Equinox

On the way to the airport we stopped at some traffic lights. I gave a man with a sign saying he needed to eat at the lights half a euro. He muttered something in response that I took to be some unintelligible dialect. Until The Principal pointed out that he had said, 'Good Morning' in English. 'Good morning', I replied, and 'thank you' for some reason.

Later in the airport car park I was left with the car and no ticket to get out of the compound. When I had retrieved it from someone in the departure lounge I then had to do that shuffling across the seats thing to put the ticket into the machine at the barrier. The bloke behind me in a white four wheel drive started banging his horn. I actually shook my fist at him out the window and let out some unintelligible strangulated cry of fury.

Later I was chatting to a woman walking her 6 month old Alsatian. I wanted to know if the gravel road I was on went to a placed called Dicomano. We chatted about this and that and I asked her if there were many English people living in the area. She said, "No, but there were some Germans'. She went on to say that it was strange the way the Germans took some of the good - they seemed to loosen up - from the Italian character but they also took some of the bad by becoming quite 'furbetti- - cunning - (or as in my case fist-shakling with fury).

I drove along some lovely roads on the higher reaches of Mt Giove between Florence and the Mugello - olive groves and emerald green pastures blending into oak woods. I passed a shepherd with his flock and  two huge Belle and Sebastian-type mountain sheepdogs.  Bird song was everywhere and at one point the temperature touched 25C.

Meanwhile The Principal was flying into buffeting winds and snow in Edinburgh.