At this time of year, when we are getting the olive oil packages ready to send out to our adopters, I’m always reminded of our very first spring package send out. We didn’t have printed tins then, we had to hand-stick adhesive labels to cover each tin. We were due to hitch a lift in a friend’s van to bring the oil back to the UK to post out and so we had a very strict deadline – but three-quarters of the way into the stickers, we realised that the printer hadn’t sent enough. Jason heroically managed to get 500 more printed in record time by promising our second born to the local printer, but Houston, there was a problem….
The following is an extract from our book ‘The Dolce Vita Diaries’
‘But when Jason tried the first sticker it didn’t quite fit. Not quite fitting is a bad thing as it means the edge either creeps up over the rim of the tin or, worse, that it doesn’t quite cover all the metal the other end. All the stickers seemed to be just a tiny bit too big. If you were lucky and happened to find the middle way, you could get an acceptable fit, but it was mere chance really. At 10.30pm on the eve of our van departure, though, I was prepared to go with it. “We’ll send the ugly ones to people with double-barrelled surnames,” I said, only half joking.
“I can’t bear it” said Jason. And he went into the office to get what I knew was going to be the guillotine. “If I cut down each one and you stick, we’ll be able to get them just right and I think we can still do them in time.”
“Oh my god, are you serious?” I said. Cutting them would mean a painstaking shaving off of maybe three millimetres on each side of the sticker at slightly tapering angles.
I knew that protest was useless.
And so we spent the whole night, well until 4am, deliriously slicing and sticking the last 500 stickers on to the tins and leaving them in neat piles to be packed up the next day. When we closed our eyes, we had repeating green olives etched on the inside of our eyelids.”
Enjoy your spring packages!
“The Dolce Vita Diaries: Stories and recipes from an Italian olive grove” is now available from Amazon.co.uk. The paperback version can be pre-ordered for April 2010.
