Sometimes one of the many mysteries that thread through the puzzling fabric of existence comes right up under your nose and can no longer be consigned to a comfortable distance...
When, some years ago, my wife and I first arrived in these rural parts, knowing almost nobody, we decided one Sunday morning to call on our only neighbour. From our place, the one structure visible is a galvanised iron shed among the vines on a distant slope. However, when you walk down to the front gate, a substantial house looms above a vast, spreading plantation of olives across the road and down the hill a bit. That’s where we went on that Sunday morning years ago, intent on friendly gestures and amicable chat.
I don’t think we’re the kind of people who are terribly good at this sort of meeting, as a matter of fact: too diffident on the male side, too forthright on the female. But anyway we did it, and in response to our knock on the door a tall, rugged looking bloke in shorts and singlet appeared to greet us. He was neither welcoming nor rejecting. We introduced ourselves. We’d just moved in "across the road" we said. He said he’d noticed someone had arrived "over there" and then, with a non sequitur that might have betrayed an awkwardness equal to our own, revealed that his wife was "in the shower". He probably meant that she would have handled this impossible encounter much better than he could.
We chatted a bit and admired the olive trees surrounding his house, stretching away rank after neat rank across the property like battalions on parade, and he said with disconcerting seriousness that our views would change if we had to strip the crop. After that, as Bertie Wooster might have said, "the long day wore on" and eventually we wandered vaguely off. He didn’t proffer his name or, for that matter, the name of his showering wife. The family’s pair of Alsatians — to whom we were happy to remain strangers — escorted us up the long drive growling and muttering and giving every indication that only recent bitter experiences of painful retribution were preventing them from reverting to their deeply ingrained, long buried vulpine rituals and having their toothy way with our calves and ankles.
Back out on the road we agreed the visit had been a failure, and we walked up our