ECHO 21/4/06 - Italy

Smell of fresh cut grass - Mario the gardener is out back strimming the undergrowth around the vines. I am up early. My father and I were supposed to head for Rome today but he is not well; one of his recurrent ailments has left him bed bound for the day. So I idle. I paint a few walls and manage other odd jobs. Then I hunt for the nightingale with a pair of binoculars I find hidden away in the corner of the porcellaia - for a while he is very close; the presence of his song, its direction, gives away a location but trying to find him in the trees is not easy. Plus he sweeps away and starts singing somewhere else without revealing any clue to his flight, throwing me off track completely.

Every creature here is mating, or trying to. Hysteria in the wisteria. Snails contort on the gravel paths and on table tops, entwined in slimy embraces in which they appear to dissolve into each other; mayfly and big black flying beetles gaily dance through the air in tandem, joined together at either end; and butterflies skim across the lawn in fast fluttering sexy dogfights - a Siskin comes close and chatters away in the low branches of an apple tree, singing for a mate, undisturbed by my presence -

Mario sweats his way through the morning in between the depleted vines at the foot of the garden. He is dark-skinned, a leathery face and forearms like bullwhips; a joker too. He calls the new pope ‘Papa-Razzi’. He comes up and lights a Marlboro Red. Then disappears for an hour or so. I am amazed to discover he has gone off for a session of chemotherapy. He is suffering from prostate cancer. You would not know to look at him when he returns. He gets out and starts up the strimmer again and wades through the long grass at the foot of the tree line, removing it swiftly.

A hoopoe calls, the stuttered boom that announces its own name -