Changing buckets:

Video (yes, I got grit and twigs in my hair taking this):

Picture above is near the bridge just down the road.

I know that this has been on the national news in other countries, but probably not for long. In case anybody was worried, the first thing is that we are okay.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me just mention that after a very dry summer and an extraordinarily summery late September and early October, rain started in this region on Tuesday evening. The papers are saying that in some spots there was more than 20 inches of rain in eight or nine hours. To put that in context, in England the annual average total rainfall is about 33 inches.

At first I thought we had it bad with the following:

4 cm water in the office, which called for mopping up, but no serious damage was done

12 hours without tapwater

18 hours without electricity (so no gas heating either)

24 hours without telephone

30+ hours without Internet

We were also aware of road and bridge closures.

As we learn more about what had happened it became clear that we were lucky. The next village up the hill was cut off (as far as I know it still is). The town over the other hill has been completely inaccessible, helicopter drops of essential food were being made. At the last count (I haven’t looked this morning) there were at least 6 dead and 8 missing in the area, so we got away with it relatively lightly! The area has officially been declared a disaster area, with central government funds promised to help cope.

I have a few photographs of my own, and I may, given time, edit this post to make it more specific. The river that flows not far past the bottom of the garden has, for instance, significantly changed course. But in the meantime, you can get some impression from the links below.

Video on the Guardian site: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/oct/26/italy-flash-flooding-monterosso-liguria

From one of the local papers: http://iltirreno.gelocal.it/massa/multimedia/2011/10/26/fotogalleria/alluvione-in-toscana-e-liguria-lo-tsunami-in-30-scatti-30900680/1

These pictures are from Aulla, our second-nearest shopping town: https://www.facebook.com/media/albums/?id=407927670505#!/media/set/?set=a.10150895041120506.755201.407927670505&type=1

More local pictures: https://www.facebook.com/media/albums/?id=407927670505#!/media/set/?set=a.10150895276580506.755233.407927670505&type=1

From a national paper: http://www.corriere.it/gallery/cronache/10-2011/maltempo/1/maltempo-liguria_8a81c316-ff33-11e0-b55a-a662e85c9dff.shtml#1

Video from Pontremoli, our nearest town: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiG-q9daHAk

If you want to find more, you can search “Alluvione” (flood) along with words like Pontremoli, Aulla or Lunigiana.

And here’s a first update: 250 people were evacuated from Mulazzo, which is one “side valley” from ours, also having a river or creek that flows down to the Magra.

And here is a picture of what you find if you try to go up our valley to Castagnetoli, the village about 1 km up from us. You don’t get through – it’s one of the places to which helicopters are flying with essential supplies:

This is not really a blog post, just a place for people to come and see the picture.

I have heard it said that marble has become so expensive that people are even stealing name-plaques off walls and that kind of thing. So maybe somebody would like this?

There are between 25 and 30 pieces of marble. Many of them are about a metre long or slightly more, but some are shorter. They are generally either about 3/4 inch or about 1.5 inches thick, and mostly between 6 inches and a foot wide. It is whitish, with a pale grey marbling. The majority are more or less rectangular, but some have corners cut off or diagonal ends. A few have residues of cement clinging to them, and I assume they were taken out of a kitchen or something similar when this house was refurbished a few years ago.

If anybody wants them you can have them for nothing, but there are two conditions: the first is that you come and fetch them yourself (it’s a few minutes away from the Pontremoli autostrada access); the second is that you take all of them at one go.

Any takers?

As background, I remind you that in 2003 I won first prize in the Ballydehob Busking Competition. This triumph was underlined a year or two later by winning second prize, an accolade even more to be valued for the fact that, unlike 2003, the competition now had multiple entrants!

But now we move our focus from music to photography. Last night, at the high point of the village summer feast, it was announced that I had won the first annual village photographic competition, with the theme of “La Pietra” – “Stone”.

Here it is:

(You can click for higher resolution)
The title would be “Crava Morta”, which is the name for the section of river that flows past 50 m from the bottom of the garden. It means something like either “Dead Goat” or “Goat Death” in local dialect. As far as I know, however, that is just a name whose origins were lost long ago. The frequency with which goats turn up dead there does not appear to be unusual. I did go down to the river several times looking for exactly the right stone in the right light. But don’t worry – the risk of injury I took for the sake of my art, clambering around the river in rubber boots that only leaked slightly, tripod and camera in hand, was minimal.

• This team of visionaries has worked passionately to develop the next generation of a service management solution, based on innovative and revolutionary technologies.

Translation: they have written some software that works quite well

The second is from the Yahoo! “Groups blog”:

• Over the past few months, we have been evaluating your feedback on the new Groups experience that we have been testing with some groups for several months. Based on that feedback, we have decided to rollback the new Groups experience starting this Wednesday, January 12. We will instead iterate on the current interface going forward. Thanks for your feedback and thoughts throughout this process.

Translation: we are cancelling some bad changes we made.

I’m particularly fond of “We will instead iterate on the current interface going forward.” See, there is still a need for courses in how to write! (Or maybe it’s “how to think”?)

I returned a week later for further investigation – there was no charge, as the main filling was to be done at the third appointment, which was yesterday.

I arrived in good time, armed with a book of nearly 800 pages that I am slowly reading at the moment. Clever, eh? And a good thing too – it was 50 minutes before I went in to the treatment room, and after the technician had cleaned out the temporary filling, I then had to lie on the chair for another 20 or more minutes, gripping a piece of cotton wool between my teeth at the offending site, before the dentist came to do the more skilled work of recreating the tooth.

And now the surprise. After checking that the word-play in a statement such as “you have been very patient patient” worked in English, as apparently it does in Italian, the dentist told me that today’s tooth was free! “Time is money,” he said, “that is my philosophy. And I know that is true for you as well.”

I would say that I was gobsmacked, but I wouldn’t want to knock this new tooth out.

Contact me if you’re looking for a dentist near Aulla!