Last week in August we headed down to Italy for a week’s break to get some hard work done on the house before the winter. Regular readers will know there’s usually a bloody drama with our visits but this time there was no sense of looking back afterwards and smiling wistfully.
Tree fellers? It could be how the 60’s Irish brothers singing group The Batchelors described themselves but I’m not sure I could write a decent blog about them. Having said that I did see one of these cast-your-mind-back tv programmes recently on young Lena Savaroni who won fame on the original tv talent show Opportunity Knocks. She was probably only about 10 or 11 and a regular performer on Saturday night tv at the time. This evening she elected to sing a duet with one of the Batchelors – the one with the moustache who looked a bit like one of the perm-haired Liverpool footballers from the 70’s, ie a bit seedy. He clutched the young short skirt-clad Lena in his arms whilst she had her legs around his waist as they sang this cheesey love song to each other. It made for some very awkward viewing especially as it was introduced by one of those creepy DJ presenters. Let’s just say it was a more innocent time. Well that’s my Batchelors story and as blogs go it’s a stinker so ‘tree fellers’ must refer to something else eh….
Here are some shots of our olive picking efforts a couple of seasons ago at our place in Italy. Our good friends and neighbours, John & Christine, Fred & Barbara, very kindly turned up and helped us enormously that day and we collected a couple of cwt of olives which was turned to beautiful olive oil by the end of the day. Happy memories.
Pasta Paulie 