A bad start to the day when I discovered that Andrea, who sells flowers in the square on Saturday mornings, has had the nerve to go off on holiday, leaving me with a flowerless house. And I couldn't bear to go to either of the local flower shops because they're like entering a mausoleum. You really get the impression you're disturbing the dead when you ask them what anything costs and anyway, they're actually not interested in selling you a couple of bunches of freesias. Their forte is arranging flowers into bouquets and wreaths of breathtaking cellophane-wrapped hideosity. I had no choice but to walk to Rialto Market. And as long as I was there I thought I might as well buy vegetables.

So I'm waiting on line and listening to the old lady ahead of me who's buying one of everything, and then I'm aware she's started on her fruit list, one banana, one apple, one peach. And not any old peach. To my cloth ears it sounded like she asked for una pesca sorda. Which would be a deaf peach. All the way back from Rialto I was trying to figure it out. Would a deaf peach be a soft one, with slightly mushy flesh that made you think of muffled sound? Or a hard fruit, tough to get through to? It wasn't until I got home, noted a glut of eggs in the fridge and thought of hard-boiling a few that the daylight dawned. Hard boiled eggs - uova soda. She'd actually asked for una pesca soda - one hard enough to last the weekend. The minefield of a foreign language. Deaf Peaches would be a great name for a band, however.