If God....

...had meant us to spend time whitewashing vaulted ceilings, he would have designed us differently! With much longer arms, for example, and most probably with a sort of umbrella attachment to the head. Even despite the design deficiencies, this morning I still decided to go ahead and paint the Tinello ( the name we rather dubiously apply to the snug) which spent the winter accumulating fumes from endless open fires, and as a result the walls of the room were filthy. I'd been meaning to do it for months, but while the Brazilians were still creating chaos and mayhem on the first floor, I somehow couldn't bring myself to add to the general level of mess.

And so.......after three hours of increasingly bad-tempered wrestling with various rollers and brushes and paint pots and ladders and plastic sheeting and newspaper and paint-spills, it was sufficiently done for me to call it a day.......while the technical department regarded the trail of disaster in my wake with a jaundiced eye, and (verbally) said nothing. The most irritating part about it was the tendency for the old layers of paint to flake off under pressure of the roller, exposing large gaps of frescoed wall-surface beneath. Which is par for the course in these parts, as any wall that's more than sixty years old will have spent much of its previous existence covered completely in many different generations of frescoed decoration; I don't think we have a wall in the entire house which doesn't have remnants of fresco on it somewhere. And as everybody in this town knows, the first thing you do when you come across something like that is to slap some paint over it as fast as you can - otherwise, before you know it, the Belli Arte have slapped a preservation order on the place, and your life thereafter ceases to be your own!

As a form of catharsis, I now intend to spend an hour or so making Rabbit in tecia, following a classic venetian recipe which uses rosemary and a mirepoix of the standard aromatics. After a 24 hour rest, it should be in fine form for tomorrow night's supper, and I should have recovered from my Michaelangel-esque travails of this morning. I've also just been sent a strudel recipe which has a filling of hazelnut mousse and seedless grapes. Sounds interesting. Watch this space....

Tonight's Menu:

Asparagus 'Oscuro' - a slightly purple variety, that I've only ever seen here; more strongly flavoured than the more normal green type.

Maurizio's Salsiccie Lunghe, with Aubergine sauteed with Garlic and Parsley.

Chocolate Souffles.