Offagna, population .... ?

I must look into that. There's a podcast I listen to called Catholic in a Small Town (somewhere in Georgia, it would seem), and they occasionally mention that the population is 8000. I'd be gratified to verify that I was a Catholic in a smaller village.

Anyway, t'other day I was helping Carlo gather potatoes from what Monica always calls "our orchard", in spite of the fact that it's not technically theirs and it's by no means exclusively an orchard. I just thought I would mention this so that by degrees you might get an erroneous impression of me as a man of the soil and be impressed - wish me luck. Some more of the bounty of the "orchard" is as follows; courgettes (together with their edible flowers, which I have edden a few times now), marrows, melons, apples, peaches, lettuce, tomatoes, onions. It's all very exciting to me; I hope I can learn something about growing vegetables by and by. There are also peppers and chillis at the house.

In other news, I found out that I had to have a dispensation from the bishop to get our marriage paperwork sorted (I think because Fr. Harry didn't request the banns in England). Anyway, it's all fine, but I wanted to mention it, because I think it makes me sound a bit dangerous. Our bisop's name is Edoardo. I'm more used to bishops with names like Chris, Keiran and Kevin, but you have to make the best of these things.

Went to Ancona today to try and buy some things. Partial success. I now have two pairs of flip-flops (ciabatte - ciabatta means slipper, which is something to chew over next time you have the bread), one for the world at large, one for the domestic front. No carpets here - my feet were getting pretty dirty on a daily basis. Monica says her mamma will be pleased that my feet will thus reamin mre stately. At one point the inestimable M was shopping for feminine things, so we went our separate ways. I thought this might be helpful for my Italian. I suppose it might have been a bit. If you go into a shop in Italy, they're more than likely to say hello and try and help you before you have any browsing time, so you have to be prepared to speak a little bit if you go shopping.

Nothing else springs to mind, so that'll do for now.