Sambuco Part 7

Mice in the House

Mike Eldridge

I'm in!
Well, Half in.
Half out!
I'm out getting stuff.
Cement, plaster, paint, tiles, glue and lots of cleaning materials, lots of. To clean up the daily mess made by cement, plaster, paint etc.
Yes we are finishing the house off ourselves.

I know I'd sworn never to put a foot in it until it was 100% completed but I got tired.
Tired of waiting for plumbers and electricians, tired of their promises. No, hang on a minute. This isn't fair on Giussepe, the electrician. He's been great. It was all the others. The builders, earth diggers and movers, bureaucrats.
This latter creature open to bribes.
If you don't, you get sidelined.
I refused to.
You understand I can't be more explicit on this one but I got sidelined. So another delay. This time for a grant. The historical grant I mentioned.

We moved in in April, after the Easter break and it was cold with the winter snow still lingering on the mountains above us. And we had no heating, no boiler, no hot water. So we kept ourselves warm by working in the garden, planting every vegetable imaginable in the orto ( veg patch). (This had paid off admirably, I should add, as I write in mid July, we have potatoes, courgettes, beans, peas, lettuces of all types).

So it's been three years and they promised just one.
And still the radiators aren't in; the apartment below still has no tiles, no doors. The two main bedrooms haven't been finished and the kitchen looks more like the canteen of a Boy Scout summer camp.
Sweet nostalgia.
But we're in.
And my guess is that sometime in mid-winter when we have more energy and hopefully more money, that the house will be fully habitable.

But the greatest difficulty has been the telephone line.
We've waited three months for a telephone line.
Now Telecom Italia is Third World. It really is. I've heard that they employ almost one million people. And my question has been 'OK, so where are they all? Just give me one of them.' To talk to. Because they don't, talk that is. Because you simply can't get through, to anyone.

Eventually I found that Head Office in Rome had a complaints Dept and it was only the good fortune of finding a sympathetic soul in the office that day that got things going and within hours I had a boss man in Ancona offering me his direct help and immediate action. Within the week we had scores of technicians and workers putting up poles (one smack in the middle of the veggie patch) and feeding through lines i.e ruining the garden and drilling a hole through the studio wall right through the shower unit.

So now we have a phone.....which goes down every twelve hours.....And which I can't complain about because I can't get through. And so on.

Oh and this is rich. They now tell me that the reason behind the delay was that my neighbour refused a line attached to his house. Reasonable. He's in dispute with Telecom over a bill of fifteen hundred Euros. He and his brother are farmers who only use the phone twice a week to call the butcher to take away a cow and this bill is for two months use. This sort of thing is happening to people up and down the valley. The reason?
(They say) that Albanians are plugging in their phones at night into those little control boxes you see around and making calls to just everywhere. Including Albania.

Telecom have refused to investigate until the bill is paid.
So they've cut him off.
La bel'Italia

Next instalment?
When the floors are finished and the radiators are in.

Mice