Every year, our harvesting skills get more finely honed. The first year, we were frankly laughed at by Corrado (who runs the olive press) about our woeful productivity. He couldn’t understand how we could have harvested for so many hours yet have so few olives. But then he didn’t see us in the grove, trying to keep Rosie (then aged one and togged up in full winter gear as it was freezing) entertained with a few perfumed bricks in a travel cot. We didn’t look like the most productive harvesting team out there, and our results were no contradiction. That first year, we had no transport, so had to lug each 20kg box of olives up our vertiginous slopes by hand, something that is draining on body and soul. And incredibly slow. We also, having only moved in a month before, had scant contacts and help to call upon, so the team was a distinctly amateur one, comprised of Jason, me and occasional help from our heroic visiting sisters.
Cut to 2009. We have a land rover. We have expert olive harvesters. We have a machine with automated wiggly fingers. A team. No travel cots. No favours from sisters. And Corrado doesn’t laugh at us any more, sometimes he even, almost admits to being quite impressed with our output.
And it’s funny getting better at things. In one way, it is surely one of life’s great satisfactions to improve, to realise that one can learn and become more effective and more efficient. But on the other it is hard not to hold out a bit of nostalgia for those innocent, inefficient days that are the nursery slopes of any new activity. So when Jason phoned last week to say that the Landrover was stuck down in the grove, unable to get up the slippery mud-slide, and he and team were hoiking the crates up one by one, I couldn’t help feeling a little bit fond, a little bit proud even. It’s good to keep a hand in with your past.
