Hubris

I cannot remember a summer like this, in terms of the weather, which has been uniformly awful. But, remarkably, awful without a drop or rain. It's been dry with some serious gales which often saw the garden furniture sailing merrily over the fence. The tomato plants took a real hammering in a particularly bad rain-free tempest about six weeks ago and they've never really recovered. Once Italians used to compliment me on the size and abundance of my tomatoes. Now little groups of horribly-inbred wall-eyed locals stand just outside the gates, pointing at me and cackling with cruel humour at my discomfiture. I try and chase them away with comments like "Hey Benito, that's a nice tooth you've got" but they soon re-assemble and carry on with their gurning and grinning.

Bring me the head of Ron Combo!

The local village bar where, finally and rightly, the name Combo is treated with the respect and veneration it patently merits is I think a still life of lower Piedmont history. Completely retro, it has long-forgotten bottles of obscure drinks behind the bar and long-forgotten customers gently snoring and dribbling in the corner. It not only keeps the local, ancient populace in a Marsala-induced vegetative state but it also sells newspapers and magazines, Sellotape, pastries, lottery tickets, plastic identity card holders, cigarettes, stamps and sweets that, pleasingly, are still kept in big glass jars on old shelves backed by mirrors that lost much of their silvering sometime in the 19th century.
And being in hunting country it is also stuffed with dead beasts and birds of every species.
I have a concern that if I do not give the owner's daughter a decent mark this year, I may be joining Matey here.