[ 23:25 saturday 21 june – piscita’, isola di stromboli ]

seated in a deck chair with stars in the soft air above me and waves breaking on the beach beneath me. a candle flickers amidst the succulent mesembryanthemums covering the ground. my mobile phone is perched in the plants in front of me, the only place where it can find a signal. the phone in turn is connected to my computer by infra red. so long as i sit fairly still i have an internet link fast enough for me to be listening to thursday’s “late junction” programme from the bbc radio 3 website. a diverse selection as usual. it kicked off with some old skool ska and has now meandered into brazilian experimental jazz. turning my head 90 degrees left i can see the silhouette of the volcano with the now-familiar red glow in the sky above the right shoulder.

today was the solstice, the longest day of the year. as sunset approached i scampered round taking photos; then as the reddening sphere descended to the horizon i left the camera on a rock and threw myself into the sea, swimming out to watch it set with the silvery water all around me. there was nobody else in sight. wonderful.

there’s a party tonight on the beach at punta lena. i’ll head down there after writing this mail.

righto, time to backtrack a bit. when i arrived here on stromboli at the beginning of february there were about 60 people on the island, somewhat reduced from the usual 400. the rest of the population had evacuated to lipari (main island of the archipelago) and milazzo (nearest port in sicily) whilst hordes of vulcanologists checked out the situation and protezione civile installed an elaborate early warning system.

the top of the volcano was covered in snow. the island was veiled in swirling cloud. a layer of fine grey ash covered absolutely everything. and all around the coast was evidence of the wave which had hit a month earlier. at punta lena twisted remains of boats were piled on top of each other. the mesh fence in front of the power station was bent horizontal. daniella’s newly-planted garden was a bare patch of mud. the kitchen of a house at one end of fico grande had been demolished. sections of a substantial wall which used to stand behind the beach were scattered around at crazy angles. trees had been ripped off their trunks, leaving only ragged stumps. the narrow roads leading up from the beach were blocked waist-high with rocks. the whole front of a house at punta lena was taken off. everywhere the sand-covered ground was dotted with table lamps, pan lids, clothes, cushions and other everyday items, snatched out of their usual context by the water.

returning to casa schuldes, as i wrote at the time, i found the main house happily undamaged. there was a 5cm layer of ash on the courtyard and terraces. inside there was a fine layer of ash on every surface, and inside every cupboard and drawer. the magazzino (store-room) down near the beach was another story. this had taken the full force of the wave. all that remained of the stout wooden door was a foot-long piece of wood hanging from the padlock. inside was a scene of complete devastation. cupboards full of tools, cans of paint, the washing machine, an oil-drum full of petrol, an ironing board, hundreds of cassette tapes; everything had been picked up, thrown around and deposited in a tangled heap. i salvaged some items i found which were still intact but it didn’t amount to very much. the fridge was nowhere to be seen, either in the magazzino or further down the beach. the receding water had dragged it right out to sea.

eye-witness accounts of the event vary considerably. the picture which emerged was like this: a huge ash cloud rose up from the sciara and started drifting over the village, then the sea receded about five metres all round the coast, then the water catapulted back with enormous force, inundating low-lying areas and destroying anything in its path. it doesn’t seem as if the wave was enormously high, just a few metres. what marked it out was its extraordinary force. people who saw it describe the water hitting the coast as if shot from a gun.

there is little consensus about what caused the wave. initially the vulcanologists announced that there had been a large landslide from the sciara in which 5 million cubic metres of material had fallen into the sea, sending up the ash cloud and triggering the wave. this seemed like a reasonable explanation for the cloud but pretty implausible as the cause of the wave, which arrived at many points on the coast from directions inconsistent with a landslide at the sciara. the theory was later modified with a suggestion that the landslide above the water had triggered a larger one below the water (the volcano continues 2km beneath the sea) in which another 15 million cubic metres of material had slipped, and this had caused the wave. this sounds very grand but i still haven’t heard of any evidence for this theory.

the older islanders, on the other hand, say that part of the mountain under the water split away, sucking billions of litres of sea water into the fissure (thus the receding sea) after which the highly-compressed water exploded back out again (hence the super-charged wave). these people are hardly scientists but to me this sounds like a more credible explanation. there are others who believe there was a gas explosion on the side of the volcano deep beneath the surface.

whatever the cause, seeing a familiar environment so transformed is a powerful experience. it imparts a tangible sense of the terrifying forces lying dormant in this environment and the fragility of human tenure here. through february and march there was an unspoken sense of anticipation amongst the people who remained on the island. was there going to be another wave? would it be even more devastating than the first one? initially the protezione civile barred anyone from sleeping in houses less than 20m above sea level. this was ridiculous, and was of course ignored (not least by myself). then as the weeks passed and the sea showed no signs of further untoward behaviour people began to relax and those who had fled began to drift back to their ash-filled homes.

:

[ 00:50 thursday – off the sciara del fuoco, isola di stromboli ]

as i sit here on the boat with my friends there’s an explosion from the top of the volcano, sending up a burst of fire followed by a puff of dark gas which coils up into the air.

: c***

[ 00:10 thursday 12 june – isola di stromboli ]

i’m sitting on the starboard bow of antonio’s catamaran on a flat flat sea looking up at the stream of lava coming down the west side of the island. the air is hot and humid. i’m sitting here without a shirt. a three-quarter moon casts a ghostly blue light over everything. the black silhouette of the volcano in front of me is sliced down the middle with a line of bright orange. to the right it forms a solid stream. to the left it breaks into pieces which tumble and bounce down the mountainside. it’s indescribably beautiful. there’s a sense of incredible force, but also a filigree delicacy to the shimmering particles of fire.

the lava makes a continuous grinding sound, underpinned by a deep bass rumbling. every few seconds there’s a fat crump as a mass of solidifying lava hits the sea.

this is the first time i’ve seen the lava flow from the water.

with my new sony ericsson telephone and gprs account i can send this message right away, from where i’m sitting in the boat. i’m still a bit awed by the fact.

: c***

[ 22:00 sunday 4 may – casa schuldes, isola di stromboli ]

sergio and i spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon in snorkels and masks scouring the coast below the house for limpets. armed with blunt knives we hunted out the biggest juiciest specimens in every nook and cranny, trying to catch them by surprise before they could fix themselves immovably to the rock. all the while we kept a lookout for the purple jellyfish currently swarming around stromboli’s shores, which have tentacles several feet long and give a nasty sting. we came up the steps to the house with a good harvest and left them in fresh water to purge themselves of sand particles.

in the evening, joined by maria, we made a cous cous in the manner traditional to trapani (sergio’s home town at the western tip of sicily). starting with semola flour and hands dipped in olive oil we painstakingly rolled little pellets between our fingers. when these were fine enough we boiled a pan of water with bay leaves and steamed the cous cous above it for what seemed like an eternity. in the meantime we steamed the limpets vigorously for 15 minutes, during which time they obligingly shed their conical shells, then put the rubbery little chaps into the water in which they’d been steamed, added tomatoes, dried chilli pepper and garlic, and boiled the sauce gently for about half an hour. a little scorpion emerged from the chimney above the stove to investigate what was cooking. i took his photo then squashed him with a stone without much scruple. they’re not very friendly creatures. it was getting on for midnight when we finally transported everything up to the table on the roof and tucked in with the waves lapping the beach below us on one side and the volcano brooding above us on the other side. it was absolutely delicious.

i’m a big fan of wild food, as readers of this journal will know. but until recently i regarded limpets as somehow beyond the pale. they are plentiful and grow very big in cornwall and the isles of scilly, yet the people hold them in a disdain which exceeds any other shellfish. i never met a single person who likes them. they are described as tough, tasteless and inedible. in the isles of scilly there is a sort of folk-memory that during periods of starvation in the eighteenth and nineteenth century limpets were the “last resort” source of sustenance, and consequently they have particularly unpleasant associations. yet here in the south of italy “patelli” are highly regarded. last month i had a revelatory experience with them during a magnificent dinner cooked by giuseppe and emanuele. this meal also included sauro, ugly deep-water fish hauled up that morning by emanuele, which we ate raw with lemon juice, olive oil and wild fennel.

whilst we were gobbling up our cous cous last night dad, mum, anna and adam were at rick stein’s fish restaurant in padstow, cornwall, for a surprise dinner to celebrate dad’s 60th birthday and anna’s 30th. i had a romantic notion that i would fly from palermo to stansted, then fly on from there to newquay in cornwall and get to padstow in time for dinner. but none of the connections connected properly and it would have taken two days, so i had to be content telephoning my congratulations when they’d finished dinner. dad still acts younger than many of my contemporaries (he and mum are just back from skiing in the canadian rockies) so i presume he’ll be wearing this decade as lightly as the previous ones.

it’s three months since i wrote my last despatch, describing my illicit return to stromboli in the middle of a force 8 gale. during this period my attention has been obsessively focused on building up the intelligence i will need for the next stage of my trampoline project. it feels as if i have retreated into a sort of cocoon, continuing frenzied activity connected with the venture at the expense of almost everything else in my life, including communications with family and close friends. possibly this despatch marks my reemergence.

being in stromboli through these months has been a remarkable experience. but i’ll write about that later.

: c*

[ 22:10 thursday 6 february – piscita, isola di stromboli ]

i’m here, i’m back on stromboli!

the conditions yesterday did indeed render a landing at stromboli impossible. i sat watching its grey triangle emerge out of the rain on the port bow and pass agonisingly by. i could see clouds of steam rising from the sciara where the new lava flow enters the sea. we passed by panarea too without attempting a landing. at lipari the captain made five runs at docking, which took over an hour, but each time the wind forced him to back away again. in the end he abandoned the attempt and headed straight for milazzo on sicily’s north coast. there we docked at half past seven, twenty-two hours after i’d boarded the ship.

first i checked into a little hotel and deposited my bags. then, not having eaten a proper meal for two days, i went to a fish restaurant i know and wolfed down a pile of their home-made pasta with broccoli and bottarga di tonno (tuna eggs which have been dried and seasoned). yes, it was exquisite. then i went back and fell asleep at once.

this morning i woke at nine and phoned the shipping company office to check the situation. they said the 10:00 ship would be operating and they thought things had calmed down enough that it would be possible to land at stromboli. so i got my things together, grabbed a couple of jam-filled croissants and got to the ship. it was a beautiful departure, a broad panorama of snow-covered mountains with alternating patches of black rainstorms and sunlight roving across the leaden sea. slowly stromboli grew larger ahead of us. an officer came round asking for documents from everyone who wanted to land at stromboli to be checked against the list of formal residents. i sat with my book and pretended not to hear, my heart beating noisily.

after two hours we were drawing close. suddenly we were engulfed in a fierce rainstorm and visibility dropped below a hundred metres. the ship slowed to a crawl and we continued. once again the scattered passengers were pressed against the windows in silence. from time to time a gap would open and we would glimpse a part of the mountain before the clouds closed over again. one such opening revealed the miraculous fact that the top of the mountain was white with a once-every-thirty-years covering of snow.

the rainstorm passed and we came in sight of the quay. the sea was still rough, breaking white over the concrete platform. but it was clear the captain was going to try to dock. the anchors dropped, we turned slowly and crept astern metre by metre with the anchor cables holding us steady. the first line thrown across to the quay fell short and the stern began to drift sideways. the second line was caught and secured. other lines went over and little by little the ship inched backwards until the gap was just a couple of metres. at this point i quietly collected my bags and slipped down the companionway to the stern.

i got down there just as the ramp began to lower. one of the officers saw me and came over with a quizzical look. my heart was in my throat as he said surely i was going to panarea. i did my best to look surprised and said very emphatically “no, i live on stromboli”. he still looked unhappy but at this point the ramp bumped down onto the concrete quay and everyone was shouting “vai, vai, vai!” and people were running in all directions. in a couple of bounds i was on the quay, back on stromboli, with a great sense of jubilation.

the description of what i found here must wait for another time. for now suffice to say the house is fine, although the storeroom is indeed devastated. my slides are undamaged. i’ve started the job of cleaning the place out. there’s a fire burning in the wood stove. i’ve greeted many of my friends and established details of what’s going on.

right now the sea is growing rougher again and the wind is strengthening. from time to time there is a flash of lightning. occasional squalls of rain pass over but between them the stars are bright in the inky sky. the clouds over the entire western flank of the mountain are glowing a deep red. after sending this mail i’ll set off for punta u bronzu. it’s time to see this new lava flow with my own eyes.

i’m back.

: c* * * * *

[ 23:45 thursday 22 august – san vincenzo, isola di stromboli ]

welcome to stromboli in august. i’m sitting on one of the terraces of “ritrovo ingrid” splashed by green, red and blue lights. a little behind me are nino, tommy and a female singer. nino has one of those sequencers which gobbles up midi files from the web and regurgitates tacky electronicky arrangements of popular songs, which are mixed with the vocalist’s exertions before being spewed out at high volume. nino sports a guitar and tommy stands before a large keyboard. both of them make the motions of playing but these “live” contributions are strangely inaudible in the mix.

i think it must be a while since nino connected his sequencer to the internet because whenever i pass the piazza they seem to be going through the motions with the same ten or twelve songs. this is a kind of torture. the audience, mainly rich kids from milan or rome done up in their labeled vestements, sit rapt as thought they are witnessing some kind of groundbreaking recital.

somehow i am reminded of a party i attended in london with bobo, roberta, eric, matheo and nana. it was hosted by mtv in a club near leicester square. the cocktails were free all night. a scattering of brightly-lit armchairs in the centre of the space was the setting of interviews being filmed throughout the night. the music was loud and perfectly-reproduced. the place was just crowded enough to say “everyone would like to be at this party but only the mooost exclusive people are invited”. i can’t for the life of me remember how we group of scruffians got in. bobo has a knack for getting tickets to this kind of thing. i recall nana didn’t have a ticket but she is so beautiful she gets in everywhere.

anyway the music was terrible and the atmosphere felt like something you’d be subjected to for punishment rather than amusement. yet every person there was boogying and laughing like it was the best party in the world. the six of us huddled together at a table clutching one drink after another and glancing with dulled horror at the perversely-animated creatures about us. after a while eric got on the floor and started practicing some capoeira moves, which he does rather excellently. a modish but worse-for-wear young man who might have seen capoeira on tv once made the foolish decision to join in. eric’s capoeira report card would say “doesn’t suffer fools gladly” and it was only a few minutes before worse-for-wear was ritually humiliated to the evident discomfort of the cluster of curious people who had gathered round. evidentally this kind of hard-edged behaviour didn’t figure in their idea of “best party in the world” behaviour.

[ 00:35 friday – antonio and nerina’s house ] enough was enough at ingrid so i escaped down here. poor sebastiano was ruefully preparing for his session on the decks as two girls from the supermarket were belting their way through “you’re the one that i want, ooo ooo ooo”. he came and sat by me for a bit. i asked if he was enjoying the summer. he winced slightly and said he could do with a break.

when i arrived here nerina was watering the vegetables with a hose and antonio was sitting cross-legged on the roof of the neighbouring house working out how to use his astrolabe. it’s quite small, all made of brass, a bit fiddly to get an accurate reading. but not so difficult to operate once you’ve got your head round how it works.

the moon is beautiful tonight, peachy-orange. it was full either today or yesterday. hard to tell. the sea is still and there’s a gentle breeze from the north-east. antonio’s edgy about a scirroco arriving tonight or tomorrow.

i spent this afternoon on his catamaran, working at my computer moored off fico grande. in a little while we’ll go back out there to sleep on the boat. there at least it’s peaceful.

being on stromboli through august is horrible. my senses are numb. everything is so surreal. the quantity of people is astonishing. tonight there are ten times as many people sleeping on the island as there were throughout the winter.

everywhere there is the same awful music, night after night. every road is laced with slowly-meandering herds of tourists, guzzling their cannoli, peering through their gucci shades, regaling one another with stories which reveal afresh how beautiful, simple and unspoilt life on the island is. the bars and restaurants are manic, bloating stomachs and dulling brains by the hundred every hour. everywhere is the fever for money. it is somewhat like being amidst hyenas in a feeding frenzy about the carcass of a antelope, snarling at one another as they fight to tear off another scrap of flesh.

my friends and i cling to corners of tranquility where we can find them.

[ 01:35 – catamaran “fera” ] ah this is more like it. i’m sitting on the coach-roof of the port hull in the moonlight with the powerbook on my lap. the keyboard is illuminated by a tiny white led on a bendy coil which plugs into a usb port in the back. it’s rather cute and i suppose a little frivolous. the bulb uses hardly any electricity, perhaps 2 seconds-worth of battery charge every hour. i bought it in london a few months ago. in the past if i wanted to use the computer outside at night i had to wear a caving torch fixed on my head so i could see the keyboard to type.

as we bob about on the dark waves there is the hum of the water being pumped off the tanker ship a hundred metres from us. these ships arrive in rotation during august, there is permanently one at anchor in front of “la tartana club”. this regime is necessary to keep four thousand tourists supplied with endless showers and flushing loos. the ships load up water from the desalinator at lipari (largest island of the archipelago). when it reaches stromboli a pipe is rowed ashore and water is pumped up to a cistern beneath mario cincotta’s supermarket. from there it is pumped in rotation to different zones of the island. every house, old and new, has beneath it a water cistern which is also fed by rain-water collected on the roofs in the winter.

until the 1980s the communities on stromboli were dependent entirely on rain-water, not just for their survival and cleaning, but also for the intensive agriculture to which they subjected the island. at its peek during the nineteenth century sixty percent of the island’s surface area was under cultivation. most of this took the form of narrow terraces carved into the steep mountainside. the remaining forty percent was cliff, sand or lava field. the discipline with which these meagre water resources were marshalled must have been amazing.

the disco has finished for the night at la tartana. the moon is high in the sky. antonio’s on the starboard hull, perched half-in-half-out-of the cabin.

having two separate hulls means two people have a good deal of privacy even in a small catamaran. this one is lovely. just seven metres long, completely wooded construction, very simple. she was built (probably in croatia) from a design by james wharram, an englishman who from the seventies has countered the increasing decadence of modern catamarans with a philosophy based on traditional polynesian designs. the hulls rise high at bow and stern, and are almost symmetrical fore and aft. six transverse beams bind the hulls together. the mast is footed on a larger beam in the centre, parallel with the hulls and supported by three of the transverse beams. the rest is open deck-space, covered with wooden slatting (between which i can see scattered reflections of the moon writhing on the waves). between the bows is a section covered with trampolining, which is very nice to sleep in.

: carolus

[ 22:22 wednesday 21 august – scari, isola di stromboli ]

one year ago today i woke to my alarm at half past four and the first hints of the london dawn. i’d got to bed an hour earlier after spending the night digging through months of phone, electricity, gas, water and council tax bills, writing cheques and stuffing them in envelopes (i’m not very good at bills). a taxi arrived at ten past five to take me to heathrow airport. with everything i’d need for life and work for the next three months’ in my backpack i closed the door of 13 taplow house. i knew it was the last time i would think of this place as my home, maybe the last time i’d have a home in london.

the previous day (the 20th) i’d arrived at the passport office in victoria at opening time (by bike of course) so that they could produce a passport for me by tea time. i’d organised a new passport a couple of months earlier but it got lost in the post. in its wisdom the uk government doesn’t consider a passport sufficiently important to merit sending it by registered mail.

on the 19th i’d tracked down and reserved a flight from heathrow to rome for the 21st, taking a bit of a gamble there wouldn’t be any hitches getting my passport together. in fact this nearly ended in disaster. after queueing for half an hour or so at the passport office i was called to a desk where i spread out my various forms and documents. i really can’t remember why but the officer quickly decided that the photo i’d brought was no good (even though it was witnessed by michael young as a good likeness!). i nearly fainted. initially she said there was no possibility of getting me a passport that day but i must have looked truly pitiful because she relented and gave me one hour to get another photo, find a friend of at least three years’ standing to witness it, and get back to them. i racked my brains for any of my friends who lived or worked in the vicinity. stipo was my first thought since he lived just round the corner, but there was no answer to his phone and i couldn’t think of anyone else i knew in that area of london. i phoned christian, but his mobile was off. so i phoned jp morgan and they (eventually) came up with a number which would reach him. i called it… he answered and immediately agreed to help. he even calmed me down a bit with his usual relaxed manner.

christian’s office though was at london wall, four or five kilometres hence. printing a new photo took five agonising minutes. but finally the strip of images dribbled out of the machine and i grabbed them and ran for my bike. i don’t think i’ve ever cycled so ruthlessly. pedestrians and other cyclists received no quarter. i even cut up a couple of cars. i got to london wall in twenty minutes flat, found jp morgan’s office, and arrived panting at reception. they eyed me suspiciously whilst they put through the call to christian to tell him i was there. he was down in moments, accompanied by donald, both of them grinning at my predicament. in no time the forms were filled in, the back of the photos signed, i’d said my goodbyes and i was on my way back to victoria.

i got there with a few minutes to spare (when this happens craig castigates me for not cutting it finer). the officer was satisfied with the new photo and told me to return at half past four to collect my passport. i jabbering some kind of incoherent thank you, overwhelmed with relief. i felt nervous when i returned later, braced to learn of some new hiccup, but the passport was there waiting for me when i handing over my ticket. i urged the cashier to pass a message of thanks to the clerk who had rushed it through. she stared at me blankly, as though i was mad.

so it was that i escaped london one year ago. when i landed at rome i didn’t have any plans for where i was going. anywhere in the south of italy or sicily would have suited me. it wasn’t til i was on the train to napoli that i started phoning friends to see how things were looking. bobo, roberta and eric had a house near catania, but at that point it was infested with little insects and didn’t sound too inviting. there was no answer to fabrizio’s phone but i knew he was on stromboli. i had happy memories from my previous year’s visit so i thought i’d join him there for a couple of days then continue to sicily to see bobo and the others.

the rest is already documented. i spent the next three weeks on stromboli, two of them living with alice and her friends in ginostra on the other side of the island. by the time i finally continued my travels in sicily and pantelleria i knew i was going to be on stromboli through the winter. i haven’t got round to leaving yet.

this has been an intense year for me.

: carolus

[ 13:05 thursday 27 june – piscita, isola di stromboli ]

i’m sitting on a rock in the corner of a plot under beating sun (for the last week the temperature has hovered between 35 and 40). about thirty members of a film crew are milling about preparing to begin shooting. the principal actors are in position, my friends matias and eugenio have been enrolled as extras, there is the usual faffing about. shhhh. silence. and everything’s ready. the cameras roll, eugenio delivers his lines. stop stop stop. the sound wasn’t good.

the production is a glossy four-parter to be broadcast on rai uno, italy’s main state-provided channel. half of the fourth episode is set on stromboli. on tuesday the crew was filming a scene at sea. antonio was commissioned to hover around in the background in his traditional sicilian swordfish-hunting boat. i spent the day working as his assistant.

i’ve been fortunate to spend a fair amount of time on the water with antonio recently. a couple of weeks ago i made an overnight trip with him on his eight-metre wooden catamaran to lipari, two islands hence. we left stromboli at one in the morning on a mirror-flat sea ablaze with phosphorescent plankton, the dark mass of the volcano brooding above us. dawn broke just after we had passed panarea and its outlying rocks. as the sun reached the horizon the colour of sky and sea changed every moment. deep purple, pink, silver, azure. we arrived at lipari at seven, reaching the quay just as a fishing boat came in and its crew started offloading the swordfish they’d caught overnight. a deal was done and we breakfast on swordfish and squid, grilled in an old bronze brazier suspended from the rigging. we set off for the return journey around three in the afternoon and reached stromboli just after nine.

a few mights later we went out fishing for totani, a locally-prized variety of squid with a reddish flesh and a particularly delicate flavour. for this a long line is used (200m), at the end of it a vicious hook baited with rotting sardines and a battery-powered flashing lamp (totani are attracted to strange things). after half an hour maria hauled in a monster, thrashing and squirting and vigorously changing colour as we hauled it up onto the deck. all the while the volcano, highly active at the moment, sent fountains of fire into the sky above us.

i’ve taken to sleeping afloat whenever possible. i find i sleep more deeply than on land, and the possibility to awaken and leap straight into the water is a delicious start to a day. next i need to get hold of a 12v adaptor for my computer so i can work for longer periods afloat.

barbara, in charge of costume for the production, comes up to me and invites me to join the crew in the shade. i’d been hiding here on my rock hoping not to get in anyone’s way. but it’s much more comfortable under the trees!

a week ago i moved house again, this time to the mountainside above scari. i’ve got a room to myself and share a terrace, kitchen and bathroom with matias, sara and their baby carlos. above the house is a field with fruit trees and vegetables. to the side are grapevines. beyond this is wild bamboo stretching up the mountain.

after eight months living alone in a large house in piscita this is a big change. suddenly i am much closer to the quay, the piazza, the bars and restaurants; and further from the sea. to my delight however it is still possible to hear the waves lapping the shore at night. and in the summer one passes the majority of one’s time outside, so it is really not important to have lots of space indoors.

after about twenty takes the scene is completed to the director’s satisfaction and everyone relaxes and prepares for the next one. eugenio is a natural, maybe this will be a new career for him. matias’ job is to sit munching a panino. after all these takes he’s already got through three or four. i hope they were good.

tomorrow morning i’ll take the hydrofoil to napoli (four hour trip), to connect with a ship bound for porto vecchio at the south of corsica (sixteen hour trip) on which i have a cabin. with any luck i”ll find my parents there at the port when i arrive. they have already been traveling round corsica for a week. i’ll stay with them another week (it’ll be a complete break from my computer) before coming back here.

life’s not too bad eh.

: cH