, in fact, PaC will even be here for Christmas? I don’t say this. But now I’m certain we’re talking weeks or, maybe, a couple of months. You can’t go on forever without eating.

F is stoic, as he normally is. Almost too English. He will go down again this weekend and speak to PaC about the possibility that I might come down. Then he’ll make a decision based on this (as to whether I go down or not) so, I may go down or I may be on my own. I’m not sure I will want to go and “celebrate” with any one else, tbh. It just doesn’t seem right.

When he tells me that PaC is the only person who doesn’t “know”, I tell him that there’s no way this would happen in England. But now I wonder if that is really the case? And, is it always the case in Italy? I’ve never been this close to the situation to know. I’ve just always assumed ……

And, can I just say that, the whole thing is scaring me. The knowing and not knowing thing is scaring me more. I don’t know why. I feel uneasy, unsettled. It’s not a good time. I even heard F telling someone on the phone that 2014 has turned out to be a pretty shit year.

My heart is full of tears for him and his family.

And the rest of me is as scared as hell, for some reason I just can’t fathom.

Some things

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Apparently, even this weekend, he will be “making excuses” for why he is there and, also, why I’m not with him. The excuse (which, in fact, is partially true) is that he has come to “sort things” about the house. The reason I am not there is “because it is raining a lot so it’s better for me to be at home with the dogs”.

And, I am told, we’ll only spend 4 days or so down there at Christmas. We won’t be staying at New Year because it’s too “sad”. The reason it will be too sad is because we shall have to stay with the dogs (because of all the fireworks) and that means we shall have to stay in the house which is unfinished (or, rather, not started).

Instead, we shall come back and have our usual New Year’s Eve party. Our normal visitors for Boxing Day will, instead, probably come over on New Year’s Eve – which will be nice but that does, however, mean that another friend may not come as the two women don’t get on.

But, of course, this is what I’m told now. This is fluid and will depend on many things, non of which are within my control – but that’s OK.

On the other hand, last night we ordered, online, our Christmas present to each other. It should be delivered within the next 15 days or so.

And, of course, F isn’t really sleeping very well and, as a consequence, neither am I. So, in one way, I shall be glad he’s not here this weekend as, maybe, I’ll be able to sleep a bit longer.

p.s. there are STILL no Italian Christmas stamps issued this year. They’d better bloody hurry up. I would be most disappointed if they don’t do them or they’re too late. Sometimes, this country is incredibly frustrating.

Sighs and questions

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We have the occasional deep sigh. I can’t imagine how much this is hurting by I am impotent.

I gain a little more information. The timescale is unknown. Now I don’t know if this measures weeks or months or, indeed, years.

But, maybe, neither does anyone else.

Sometimes, the lack of tactility and information surprises me for Italians. At times, his family seem more “English” than mine! Keeping everything hidden. He continues to make jokes as that is his way of coping. Although, last night, the joke was quite black and I had to force a laugh.

And then, unexpectedly, we have a deep sigh. And I feel terrible (although, I’m sure, not as terrible as he does.)

So, I wait for the next bit of information. And I have a lot of questions that I simply can’t ask.

We are, in fact, going down for Christmas. Except he needs to make it an unexceptional event (us going down for Christmas). So he needs to make an excuse. Apparently. So now I know that not everyone knows that he knows. And, I know that during this particularly “unfestive” period, he will make jokes and laugh and act as normal. And, so will everyone else.

And it will, indeed, be very weird.

In which I become old and, thankfully, not crippled and have a strange dream

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Monday. 24/11.

This morning I didn’t shave as normal. What I’ve left, could become some sort of goatee, I guess, if I let it grow. The reason for this was the event on Sunday. I was angry with myself. And, not a little worried.

Have I become one of those “old” people who fall and injure themselves?

I’m taking the dogs out for a rather long walk. We’re about 5 to 10 minutes from home. We come to a crossroads with traffic lights. The lights are green (for us) and so I shorten the dogs leads so that they are right by my side.

We step off the curb and the next thing I know, I am hurtling towards the ground where my chin hits the road and my glasses fly off.

A load of people are racing over to check if I’m OK. First I check the dogs. Bless them, they have stayed exactly where they were when, eventually, on my fall downwards, I let the leads go. Of course, the reason I hit my chin was that I didn’t let the leads go immediately and so had no time to brace my arms/hands against the fall.

Next is my glasses, which someone has picked up.

I check with someone if my chin is bleeding. It seems not but the skin has broken. Already I can feel it’s going to bruise.

I toy with going back home but he is cleaning so I don’t want to do that. I really feel like I need a sit down but there is nowhere to sit. I go on.

Later, I see the chin is red and puffy. F wants me to go to the hospital but I say no. After all, this is just a bruised chin.

But it does hurt.

And I realise that I never said thank you to the people who helped me and I feel really bad about that. But we don’t always think straight at times like this, do we?

During the night, I had a rather strange dream, part of which was to do with the “accident” I had earlier.

I’m driving (quite fast) and I see, a little way in front, cars stopped (as if at traffic lights. I have plenty of time to stop but, for some reason, I am distracted and don’t stop. Instead I go plowing into the back of the last car causing me to fly through the windscreen. I fly over the four or five cars in the queue, each one getting battered by the car behind as the crash acts like an accordion being closed.

I eventually land on the ground, in front of the first car in the queue, unsurprisingly, smashing my chin on the ground.

Other than that, I am quite unhurt. After a few moments of getting my act together, whilst waiting for the police, I go back to the first car I hit which is quite mashed up. The occupants are no longer occupying the car and I find them sitting down in a café nearby. I go to the woman to say how sorry I am but her husband/boyfriend jumps up, really angry.

“She’s pregnant!” he explains. “Didn’t you realise she was pregnant? She could lose the baby!”

And he keeps going on about this and all I could think was how we never know how much our actions will affect others.

And then I woke up. It was about 4 a.m. Strange dream.

Christmas Decorations are UP! And other Christmas-related things

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The Christmas decorations are up!

No, don’t worry, not in our flat. I mean in a street which I use on my way home from work.

They aren’t switched on but they are up.

And, talking of Christmas, I have still to do the cards. This weekend, is the plan.

At the moment, F is talking about doing a house-warming party around the middle of December – when he has decorated the flat! :-) Bless him.

As an aside, I tried, on Monday evening, to get my computer to display films on the TV. We already have the HDMI cable punched through the wall and I had bought an adapter to attach to my MiniDisplay Port. So, it should have worked just by connecting. Although the picture was fine, the sound only came from the computer which, being in the next room, wasn’t really any good. After hunting around, I found that Macs built prior to 2010 didn’t have a proper HDMI slot and no audio was passed through.

Wednesday, I found an adapter that WAS supposed to do the job for Macs of the age of mine. Except that the company making them had stopped making them. However, I found one on Amazon and bought it. It’s “on its way” now. Should be here by Monday but I’m hoping Friday – then I can try it at the weekend!

In the process of trying to make the sound work on Monday, I found, on Tuesday night, that one of my programs wouldn’t work anymore. After hunting around a bit, I decided to re-install it. So that was that.

Except, on Wednesday night, I found that, as a result of my re-installation, Firefox wasn’t working properly and what-seemed-like-spam pages kept coming up. After much pratting around, I found the solution. Let’s hope that the new adapter I’m going to be getting doesn’t end up messing up other things on my computer. It’s not that I can’t fix it, it’s just that everything then takes so much longer.

It will be nice if we can watch films in the lounge, especially for Christmas!

Rubbing along, sometimes more like a cheesgrater rub!

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“Tell me when you’re ready.”

I had started to take the glasses out of the cupboard. We’re putting some place mats into the cupboards so the glasses can sit on top of them.

Can I be really honest? I don’t know why. For me, to have theses place mats in means that we just have something else to clean. But, it will make him happy so it’s OK.

I clear the first shelf of the cupboard. I haven’t shouted that I’m ready yet. I want to clear the whole cupboard first.

I start on the second shelf.

He arrives, with cloth and ammonia to clean. He sits in front of the open cupboard, right in my way.

So then he starts handing me stuff to put on the table temporarily. I am, just a little, fucked off by this. I hold my tongue but, for a moment or two, I think about going somewhere else. To not be there. FFS – say one thing and do another! It drives me mad. But not so much, as long as I don’t react.

Then he cleans all the shelves, then adjusts the top one so we can put the wine glasses at the top. Then the place mats go in and then I start handing the glasses back.

There are an extra four place mats for us to use on the table. They match the upholstery of the sofas and are the other shade of blue than the seats in the dining room. Now, much later, he has laid the table. There are the place mats and a couple of candles, a slightly darker shade. I must admit, it all looks rather nice.

Earlier still, we had been for breakfast – the rain is persistent, constant and heavy. We go to the supermarket. I had nearly said that I would go later but, as it was raining so much, I thought better of it. In the supermarket, after a few minutes, he tells me to go and do my own thing. I guess he finds me as frustrating as I find him. That doesn’t make it better, of course. I worry a little about our lack of synergy . I mean to say, on a practical level, day to day, we don’t really have the same ideas or, if we do, we would go about them in a different way. And, yet, we kind of rub along together quite well. Later, in the supermarket, when we go to scan our items through, I tell him to pack. He doesn’t want to. I explain that I don’t want him complaining like last time so he must pack. He does but grudgingly. However, this time, at least he couldn’t blame me for anything going wrong! Not that it did, of course. After all, he had packed everything :-)

And so, tonight, we have our second dinner party together. There’s some chickpea soup that he’s done, the fishcakes and then a lemon meringue pie which I have made because one of the guys likes it so much and made a specific request that I make it.

Everything (more or less) is ready to go and we’re three hours away from them arriving so it should be fairly easy. I hope.

A Policeman Calls

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The old, Art Deco-style phone by my bed rings.

I pick it up. The mouthpiece is large and made of metal. It’s quite a beautiful example of its kind.

“Excuse me, sir,” the mans voice says, “this is the police. The alarm appears to be going off downstairs.”

I remember now, F had told me a few days ago that the alarm had gone off and he had had to go down. In the end there wasn’t anyone there but, you never know.

“Are you here?” I ask the policeman. He has a typical policeman voice. A little bit “west country” – Devon, Somerset, perhaps?

“No,” he replies. “We’ll only come if there is a real problem.”

I suppose I’d better go down then, I think. But F is away and what if there are people down there. I look across at the door. It is dark; it is the middle of the night. I see the shirts hanging on the bedroom door handle. I know they’re shirts but, for a moment, they could be a person, crouched down. I knew it was only shirts and I knew that if I looked at them, they would look like someone was there. My heart is thumping like crazy. I really don’t want to go down and see if anyone is there.

I am surprised that the dogs are not awake and by the side of the bed. It seems a bit strange.

I now need a drink. That means going to the kitchen. I don’t want to go to the kitchen either.

I lie back down, as if to go to sleep. My heart is still thumping like it wants to leave my chest. I realise now, some other things are strange.

Let’s take the phone call. The guy was an English policeman. He spoke in English!

Then, of course, the fact that I don’t have an Art Deco style phone by the bed (it’s in the hallway, not connected and, anyway, has a black Bakelite handset.)

Then, in addition, there is no downstairs!

But, at some point, this changed from being some sort of nightmare to real life. In fact, it became real life just before I looked across at the door at the shirts.

So the bit about F having had a call from the police before was obviously not true.

Or was it?

The weekend

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Well, the weekend was lovely and not so lovely.

The visit to the cemetery was made on the Saturday, 1st November, which I thought was the Day of the Dead. I didn’t go. The Day of the Dead is, in fact, the 2nd – but they didn’t go then. The 1st is All Saints Day.

And the weather was glorious, all weekend.

But, I didn’t go (to the cemetery) because I felt rather crappy and constantly cold. So I don’t really know what it was all like. Still, there’ll be another time, I’m sure.

F realised how bad I felt by Saturday evening and, from then on, drove and made sure I was OK, bless him. He drove back on Sunday afternoon (for which I was grateful) and then insisted I went to bed when we got home. I half-watched a couple of films and then went to sleep.

He was rather sweet all evening, coming in to check on me and offer cups of tea and stuff. He insisted on taking my temperature and decided I had a bit of a temperature. He didn’t want me to go into work but he knew I would anyway.

So, here I am, still feeling fairly crappy but it’s OK. If I can get a good night’s sleep tonight, I’m sure it will all be much better in the morning.

Inauguration

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We’ve now eaten a few times in the kitchen.

F made soup. And, one time, pasta. I like eating in the kitchen. It’s warm (from doing the cooking) and light and very comfortable. I think, even if he says he hates cooking, that he secretly quite likes it. Possibly, also because I am appreciative. V used to like cooking for the same reason.

However, the “big” test came on Saturday night. We had our first dinner in the new house. We ate, of course, in the dining room. First there were drinks in the living room and then we moved to the dining room to eat. F did soup, I did fish cakes with spinach and roast potatoes and then a chocolate cake.

And lots of wine.

It was lovely and the food seemed to go down quite well.

But, for certain, F had far too much to drink and, overnight, was ill. I know it wasn’t the food since we had the same thing and I was fine. He also blamed the drink. Still, it gave me time to clear up the next morning a bit, which he liked.

So, our first dinner was a success and it was certainly very comfortable with the space to do it properly.

However, there is something that I’ve noticed which is quite strange, for me. In the past, I would always do stuff I had done before. I did things that I had practiced until I “got them right”. Now, I always want to try something new. So, the fish cakes were new, the chocolate cake was new and I cooked spinach for the first time ever!

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m confident (because whilst doing these things I always worry that everything will turn out terribly) or, as I think it is, the thrill of doing something for the first time – with the fact that it could be a complete disaster (but rarely is).

20 years ago I would never have been so “reckless”. Now I seem to actually look for things that I’ve never done to see how they turn out!

F, bless him, compliments me to others, saying what a wonderful cook I am. Anyway, he certainly seemed to like the chocolate cake which was a little like chocolate fudge cake – like eating pure dark chocolate in cake form. I was (am, because there is still half of it left) very pleased with it.

So, that’s it. First dinner done. Now we have a lot more to do to repay all the dinners we’ve had at other people’s places. And, then, of course, the house-warming party in December. Maybe it’s the sharing of food with friends, the “breaking of bread”, but our flat seems almost officially inaugurated now.