AURONZO.

We return on a Sunday afternoon when all the supermarkets are closed so we decide to go to our favourite bar by the lake as it also is closing until Easter. We walk down under a full

moon to find there’s an end of year party going on with a very noisy but excellent band. Our little town is rocking!

Not only that but there’s a chestnut festival on in another square on Saturday night. Free pizza, cones of hot chestnuts and mulled wine. Just when you think this place has quietened down for the winter.

Each day we wake and look hopefully up at the mountain in front of us for more snow and the days run into each other as we cook up a lot of vegetable dishes and try to ignore what’s going on, going down, going to ruin in this incredible world of ours. Hard to accept that we have so quickly destroyed it in such a short amount of time and that wars are still happening when there should be peace.

But we walk around the river on dusk one night as the mist layers across the lake and the last of the apples dot the leafless trees with their ruby redness and life continues albeit in different weather patterns. It’s time for socks and layers as I wander now through the villages and darkness falls so early.

And we decide halfway through November that we should put up our little Xmas tree to enjoy it before our next trip away to see the Xmas markets in Poland and Germany.