If you were eighteen and still living at home in England, even when nowadays it might be economically prudent to do so, it wouldn't feel quite right. If you're thirty-five and still living at home in Italy it’s perfectly normal. Let’s look more closely at this phenomenon because not many people do. Or choose not to. Let’s put it up against another statistic: the Italian population is set, on current trends, to fall by 18 million in the next 35 years or so. This was the topic of conversation at a dinner party last night and it didn’t lead anywhere.

My point of view was that the tyranny of the Italian family, ergo mother, is at an end.

Why bring up this sociological topic?

It allows me to write about Titiana. The reason I came to Italy in the first place. And to describe my subsequent fall from grace with La Famiglia Italiana.

I’d met her in London and it was quite the romance.

London has a particular appeal to young Italians. It allows them to step aside from being Italian for a short while at least.

It allows them an almost legitimate excuse to have their heads shaved or hair dyed green. I fly frequently to London for long weekends and witness such transformations.

But Titiana did neither of these things. Her mother was a teacher of English and she was able to pass quite soon as a Londoner in the way she spoke and moved within the culture. She wanted to be as far away from her Italian past as possible as a way of disentangling herself from the grip of her mother. This I am sure was what led to her ultimate undoing.

And we fell in love and didn’t have to account to anyone for the weeks of fun and freedom that first year. She was a photographer. I was involved in the design business and together we floated around the periphery of what we considered to be the alternative music world, picking up work here and there and mixing in that dark world of late night trawling which would leave a legacy of drug dependency and deafness for those who couldn't or wouldn't escape. Not for us though! We escaped from that after two years or so, to the hills of southern Tuscany.

And this is where the fateful saga began.

I know if Ed and Francis had been around in those days it would have turned out differently. Maybe they were. I shall have to consult my Spiders books to find out how long water-spiders live but as it happened I wasn’t at all interested in arachnids at this time of my life although I fell into a series of carefully calculated webs and traps which they would have spotted a mile off.

Had they lived behind a hinge (or perhaps behind a lock in this case) at Podervecchio, the farm we had bought on a hillside overlooking a plastic mill with an artificial water wheel, they would have set the alarm bells ringing the moment I set eyes on the place.

On the day I bought it I found myself saying yes when my heart said no. A thing I've just got to stop doing.

I saw myself writing cheques for millions of lire that I didn’t at that time actually have.

I nodded my head in agreement at what was being said in a language that I didn’t yet understand.

I went from lawyers’ offices to accountants and from notaios to geometras and felt my grip on reality slip away.

Thus began the story of my fall from grace with La Famiglia Italiana.

Last night a huge hawk moth appeared on my staircase. They fly up from Africa at this time of year and send large and flickering shadows around the lamps and lights they are drawn to. But they are tough creatures almost as strong as little sparrows and somehow don’t seem to damage themselves as badly as their tinier cousins whose corpses we scrape off the stairs in the morning. They live for years I’m told and have four eyes and a nose designed on their wings, which make them look wise and thoughtful like baby owls. They seem to know what is going on despite their vulnerable moth like behaviour. They appear to know better in other words.

And it was like that for me that time. Trapped in a pattern of action in which I didn’t seem to be able to help myself and at the same time knowing darn well what was going on. But for some unaccountable reason, through some greater wisdom maybe, did I really want it to happen? Good question.

But more of this later.

Last night the hunting dogs were baying from the early hours.

This morning I once again complain to my neighbour about barking dogs. He gives me the usual set of excuses and lies that yes he will root out the crooning culprit and in fact do so this very day as he has promised every other day this month. Skipping along beside him is a tiny puppy and I say is that yours? And he says maybe. It’s a cross between a Maremma dog (a white dog pretty as a pup and stupid when an adult) and a St Bernard. It follows me immediately and won’t leave my side as I go to transplant my tomato seedlings. It walks straight through the vegetable patch crushing a dozen lettuces and knocking over as many broad bean plants.

I know I am getting nowhere with this dog problem.

Tomorrow I’ll buy earplugs in the Co-op and some chicken wire to put around my veggie patch.

Last night I had a dream about killing Piero .

Piero is a friend I work with and he lives on the hill opposite.

I suspect this dream has a special meaning for either him or me.

I suspect Ed and Frances are using dreams to enter my mind.

I’ve no idea yet