Will you please be quiet, please?

It's hot here, with a lovely breeze that springs up in the afternoon, perfect for a siesta on the terrace.  Neil brought a hammock back from Cambodia and the plum tree and the olive tree are just the right distance apart to rope it up to.  And, of course, you've got to have the right reading material.  When I tiptoed out and discovered he had fallen asleep reading Raymond Carver's Will You Please be Quiet, Please? I just couldn't resist the pic!

We're very far from the Olympics and even the sports mad Italians aren't giving it much attention on the news - it's all about the financial crisis here.  Several regions of Spain, and now one of Italy's biggest , don't have enough money to pay their staff and are requesting government aid.  The price of fuel here is now nearly 2 euros a litre and there are demonstrations and planned strikes.

But stretched out on the terrace, eating a bowl of  sweet cherry plums from the tree above us, it's easy to pretend everything is ok. What, after all, can small people like us do, except get on with our daily lives?  Neil is pushing clay around in the studio he's erected in the wood and I'm trying to knock two books into shape to get them out on Kindle in the next month or so.  But there's a strange atmosphere in town, less tourists than normal and apparently they're all spending less, which troubles the bar and restaurant owners.  Definitely a whiff of fear.