The darkness is sudden.

I’m tired from baling. I’m also grimed up and I take a shower. I pay no attention to Ed and Frances as they leave the brown hinge and dance in the air in front of the window.

My tired eyes struggle with focusing between their antics and streaks and flashes of blue white light between them and the rash of lights from San Gimignano.

You call me. You ask is it dark?
I say the fireflies are lighting up our nights as they dance through the stars.
Yes, last night the fireflies arrived!

This is the real beginning of summer and they shock you, they distort your memory because you can’t see a year in there since they were here last time. The habitual walk in the dark to Rosie's house can no longer be done with a torch.

A torch obliterates their beauty. They arrive at the lowest point in the lunar calendar and I have to grope with sandaled feet avoiding the ditch etched out by the recent storm.

I shout out to my young London guests inside the house who are here to sleep and sunbathe for a week before returning to the same existence they deplore.

They look out and say wow and isn't it incredible and rush back in for the BBC news on satellite TV.

They need to know the world is just the same as yesterday.

Ed and Frances know it isn’t.

Morning coffee and cake with Rosie. A chicken shrieks from Valerio’s yard and Rosie leaps up and we see Porgy running down the garden path with a chick in his mouth, which he promptly drops behind a wall.

I put the slightly damaged chick in a picnic basket. It’s bleeding and Alfredo has just told me to throw it in the hedge. But I’ll leave it for ten minutes and give it back to the hen should it live.

Beneath the window I can hear Porgy’s "how to behave" lesson.

I know Rosie is sitting with him amongst the other chicks and the hen.

I hear calamitous admonishments, the thud of a closing door, a whack and a yelp.

In that paradise time ten years back we talked only of theatre and story telling.

We made art at the river, puppets from the clay and had shows late into the night.

The fireflies evoke memories of those moonless nights which made our evening trips to the bar in the village a choice of potential disasters. Between walking through a deep rough damp ditch either side of the path or walking stark right into the jaws of Teo, Baldini’s Rottweiler who would wait silently, (mouth wide open we would imagine), and motionless in the middle of the path like a crocodile at supper time. Torches were banned and everybody would hold hands and stifle forbidden giggles guaranteed to burst into raucous laughter at the slightest silly comment. You know the feeling. It’s life at its best isn’t it?

Dinnertime, or even who would cook, was never planned, but it got cooked, dishes washed up in a dance. There were no windows that first summer and as the night went on the fireflies would sail gently into the house until by the early hours they would have filled it from top to bottom and we would lie there and be taken away from the thoughts of the day.

And still, now, when I walk now down this new lane in my life I don’t take a torch and again they take me away to those times. And the children are there and the best of friends are there and present and future have welded together because you know for sure that everything you wish will come true because the awful division has been magicked away. And you don’t get called a dreamer and nobody is going to cheat you because there are no cheats because the world is perfect.

And the fireflies are the guardians of this memory and it will return as long as they return. And they stay with me to the bottom of the lane and Bess is now running as she did before her operation and she snaps at them but they are not in any space she can measure and I see their reflections flash in her eyes.

And I know the miracle is working again and that past and present and future have fused together for a brief while to become now and that I am free for a short time.

And they dance a dance of love and they find each other in those parts of seconds. I look up to see them in their thousands beneath the dark massive shapes of the oak trees beyond where Cesare parked his tractor earlier.

And I am released from the disruption of the early evening drive to Florence. The madness of a city gasping for air, the station where you ran for the late train through the file of riot police force marching to the football rioters in the station bar and me noticing them an equal balance of male, female in their blue uniforms and riot shields, guns and helmets.

I shower in the dark. Tonight I want candles only. I know the procedure and don’t need bright light but the small brown window is alight from edge to edge. They are now dancing in and out of it and Ed and Frances are dancing with them too, slowly and rhythmically and the ballet is of some other time and within this time and within this space I know I’m included and am ready to listen.

The shower has run cold.

I find a towel and walk to the kitchen.

The phone rings.

You ask are you OK?

I say my watch has stopped.

They wrote themselves as protagonists.