The Aegean Stables

Yes. For a long time I thought Hercules' fifth labour task was to clear some stables down in the Aegean. Only recently did I realise my glaring mistake. From then I have dinned 'Augean' into the woodpile that is my head.

Anyway, it was minus 3C in Strada when I arrived this morning. I went straight to the agri shop and bought a lump hammer and a zappa - those clunking Italian 'hoes' with a two-pronged head above the flat-bladed zappa part. €6 for the head and €3 for the handle.

After a second breakfast on a hastily built fire of bread toasted on the coals with our own olive oil and a sprinkling a a mature Pecorino I laid to in the old stables hacking away at the encrusted layering of hay and straw and sawdust. Even though not used for four years there was that tang of horse piss caught still in the compressed, hardened and bone-dry compostables.

The clay floor underneath was harder still and I'd soon sent mighty shivers up my forearms into my shoulders and bent the two-pronged attack I had taken so blithely in the shop. (I still have the propietor's sack-trolley wheel on my sack-trolley because the one I bought was busted - the 'camera d'aria' ((a Blip handle if ever there was one))- the inner tube - was punctured. But he was all smiles.)

Hours later, with The Ashes on Five Live on the phone I was still hacking out the stuff. As I joked at the time, I had breathed in so much dust I was becoming a wee bit horse. Naaaay.

Still with the floor cleared to the hard old clay soil of these parts I was ready for the second act. This consisted in stripping the pine cladding from a bedroom ceiling (of the distant and uphill house) and busting down the false ceiling of 'tavelle' - baked clay double-skin thin hollow bricks - that are used in the complex construction of ceilings and floors in traditional houses - although solid terracotta tiles were used in the past.

The busting-out I'm doing is with a bloody big 'bastone', (stick) punching it up through the weaker part of the tavelle which then come crashing down onto the terracotta floor - protected by old moving boxes laid flat.

I've done a  quarter so far and I am sack-barrowing and dragging huge boxes of the broken tavelle down to the stable to make a base for a concrete floor. The frost never let up and this made the dragging slightly easier. But there is no stream to divert to clear my Augean stables.

The photo was snapped in the Arno valley in a traffic jam near Sieci after having dropped The Boss off for an early class.