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NORTHERN ITALIAN DIARIES

NORTHERN ITALIAN DIARIES

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Tag: Italy with kids

Up in the mountains with kids

February 14, 2017.Reading time 5 minutes.

How to climb up mountains with the kids and enjoy it

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Coffee and blueberry muffin, blank piece of card, post its. This is the moment where I sit down with my sheet of card and post its and a new book idea begins. I love this moment so much also because I am so excited about this one I want to shout out from the top of the hill in my village, but obviously I won’t. I always tell my kids, it’s the process what really counts, that’s where the real joy lies, so here am i practicing what I preach. When I was around twelve my teacher at secondary school asked us all what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told her and the whole class: My ambition is to be an authoress, with all the precociousness of a girl who was constantly looking ahead, as another twenty some other girls in navy blue gym slips collapsed into giggles and I remained mortified and wanted the ground to swallow me up. Would love to go back and tell that girl: Do ‘t worry, first you’ll live a bit, and then you’ll write, and you’ll love it more than you could have ever imagined.

Once upon a time there was a girl who came from the moors. Well not literally, but we all have our places, and the moors is definitely what the UK means to me. At one time it was the house I grew up in, but there’s another family living there now and eventually we all have to let go, so I’m happy to just wander the moors now. My grandmother grew up on the moor, until she went into service when she was young, before the war, and I love to think of what it must have been like as a child and a young woman, born into a Yorkshire mining family and growing up in a village on a Yorkshire moor in the 1910s and the 1920s. She was the grandmother who looked after me as a baby so my mother could go back to work, as at the time she only got six weeks’ maternity leave. She died suddenly when I was six, six months after my grandfather. Childhood grief has a way of resurfacing, and I spent years in my twenties trying to place it and understand it, and then when my own mother died, my elder son told me “I have two mummies,” and I finally understood. This is me after a year in Italy in my I only wear black and my sunglasses phase because I’m oh so italiana. It makes me smile now, but yes that was me too.

Pasta and ragù to hold it all together

No I wasn’t standing precariously near to the edge, this was on full zoom and I wish I’d come further out as looking at it gives me vertigo. Today is an exercise in mountain adoration. This isn’t just rock, this is the history of the evolution of our earth shaped by volcanoes, mass extinctions and ice ages. One of the reasons why the Dolomites got UNESCO World Heritage status in 2009, along with their incredible beauty. (For me they are also poetry.) The Tre Cime di Lavaredo are the three peaks. I may have actually posted this before, but hey you can’t have enough mountain pictures, can you?

The Tre Cime di Lavaredo (three peaks) in the incredible Italian Dolomites. (Swipe for view of Rifugio Locatelli as you’re walking along to it.) have this thing about mountains. I love going to them, and I love writing about them afterwards for @italiamagazine. If you haven’t visited the Italian Dolomites, put it on your list. My article telling you why will be in the June/July edition and I can’t wait!

Oh but that sky 😍

Memories of stopping of in Arles nearly three summers ago, wanting to go to Les Rencontres d’Arles photo exhibition and then finally getting to go and seeing Tom Wood’s Mothers, Daughters, Sisters shot on the streets of Liverpool between the late 1970s and 1999s and loving it like I thought I would. If you don’t know his work, go google. It’s a powerful narrative, and for some of us familiar. I keep coming back to these photos, it’s a continuing theme.

Half finished a feature, pitched another, book idea fermenting, need to write a proposal for that, strawberries and Greek yoghurt in bed. You know those days you dream of having some kind housekeeper, one who also makes your tea because you get to the end of the day and you’re so tired you just have to take yourself to bed? Still. I love it when I can feel life getting back to some kind of normal.

Sausage, mashed potatoes, peas and Bisto gravy, which is total comfort food and which the kids have literally wolfed down. Also reminds me of when I used to go up town on the bus with my nanna, as she called it. She’d take me shopping and then we’d have dinner which was what lunch was, just like dinner was always tea. We’d go to the same cafe and have sausage and mash or thin slices of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, potatoes and gravy and I would sit happily eating away in the knowledge that she was my nanna and I was her granddaughter.

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