The Dolce Vita Diaries

“We did some research and spoke to some folk. It seems a normal electricity supply would be about 3kW. In fact, the legal minimum is 3kW. Our electrician came out. He seemed suspiciously young. Like fourteen. Is that legal here? Anyway, he looked at boxes and stated rather enigmatically that our supply ‘should’ be just under 3kW. I think it was ‘should’ but I’d been letting the grammar lessons slip lately.

He advised calling out someone from Enel, the electricity people. We did. Someone came. He wasn’t so young, which was good. He looked at the same boxes and his eyebrows went squiffy but it was before lunch so not the grappa. He said ‘Beh’, which means ‘Well …’ He said ‘Beh’ again. Which still meant ‘Well …’ but slightly more emphatically. I gave him a look and a bit of noise which started life as ‘dunque’ (which means ‘so …’) but then got embarrassed – too big a word for too small a thing, so it ended up more as a ‘duh’ coupled with a puzzled expression. The international language of communication told him that I wanted answers. But instead of answers, he started reciting a poem! The village was old. The line was long. The hill was steep. The hill went down. The hill came up. We were at the end of it. The electricity leached out along the way. Oh hang on, not a poem. This was our life. There was nothing he could do. They themselves wanted to upgrade the line because every winter it breaks (oh great) but they can’t because lots of the people whose land the lines go through won’t let them in. Really? At the very least a novel excuse. Was there nothing else we could do? ‘Get a generator,’ he said.

This, it seemed, was to be our electricity fate.”

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