Downloads, Chillies and Stalking

Saturday 27 August 2011 – Morrissey is singing ‘Shame Is The Name’ as my breakfast is cooking- a full English – The sun is belting out more of its hotter than hell rays, will this heat-wave ever break?

I spend the morning getting the downstairs apartment ready for a family that are arriving on Monday. To be honest I’m not really into the domestic side of things, having already done it once before, it cemented my belief that I’d hate to run or work in a hotel.

I spend the remainder of the morning searching for and downloading music, I run into quite a few demo tracks and feature recordings of ex Sugababe Mutya Buena, these are added to my collection as is The Sound of Camden and Linea 77. So my iPod now has 19,055 songs.

Early afternoon, it’s so hot that there’s nothing for it but to have another cold shower. The heat is so intense that I have to keep doors and windows closed, there’s no breeze so it creeps inside the house. Everything is warm, my shirts in the wardrobe feel like they’ve just come out of a tumble dryer, and tepid pillows make taking a siesta a no no. Still this baking sunshine is good for my sundried chillies, that are as hot as the Italian countryside at the moment. (I think I’ll make little packages up for Christmas gifts).

I read for a little, shave, then head up to Casoli for beers with my friend Christine. Now there’s something you should know about Christine; it’s not that’s she’s a real life Eastender, or even that she can be seen in a Pathe newsreel as a young schoolgirl. The shocking revelation is that she has a stalker, a silver haired gentleman that shuffles around town with an air of old fashioned eccentricity.

I use the term stalker loosely, as the chap has never made contact, he’s not so much as posted a pair of his unwashed pants through Christine’s door, and to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t have a room plastered from floor to ceiling with photographs of her. In fact his only crime is that wherever she goes, he always appears. She can be sat in the bar, and he’ll saunter past. A trip to the post office and she turns the leave and he’s the next person in line behind her. And heaven forbid she takes a stroll through the market on Friday morning, because you can guarantee, as she rifles through the €3 clothes stall and picks up a lilac halter-neck, there’d be another hand on the hem, – the silver stalker.