I am sure that Ed and Frances are giggling in the bathroom behind the brown hinge. It's a high-pitched barely discernable whisper of a sound. They are aware of everything I type and they influence a lot of it too. My typing skills improve after a shower.
They have been on a spider fast for a week as part of a courting ritual. Four flies and a mosquito, there a week ago, still zoom about when I open the bathroom door. This afternoon, however, hot and steaming after cutting the grass, I take a shower and see the four flies caught beneath the hinge, hanging in some liquid substance. Frances has a swollen belly and is probably pregnant. How can I be sure? I've bought five books on spiders but neither mentions pregnancy. And she's hungry! She’s nibbling away at the dead flies. The mosquito is nowhere to be seen.

It’s a particular disgrace hereabouts for a wife to leave her husband soon after marriage. Socially it casts a dark shadow over a man.

Even worse if she brazenly runs off with the tractor driver down the road and moves in with him and drives his tractors all day for all the world to see.

Valerio lives on his own since Lucia left to drive tractors. He is my neighbour and I protect him from the above-described disgrace. I protect him, as it were, by association.

And it's because I live alone (except of course for Ed and Frances and Bess my dog and frequently Leone my cat) but more so because I’m a foreigner that he is allowed to live alone too. Undisturbed.

They say 'Ah yes but you're English'. As if this fact alone lets Valerio off the hook in the minds of his family and hunter friends who allow themselves the idea that I in some way through this association have wrought some permissible change to his Italian personality. It's this mechanism of social parachuting that exists in Italy. Dive in and do it and it's done and that's the end of it. Just as a trip to London allows a young Italian to sport green hair for a month or two. 'He's been to London, what do you expect? Ah yes, of course, London'

Maybe you're not following this too well but this is the way I protect him. This Englishman, i.e. me, is influencing him. No green hair, but a touch of that English eccentricity. No doubt about it.

He's allowed a freedom he wouldn't have in any other social context.

That's as close as I can get to explaining it and I could be wrong.

The word is out that I am leaving Tuscany. Pushed out, they say, by the hoards of tourists who have driven me to the very edge of madness (they say.)

I return from seeing my new house over the mountains where there are no tourists to drive me to this edge, and I find a peculiar situation.

The singular Valerio and the equally singular Alfredo (also a neighbour but a cunning one from Venice) have in my absence constructed a wire fence around the back of my garden.

Why? I ask them (although of course I already know.)

To keep the chickens away from Alfredo’s strawberry and tomato plants, they reply. Alfredo’s tomato plants are precisely twelve in number. But it’s there. It’s constructed. A fait accompli. It's done so it's done.

So now where do the chickens go on their constant search for food? Valerio's free- range chickens? They go all the way around the top of the house, braving the little snappy jaws of Pepe, Valerio's dachshund, straight to my vegetable patch where I have just this very afternoon discovered them all, (twenty in number). They've pecked and scratched already halfway through the lettuce plot, and halfway through the broad bean plants too.

I suspect Alfredo has driven them there deliberately as an extra insurance for his strawberries because he comes running out from the strawberry patch when he hears my shooing and cursing and he is panicking because he thinks they’re now heading back towards the patch. Dead right, they are! They are because I’m herding them there.

Quite frankly, I don’t know what to do about this situation.

I think it might have a potentially grave outcome. For both humans and animals.

I think if Lucia hadn't run of with the tractor driver this would never had happened.

From the other side of the mountains I receive an e-mail from a friend telling me the builders are blowing a hole the size of Wales in my limited re-building budget.

Cesare says come down with the figures and we’ll work out costs when he gets back, so I sit dejectedly by his front door awaiting the sound of his jeep chugging up the hill. But he’s late and I suspect he and Rosie have gone to search for their two dogs that escaped and went off hunting today. They’re drawn out by the calls of the wild. Snakes are on the move; porcupines getting ready to do likewise and the deer are heading down from the hills for fresh grass after the recent unusually profuse rainfall. Spiders everywhere. Lots.

I watch one make her web. She takes twenty-five minutes to build it around what looks like a silver ball of eggs. The main anchor threads I trace down to the ground and across to a dry rose bush; another over to the bread oven. She builds the main circular structure and then begins to fill in the gaps round and around and is within a centimetre of arriving back at the centre when Bess comes wagging towards me and swishes away the thread and the spider is left in a huddle of compacted, destroyed web. I shout at Bess and she rolls over blissfully in the freshly cut grass unaware of the damage she has caused.

Later I walk back down to the scene of the tragedy. The spider has gone and not a trace of the web or the eggs remains. I find her nearby, motionless in a corner by the bread oven door.