How to not get eaten by a wolf
My parting words to a pal who came for an early morning Pilates session with me before I left for Italy: ‘oh, ya I’ll be getting up at 5:30am every day to go for a run before the children wake and it gets too hot. Ya, ya, ya’ BLAH BLAH BLAH more like! I must have sounded like such a sanctimonious twat! And here I am, 2/3 of the way into our time here and I’ve not gotten up early once!
The link to the photo for this blog is that my proclamation was followed with my professing a mild concern of being eaten by a wolf in said early hours. The wolves come down into the valley to drink from the river at night then amble home again as the darkness subsides.
So, dear friend, I can confirm I have not been eaten by a wolf and neither am I sat on my high horse!
Hours kept over here are soooo different. Basically everything gets pushed back: we stay out late, on the beach, for example, get back and eat late + all the de-compression activities mums have to do: shake out towels and hang up, rinse swimmers and protesting children, sort through manky picnic left overs (why, oh why do insist on always making a picnic that doesn’t get eaten- beach side pizza slices, pots of Pringles and delicious Italian gelato supersede wholesome cashew butter sandwiches every time!). We all end up going to bed at the same, tardi time, me invariably too defeated to encourage…/ force myself to stay up and Do Something Productive. Oh me, oh my, when will I ever let up on insisting every second of my time ought to be Productive: I wake up, naturally at 5:30am (true) and have a battle (albeit a short one!): get up vs snooze…? The latter pretty much always wins, I justify this somehow at the time BUT THEN wake up ages later and my first thoughts are of self-deprecating frustration, not of gratitude for my lovely long sleep, and everything else I am grateful for in my life (for those of you who have not looked at social media for 4 years, this is how we are recommended to start our day by all the 500 billion ‘life coaches’ who evolved from Lock Down.
Well, this morning, I berated myself for a while then managed to say: ok, you’ve ‘lost’ a couple of hours, now don’t fuck up the next couple by dwelling upon it. So I made my children (who have been glued to their i-pads for approximately two hours by this point) toasted waffles with chocolate spread (THE most delicious choc spread you’ll ever taste btw, produced by our dear friend Roberto de Andreis of https://www.oliodeandreis.com/) instead of going through the daily battle of insisting they have ‘yummy’ Weetabix with oat milk. So, at least their day started well. And, hey, mine too; I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing this, on our sunny balcony, looking up at my favourite scene in the world, ‘our’ mountain. So now, dear zeitgeists, I join you in my gratitude for this day, every day and everything in my life, lucky me :)