{"id":4158,"date":"2010-01-04T01:23:32","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T01:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vallico.net\/casinoqmc\/?p=4158"},"modified":"2019-10-09T23:00:42","modified_gmt":"2019-10-09T23:00:42","slug":"five-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vallico.net\/casinoqmc\/five-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Five stories : ‘News from the Towler Institute’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here for the readers of the CASINOQMC site, in reverse order of publication, are five stories originally published in the ‘News from the Towler Institute’ blog on that wonderful website barganews.com<\/a> [‘busily putting Barga on the map’ with single-minded determination since 1996 – before most people had even heard of the internet – by Keane, a great man and a great artist]. The stories concern various happenings during the development of the Apuan Alps Centre for Physics which may be of interest to people who have attended events at the venue.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tales from the Disaster Zone<\/a><\/h2>\n

Posted on

by Mike Towler<\/em><\/p>\n

So we\u2019re cut off. Vallico Sotto is isolated from the rest of humanity by the biggest damned landslide you ever saw. See this hundred-foot-deep three-hundred-foot-wide mile-long hole? That was a road I walked over just the day before.<\/p>\n

\"landslide21\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It all began with the snow, see. They cancelled the school bus because of the nasty weather, and so I took Froggie the Fiat Multipla down to pick up our four-year old daughter Saska and the three daughters of some English friends who live in the forest below Vallico. It\u2019s the week of the recita<\/em> \u2013 which I imagine is some kind of Nativity play \u2013 and Saska has been given the vitally important role of a snowflake<\/em>. It\u2019s not what I\u2019d hoped for actually. Especially since at the big pantomime in her English school a week earlier she played a star<\/em>, not in the showbiz sense, but in the sense of standing at the back of the stage with a gold pointy shape attached to her head and being told to twinkle. You\u2019ve got to say it\u2019s disappointing.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got the Virgin Mary in the back of the car though. And to be fair you can see why she got the job, as she looks exactly<\/em> like your internal picture of the real one back in about 10 BC, albeit maybe a bit cleaner. And right now, you can tell from her face she\u2019d rather be on the back of a donkey than in my car. The school is down in the valley far below, and when I got there it was only pretending to snow. As we begin the climb back up the steep, winding road to Vallico Sotto, it really<\/em> starts to snow. Proper snow that sticks to the road. And Froggie, with his old worn-out wrong-sort-of-tyres and total lack of preparation for winter, starts to slip and slide. After ten minutes of incredibly slow driving in second gear we get back to the Vallico car park and I reckon we have something like five minutes to spare before the road becomes impassable. Lucky.<\/p>\n

The Virgin Mary\u2019s father \u2013 sadly called John rather than Joachim \u2013 is waiting, and he hurriedly clears off to his forest with the short-arsed holy trio. Saska, my wife Sammy and I are left alone in the car park. Through the swirling snow I gaze at the ugly monstrosity building site which has been the public face of Vallico for the last three and a half years. When we first came here five or six years ago, it was a beautiful old ruined fourteenth century palazzo<\/em><\/a>. Looked quite nice actually. Only reason you couldn\u2019t live in it was that there was no glass in many of the windows and there was a huge crack in the stonework of the facade. Then whoever owns it decided to restore it by \u2013 get this \u2013 completely demolishing it then putting the resultant jigsaw back together from the multiple piles of tens of thousands of ancient stones. Unsurprisingly this took a long time, with a giant crane taking up half the places in the car park, but eventually something that looked remarkably like a modern palazzo<\/em> reappeared. No plaster, still no windows, and then everything stopped. People said that the builders had been banged up in jail for nicking the most architecturally important bits of masonry and selling them on. Some other people said the money had run out. Eventually after a year or so someone came and took the crane away (What\u2019s the weekly rent for one of those things? No wonder they had financial problems.). And so now for a hell of a long time an unfinished something like you\u2019d expect the Mafia to build in Sicily has squatted like a monstrous toad in front of our supposedly-protected beautiful village, amid piles of mud and concrete, swathed in scaffolding and the ugly bright-orange netting with which the law obliges you to cover every building site. The hundred or so people I bring here every summer for our public events arrive expecting to see some kind of Tuscan mountain idyll. When they get here and see this thing it\u2019s clear some of them want to go home again. On the official building site sign where it says \u201cEstimated Date of Completion: Dec 2007\u2033 someone has written, in Italian, \u201cSo f***ing complete it then\u201d. That\u2019ll be the day.<\/p>\n

So, slipping and sliding just like Froggie, we walk up the steep path to our lovely old monastery and settle in for the night.<\/p>\n

\"car_park1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fast forward to the following morning. After I wake up, I lie in bed for something like four hours, refusing to tunnel from underneath nine layers of bedclothes into the frigid air of my unheated room. When I eventually crack and fling open the frozen shutters, all I can see is a vast uneven field of snow extending as far as the eye can see; the unevenness is caused by a series of giant lumps which I take to be houses. The entire village and all of the surrounding mountain have been completely buried under two to three feet of snow. We are, and not for the last time this Christmas, cut-off from the rest of the world. When I pop next door later, our lovely neighbour Flora Calissi \u2013 a resident of Vallico Sotto since around 1896 \u2013 told me there hadn\u2019t been any serious snow up here since the 1960s. Before that, she said, it was a regular thing; that\u2019s climate change for you. To be fair though, a couple of the younger local lads (the ones in their 70s) remembered that actually there was a pretty fair snowfall here around 1985. Mind you, that\u2019s still a quarter of a century ago and you have to wonder whether the council snowplough still works.<\/p>\n

OK, snow. Brilliant. Snowmen! Snowball fights! Let\u2019s build an igloo! Hooray. However for some reason I don\u2019t have any gloves and when the air-temperature is still around minus 10 degrees and the snow is exactly the wrong sort of powdery little crystals that don\u2019t stick together you rapidly lose your enthusiasm after picking up your first handful. Unless you\u2019re Saska of course. She quickly goes completely mental and buries herself in the stuff for hours on end and amazingly emerges without a terminal case of frostbite..<\/p>\n

\"snow3a1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Back in the world of grown-ups, there are problems. Just around the time of the first snowfall Sammy and I realized there wasn\u2019t any food in the house, and we were just about to plan an expedition to the big Leclerc supermarket in Gallicano when the snow came. So now we\u2019re likely to be stuck here for days with nothing to eat. Now, why don\u2019t we just go to the local shop, you might ask? Well, first of all of course, Sammy\u2019s got to have her bloody soya milk and other rare delicacies that they don\u2019t stock in village shops \u2013 Christ, there\u2019d be tantrums if she was stranded on a desert island \u2013 but the most important point is that we don\u2019t have a village shop any more. We used to, mind, but sadly it closed a few years back when local baker Mario \u2013 husband of the lovely Adelina from behind the counter \u2013 built a giant new emporium for her down in the main valley miles away. If you visit Da Mario in Piano di Coreglia, tell them to come back. We miss them. There was a village restaurant too, but that closed a few years before the shop did. There is still a bar, but it\u2019s a sort of members-only workin\u2019 mens\u2019 club (apparently so they don\u2019t have to pay tax on the beer) and it\u2019s not the sort of place you go to have fun in winter. So basically we\u2019ve got no services left at all. When the villagers were offered a mains gas supply a year or so before we arrived they voted against it, on the grounds that Mario would always bring round the enormously heavy bombole di gas<\/em> for your gas fires or your cookers on his little tractor, and these are apparently very slightly cheaper. Bet they\u2019re regretting that now.<\/p>\n

I should say though that everything in the restaurant is still there (tables, cookers and all that) \u2013 it\u2019s just that the door is always locked. Some enterprising and very kind local friends of ours actually reopened it this year during one of our summer schools when we had our annual \u201cVallico Sotto against the World\u201d football match and they made us some quality pizza. One little village \u2013 with only around eight guys fit enough to run around for half an hour \u2013 against a potential pool of something like seven billion people. I\u2019ve tried importing Brazilians, English, Spanish, Germans. Even Mongolians and Nepalese. But it\u2019s no use. Every year we still get hammered by Marco and his boys. The shame of it.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I digress. We\u2019re trapped, and we\u2019d better get used to it.<\/p>\n

\"snow41\"<\/a><\/p>\n

OK, so you don\u2019t get confused with what follows, let me bring you up to speed with the local geography. The fortress and village of Vallico Sotto \u2013 which certainly dates back to Roman times (I\u2019m currently translating Gabriella Carli\u2019s history of the village \u2013 should be finished as soon as I can figure out what the lengthy passages of mediaeval Italian mean) \u2013 is built on the ridge of a rocky outcrop high in the southern reaches of the Apuan Alps between the two little rivers Rio Maggiore and Rio Selvano. A few hundred metres higher is our non-identical twin, Vallico Sopra \u2013 presumably built not long after Vallico Sotto when some sun-worshipping ancient from the Dark Ages realized that its location got sunshine for a couple of hours longer in the afternoon. This is where our artist friend Mandy lives, of whom you will hear more. She bought a ruin there last year, and the builders have just (like, two days ago) finished putting in the heating. She has \u2013 and she\u2019s really going to regret this \u2013 invited about 200 members of her family to visit during this Christmas holiday to celebrate the completion of her new home. Mandy, husband Dave, and son Tom drove here from England and arrived about twenty minutes before me and the Virgin Mary and the others got back from school. That was lucky too.<\/p>\n

How can we get cut off then? Basically, there\u2019s one only way up.. Look at this photograph of what Vallico normally looks like in winter..<\/p>\n

\"vallico_in_winter_landslide1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The red road is the escape route from Vallico Sotto (population: 120). Just on the other side of the ridgeline the road winds down for about three km past the Da Sandra restaurant as far as the village of Fabbriche di Vallico at the bottom of the Turritecava valley. Descending from there along the Turritecava river for about nine km brings you to the main valley of the river Serchio. From there, left to Barga and Gallicano, right to Lucca.<\/p>\n

The green road goes past some local agriturismi<\/em> and a few houses. Then the tarmac runs out and the resulting bumpy dirt road climbs steeply up to the ridge at Foce di Pompanella. In principle it\u2019s possible to traverse this to get to the village of Trassilico in the next big valley parallel to ours, but in reality you need a four-wheel-drive off-roader with a three-foot ground clearance. Froggie doesn\u2019t cut it. The yellow road goes to Vallico Sopra (population: 80) then continues up to the ridge where we find a dead end at the even tinier village of San Luigi (population: 10 and some dogs). There is in fact an old mule trail from there which continues to Verni and Trassilico but it\u2019s completely impassable to cars, even expensive ones. That said, I reckon a hundred guys, working for a week, could widen it and clear it to make it suitable for motor vehicles.. Why would you need to do that, though? I mean, really! Don\u2019t look at the blue line yet.<\/p>\n

The orange dotted line is the mule trail. The lily-livered pansies like me who inhabit the place nowadays talk about being cut off, but you\u2019ve got to remember that the red, green and yellow roads were only built from 1960 to 1970. Before then, if you wanted to come up here, you had to hitch a lift with a bloody donkey \u2013 for Christ\u2019s sake \u2013 all the way up one of the mule trails now overgrown and forgotten by everyone but the very old. Didn\u2019t stop \u2018em though. There were getting on for a thousand people living up here in the early 1900s.<\/p>\n

Just for the record, this is what Vallico looked like a few days after the snow. Reminds me of the hymn we used to sing at school back in the 1970s (though obviously these days you\u2019re not allowed to sing hymns, since Jesus was after all only a minor prophet and you might offend someone):<\/p>\n

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
\nEarth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
\nSnow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
\nIn the bleak midwinter, long ago.
\n<\/em><\/center>
\"snow_vallico21\"<\/a><\/center> <\/p>\n

So anyway, we stick it out for three or four days. We venture out occasionally to play around in the snow, but mainly we sit inside, reading, talking, playing. The girls watch about 8 million DVDs. Yeah, and we cook as well. Real back-of-the-cupboard stuff. It\u2019s when I find myself looking one evening at a bowl of two-year-old rice to which \u2013 in the absence of other options \u2013 I have just added some red-wine vinegar and a pinch of cinnamon past its sell-by date, that I realize this is starting to piss me off. Not only the food, but the water pipes have frozen, and we can\u2019t wash, clean our teeth, flush the loo, and the only reason I was able to cook the rice was because I melted some snow. It would be good to know when we can get out of the house for a bit. I want to take the girls to Lucca, to let Saska play on the vintage roundabout with horses that go up and down. I want to mooch around the Christmas market, to visit the antiquarian bookstore, to sit in our favourite little bar sipping some deep rich red wine. Vallico Sotto is great, but a guy\u2019s got to have a little relaxation. And anyway, I don\u2019t have enough presents to fill Saska\u2019s Christmas sock.<\/p>\n

The council have fired up the rusty old snowplough, sure enough, and they\u2019ve cleared the roads. But they\u2019re all still covered by a thick crust of ice and Froggie has no chance of even getting out of the car park. But it\u2019s then that something bad happens. The temperature goes up by more than twenty degrees in the space of a few hours. What do you call it? A warm front moves in. And then. And then about five billion tons of snow melts all at once. And then it starts to absolutely piss down with rain, and it doesn\u2019t stop. It doesn\u2019t stop for a long time.<\/p>\n

\"snowplough1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Not long afterwards it\u2019s the 22nd of December 2009 and it\u2019s still absolutely lashing it down. It\u2019s also my fortieth birthday. No shit, really. Old man now. I\u2019m wearing the funkiest shirt in the world (courtesy of my lovely wife) and we\u2019ve all gone down to Da Sandra to celebrate with Mandy\u2019s family. They get to the restaurant before us, and when we arrive they give me some great presents. First, a machete. There are any number of beautiful footpaths around here, but sadly \u2013 and understandably \u2013 the denuded population have lost the will to keep them clear of encroaching vegatation. Go on, I\u2019ll do it then. Also, knowing my love of filling the house with weird stuff to show our visitors, they give me a beautiful reproduction antique sword. I wave this around a bit, and find myself threatening Sandra with it and demanding she doesn\u2019t charge us for our meal. She\u2019s a formidable woman though, and she stares me out..<\/p>\n

Let me talk briefly about the Mandy family. They live just a couple of miles from us in Cambridge, and by some strange cosmic coincidence they bought a Tuscan ruin to do up only a couple of miles from ours in Italy, and they\u2019re now our new best friends (don\u2019t worry Dan and Jane, we still love you too!). Mandy is a painter<\/a>, and a good one \u2013 add her to your list, Keane \u2013 and she\u2019s the co-founder of the Tuscany Stuckists<\/a> with Sammy. Her son Tom causes confusion. He is a strapping 6 foot tall 23-year old babe magnet with big hair, but Mandy looks so youthful and lovely that it makes you think she must have given birth to him aged about 3. And husband Dave, though \u2013 he\u2019s a wild one. Dave is the boss of a Cambridge company that can make absolutely anything<\/em> out of plastic. He sometime does stuff for artists, and one of his recent commissions involved making a giant six-foot lobster engaged in an act of sexual intercourse with a man. No, really. All those legs and antennae have got to imply some serious plastic-moulding talent. I tell Sandra about this and she falls about laughing. She says she\u2019ll think about ordering one for the restaurant car park.<\/p>\n

So time passes. We have a brilliant evening with great food and then we head back home up the hill. It\u2019s only when we get out of Froggie in the car park that we realize that it is seriously, very seriously, raining very hard indeed and we only have one umbrella between the three of us. Walking up the path is like wading up a river, and it is a relief when I slam the front door of the monastery behind us, and I can take off my soaking wet things. Now let me confess something to you at this point. I\u2019m a bit drunk. I don\u2019t normally get drunk (sorry mother), but it\u2019s my 40th birthday and the end of my youth and all that, so I reckon I\u2019ve got an excuse. I\u2019ve had the equivalent of maybe a bit more than a bottle of wine, and I\u2019ve had a good big meal. The one thing I want to do is go to sleep, so I pack the girls off to bed, and head out of their bedroom to check and close down the house and maybe have a cup of two-year-old Ovaltine (I am old now, after all). The best laid plans..<\/p>\n

\"ovaltine1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The most miserable night of my whole life then begins, and it starts when I go to the kitchen on the top floor to get the Ovaltine. I reach my hand up to the little wooden tea-shelf but then I stop. Water is flowing down the wall in great streams behind it. I grab a towel and the washing-up bowl and run up the stairs to the attic. Finding water pouring out of a hole below the ridge line I shove the towel roughly into the hole to plug it, and arrange the bowl on the floor to catch the drips. Bloody medieval roofs! Then, covered in cobwebs and filthy, I go back down to the top floor. Shit. Downstairs. Even though it\u2019s been raining for the last few days it hasn\u2019t occured to me to look downstairs; I know perfectly well the church roof is a bit porous. In winter, see, with no central heating, we tend to nest on the topmost of our three floors which we heat with gas fires and block off with a trapdoor that I built over the stairwell. I\u2019d got too cosy, and I had forgotten to look at the rest of the house..<\/p>\n

I pull up the trapdoor and go down to the second floor and run to the end of the corridor where the door to the church is. OK, so we\u2019ve got a church in our house. Don\u2019t get jealous. I swapped a little terraced house in Bolton that I inherited and sold for less than a hundred grand for this; hardly the Duke of Westminster. Anyway, sure enough. Drip. Drip. Drip. Three streams of drips are pouring through the church roof \u2013 I\u2019ve seen at least two of these before. There\u2019s a puddle of water behind the altar at the back of the church too, and I see that water is somehow streaming through the back wall. Definitely haven\u2019t seen that before. I run down the stairs to the bottom floor to get some pans to catch the water, and as I enter the pantry I immediately sense something is not right. I look down and I see the crappy inherited piece of linoleum covering the floor that I always meant to replace is floating in two inches of water.. Shit, and double shit. Where\u2019s this coming from? I look up? Nothing coming through the ceiling. I look sideways. Ah. Water is flowing into the room through holes in the plaster at the bottom of the wall. I remember that the house is built on a slope and that the bottom floor is something like eight feet underground. The level of the water table has apparently risen so far that it is now higher than the floor and the pressure is pushing huge streams of liquid through the wall.<\/p>\n

Panicking slightly, I reverse back into the kitchen \u2013 haven\u2019t been in here for a week \u2013 and immediately I become aware of a high-pitched gushing noise slightly different from the sound of the incessant rainfall. It\u2019s coming from the front of the house. Flinging open the windows into the lashing storm, I see that a high pressure jet of water is hissing horizontally into the front garden. Burst pipe. The one going to the garden bedroom. So that\u2019s why the water pressure\u2019s been a bit low since the pipes unfroze. Christ, this must have been going on for the last two days. Then it hits me that the only reason that water is coming through the back wall of the church (which is above ground level) is that one of the pipes running through there must have burst as well.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s midnight. And it\u2019s only then that I realize that despite my desperate need to sleep, I\u2019m not going to get to bed for quite some time..<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Two days later, it\u2019s Christmas Eve, and I feel like death. I reflect back on the night of the 22nd. After putting big buckets under the roof leaks, and turning off the mains stopcock to stop the burst pipes spewing everywhere, I had turned to the water spouting through the wall. There was still some time to prevent a general flood, since thanks to either a cock-up by some mediaeval mason or by ground subsidence the back of the house seems to be lower than the front, and the water was collecting in a big pool against the back wall. If I could mop the stuff up at the same rate as it was flowing in, then maybe we could prevent a major disaster. I quickly found the mop, but the mop bucket wasn\u2019t where I expected. When things aren\u2019t used for a few years you forget where you put them, and after five comedy minutes of tearing round the house looking in all the different places where things get put, I gave up. How can a mop bucket just disappear? So, already bored, I improvised one. Using the removable plastic vegetable compartment from the bottom of the fridge, and a metal mesh salvaged from the grill-pan of the cooker. I lit a gas fire in the pantry, turned on the dehumidifier, opened a bottle of beer (there\u2019s got to be some pleasure in this), and started to mop. Splash the mop into the water. Lift the dripping mophead onto the grill. Rotate five times. Push hard. Squeeze. Repeat. And that\u2019s how it was for the next six-and-a-half hours<\/em>. Until dawn. On my birthday. My arm muscles are still killing me.<\/p>\n

Oh yes, and every half an hour or so \u2013 just for a bit of variety \u2013 I had dashed madly through the house looking desperately for squidgy moldable substances to squeeze into the little holes through which the water was entering the house. An early thought was Blu-Tack, but for the life of me I couldn\u2019t find the big packet that for some reason I\u2019d brought over from England ten days before. It was only on the third trip around the house that I remembered that the previous week Saska had spent an entertaining evening making Christmas presents for Mummy using Daddy\u2019s entire supply of Blu-Tack (including a pussy cat, and an entire park<\/em> \u2013 complete with grass and twigs stuck into it). All were now lovingly wrapped in Christmas paper and ribbons and sitting under the Christmas tree. So 2.30am sees Daddy furtively scrabbling under the tree tearing off wrapping paper, wondering how many presents he can nick before Saska will notice (come Christmas day of course, she remembers every damned one..) \u2018Stealing your own daughter\u2019s Christmas presents? Shame on you!!\u2019 cry the entire Barganews readership. I know. I know.<\/p>\n

And did it work? Was it worth the trauma and the infant Christmas blubbing? Well, when I shoved the Blu-Tack pussy cat into one of the holes (along with half Sammy\u2019s supply of silicone ear plugs that for some reason she likes to wear when she\u2019s asleep) there was a definite reduction in the water flow. I should write a letter to some nerdy DIY magazine.<\/p>\n

The following day was no fun either. With the snow mostly disappeared we got Froggie down the hill for the first time in a week and we managed to bring a wheelbarrow or two\u2019s worth of supermarket supplies \u2013 plus some emergency plumbing stuff from Brico. I waited the whole evening for the incessant rain to stop until about 1am I bothered to read the instructions on my two-component epoxy putty. \u201cALSO DRIES UNDERWATER\u201d. Sigh. And that\u2019s how I found myself at two o\u2019clock in the morning, sitting in the front garden on a white plastic garden chair in the freezing rain, mixing the two components of the putty together in my hands. It grows hot as it begins to polymerize, and I put it down on the window sill while I briefly scratch at the ruptured copper piping with some emery paper. When I pick up the putty thirty seconds later it is as solid as a small stone and completely unworkable. OK, now I know why there was something about \u2018careful timing\u2019 in the instructions. The whole twenty-minute process has to begin again, and I head back inside dripping wet. Legendary reserves of patience are beginning to be called for. To stop me from remembering how miserable I am, the whole time I\u2019m declaiming under my breath the Richard Burton narration from Jeff Wayne\u2019s 1978 War of the Worlds<\/a> concept album which I\u2019d learnt off-by-heart \u2013 with the correct melodramatic accent \u2013 for something to do during the 19-hour drive from Cambridge ten days before when I realized I\u2019d forgotten to bring my usual CD audiobooks.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo-one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No-one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us..<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

.. and the rest of it. Over and over again. During the whole journey down I had a giant six-foot elk in the back of the car. It must have thought I was completely insane.<\/p>\n

\"elk61\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So back to Christmas Eve. Having found Flora in tears on account of the huge amount of water dripping into her attic and back bedroom (the same leak that\u2019s coming into our top floor), I\u2019ve spent half an hour on the dangerously slippy moss-covered roof. You should see it up there. About an acre of higgledy-piggledy centuries-old tiles weighed down with occasional heavy rocks. Many of the tiles \u2013 if you stand on them whilst weighing more than about four stone which, erm, I guess I do \u2013 will crack and introduce another leak. Offered this job, I think Sisyphus might have preferred to keep pushing his boulder up the hill. I slap on a couple of tarpaulins in something like the best place and hope for the best. And yes it is still raining.<\/p>\n

\"roof1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We\u2019d also managed a run down to Fabbriche di Vallico to pick up a decent turkey from Signor Vanni the butcher. All the preparations for Christmas are made, with the exception of wrapping the girls\u2019 Christmas presents in the attic, and having had a total of about five hours sleep in the previous three days I\u2019m hoping they\u2019ll go to bed soon. Af course they\u2019re both so excited they stay up until about 1.30am. First I have to wait for the sound of infant snoring. 2.30am. Then I have to sneak into the attic, wrap the presents whilst trying not to make rustling noises, and find Saska\u2019s Christmas sock. In the end I have to make do with one of my not very Christmassy ordinary socks \u2013 the only clean one I have left. Then I run round the house trying to find some little things like tangerines and sweets to put in the sock, then I have to drink the whiskey and eat the panettone<\/em> that Saska has left out for Father Christmas. She\u2019s helpfully covered both of them with a thin film of ash from the fireplace. Then I write her a note of thanks telling her to be a good girl next year and that the whiskey was delicious (even though it was actually some disgusting liqueur someone gave us years ago). As I sneak into the girls\u2019 bedroom, I feel compelled to don a small beard of cotton wool, a red hat, and a thick dressing gown in case they see me. Of course neither of them do so I just end up feeling a bit stupid. I lay the sock on the end of Saska\u2019s bed, and finally I leave a trail of cotton wool snow from the bed back to the chimney. I check my watch. 5.30am. Jesus, they\u2019re going to be up in a few hours.<\/p>\n

Anyway, before you say I\u2019m destroying the illusion about how these things work (sorry kids!) I\u2019ll delete the previous paragraph as soon as Saska learns to read, OK? And you mustn\u2019t tell her. I want her to keep believing in Father Christmas until she\u2019s at least fourteen. As well as mispronouncing words like \u2018aminal\u2019, \u2018mazagine\u2019 and \u2018hopsical\u2019 which I\u2019ve been carefully mispronouncing myself ever since she learned to talk.<\/p>\n

Since one of the purposes of this story is to show you what a miserable time we\u2019ve had then I\u2019ll skip Christmas day itself, since it was lovely (apart from the continuing torrential rain of course). Mandy, Dave and Tom came round with Dave\u2019s sister and Tomoko\u2019s family from Vallico Sopra for turkey and fun. Foolishly we showed them North Face<\/em> in the evening \u2013 a German film about Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser\u2019s extremely fatal 1936 attempt to climb the North Face of the Eiger; foolish since Mandy immediately banned me from taking Tom and Dave anywhere near Monte Procinto<\/a> or on a few other dangerous hikes we were planning.<\/p>\n

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Unperceived by us, however, just down the mountain something terrible was happening. The first I knew of it was the day after \u2013 late Boxing Day evening. Mandy up in Vallico Sopra phones up Sammy. She\u2019s been told the carabinieri<\/em> are closing the road to Fabbriche (our link to the outside world) tomorrow at 7am. Permanently. There\u2019s been a landslide. If you want to get your car out, drive it down now.. We do need to get it out since it\u2019s being driven back to England for the new term next week but by now, of course, you can guess what condition I\u2019m in. Yes, I\u2019ve just had three glasses of wine and a nice dinner and I want to go to sleep. I wonder if anyone has ever done so much crisis management late at night whilst drunk. In the rain.<\/p>\n

So I wearily put on something warm and go to the car park. Soon Froggie and I are rolling slowly down the red road into the inky-black soaking-wet canyon that is the Turritecava valley. Mandy had said the landslide was just below Sandra\u2019s restaurant and that the road had already been cleared, but that there was a huge threat of another which is why they were closing the road. Halfway down, it occurs to me that driving the car directly through the fallout zone of an unstable landslide is er.. well, slightly dangerous. As I hurriedly motor past the Valsozza bridge, Froggie\u2019s headlights pick out a confused mass of mud and smashed tree trunks shovelled off the road line, and a minute later, I\u2019m down. I park on the main road somewhere since Fabbriche is full, and then I realize that, as always, the worst part of the evening is yet to come, since I\u2019ve forgotten to bring a torch and I need to walk three km back up an incredibly steep hill, in the pitch dark, under a landslide, drunk, while being rained on. Isn\u2019t this just the best Christmas ever? Five minutes later I hurriedly pass the landslide gazing upwards through the drizzle into the threatening black void. A couple of eery red warning lamps and a bit of moonlight is all the illumination I have, and it ain\u2019t enough to see what happened, but there is \u2013 at least in my imagination \u2013 a palpable sense of menace.. All the way up there\u2019s nothing on my left but gigantic nearly vertical slopes with water streaming off them, and it\u2019s at times like this, that I really begin to regret reading all those climbing books which end with the climber getting his head smashed in by falling rocks.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a picture of what the pleasant little country bridge over the Valsozza looks like not long after about 100,000 cubic metres of mud and half a forest has just blown straight through it.<\/p>\n

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Now a question \u2013 where did all that mud come from? I know the Foce di Pompanella road (the green one on my picture) is a few thousand feet straight up from the Valsozza bridge. Perhaps I\u2019ll get a better view from there. The next day I climb about a mile up the road, as far as a tree-trunk barrier that someone has rapidly fashioned to block the way. Past the barrier, round a corner, and you get the shock of your life. The Foce di Pompanella road isn\u2019t there anymore.<\/p>\n

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This quite clearly is a bit of a disaster, to say the least.. Marco\u2019s agriturismo \u201cLa Fornace\u201d is on the other side of this new canyon, along with quite a few houses and capanne<\/em>. The locals get their wood from there. There\u2019s any number of fantastic walks and views that way, and this is not going to be fixed any time soon. Click on the following picture to play my gloomy rainy video which should give you a better idea of the scale.<\/p>\n

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Repairs are going to cost millions of pounds and take many years, if they think it\u2019s worth repairing at all. Eventually, from talking to people and reading press reports, I figure out what actually happened. Believe it or not, it was at lunchtime on Christmas day. 12.30 on the dot. There were 200 people having their Christmas lunch in Sandra\u2019s restaurant just a hundred yards up from Valsozza. It\u2019s amazing someone arriving or leaving wasn\u2019t killed. Apparently the diners were all stuck up there until the road was cleared with big diggers later that afternoon. It wasn\u2019t until they sent some geologists along the upper road the following day that they realized only half the mountain had collapsed, and that the other half was in serious danger of following it. Mayor Oreste Giurlani signed an indefinite road closure notice and that\u2019s it.. We and the 200 others up here are trapped, and all over the local news programmes.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all planned of course. The Mafia (or whoever) are apparently planning to build an incinerator plant next to Saska\u2019s school(!), and we\u2019ve all been summoned to a meeting tonight in Fabbriche di Vallico to protest against it. I wonder how much dynamite it took to stop the 200 Vallichese<\/em> from attending. Those guys have powerful connections.<\/p>\n

So, what have the authories been doing since the landslide? Very quickly, a load of concrete and stones were thrown over an incredibly-steep old path that goes down from a meadow below Sandra\u2019s to the main road. So at least young fit people can now walk down the mountain and escape without having to play Russian roulette in the landslide drop zone. I\u2019ve also read in various news articles that they\u2019re going to build a helicopter landing pad, and that the army are going to build a Bailey bridge<\/a> over the Valsozza gorge away from the fall line, which should be interesting. This could even be done quickly, since these bridges are meant for getting tanks over rivers whilst under fire. At least no-one will be shooting at them this time.<\/p>\n

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What should be done in an ideal world<\/strong><\/center><\/p>\n