Last updated 09:21, Friday, 10 October 2008

It was a perfect autumn afternoon. A soft, golden Tuscan sunshine was bathing the piazza in which long, lazy lunches were being enjoyed by locals and visitors together, making best advantage of fresh air, good food and friendship.

From a third storey window in one of the tall, centuries-old apartment buildings on the ancient square’s perimeter, a woman with breasts like Sophia Loren’s was pegging out her delicate smalls on a line strung between geranium-filled flower boxes.

“Look at that,” I said, admittedly a little carried away by the moment – and possibly the wine. “Isn’t that just a wonderfully Italian scene?”

She popped another olive into her mouth, took a sip from her glass and glanced up towards the washing.

“They do that in Whitehaven.”

You can take the girl out of Cumbria...

“What!”

“Actually I can remember when washing used to be strung across streets in Carlisle too. But in parts of Whitehaven some women still hang out laundry like that.”

“Like Sophia Loren?”

She shrugged away my seemingly frivolous attention to unnecessary detail and fished about for another olive.

A few days away, as well-deserved escape from rain, chill winds and the encroaching darkness of winter, are supposed to serve as the change they say is as good as a rest. Interestingly though, some take more easily to change than others, who prefer always to carry a little piece of home with them – wherever they go.

Maybe that’s as it should be – though I’m more of an escapist, possibly even a fantasist, myself. Perhaps it is only right and proper that we should remain grounded, thoroughly rooted in home soil, with a determination to keep each and every exit a decidedly temporary one. Probably more so now than ever before – when temptation to run away from domestic downturn doldrums and follow a foreign sun is at its keenest.

“Don’t care for those,” she said, casting a disparaging eye over a shaded street-stall laden with artisan wood carvings, polished bowls, Jesus bread boards, salad servers and the like.

“They’re a bit like stuff you could get at home,”

“Jesus bread boards? Well, maybe. But they are all carved from local olive wood.”

“Carlisle’s Civic Centre has an olive wood floor. Did you know that? If ever they knock it down, that floor will fetch a fortune.”

There she went again. Always a Cumbrian tale just itching to trip off the tongue. What was her train of thought? That we could buy pieces of the Civic Centre’s floor and have them carved into crosses, saints and grooved stirring things for sticky honey pots?

Not a bad idea, come to think of it. Now that we’re being urged to shop locally to beat back the demons of globally emptied wallets and wobbly banks – to whom we’ve granted much more generous loans than they ever did to us – an early bid for pieces of a Carlisle floor that started life in a far-off olive grove might be the only safe investment left to us; should they ever pull down the Civic Centre... please God.

But we weren’t thinking of such fundamentals as we shopped and dropped in Tuscany, dashing with alarming frequency into designer boutiques – and into gelaterie for recovery. Investments were distinctly short term, indulgently ill-advised and shamefully non-local.

Neither of us is a stranger to shopping and to tell the truth, in the rush of the buzz we can be pretty indiscriminate about where we do it – as our struggle to find bags big enough to carry home our new handbags, shoes, boots, wraps, pictures, cheese et al tended to prove.

Our ways are going to need to change radically if we’re to rally to the urgent call to shop intensely locally and support our hometown producers and traders in these worrying times.

In our defence, not too many Cumbrian farmers can turn out extra virgin olive oil or authentic parmesan cheese. Few local traders are in a position to cut the price of Valentino handbags. But we do hear the shop-at-home message... she perhaps more clearly than I.

In a break for a spot of culture, we studied 15th century paintings and sculptures in Lucca’s hauntingly lovely church of San Michele – until, that is, I lost her.

“Where did you go?” I enquired later. “Suddenly I found I was talking to no-one in there.”

She looked a little wistful as she parked her numerous bags beside her feet at our lunch table.

“I went to light a candle to my late husband,” she said quietly.

“Ah, I see. Sorry.”

“It’s fine. I just thought I should thank him for my shopping.”

More touching home thoughts from abroad. Maybe, on second thoughts, no-one will ever take the girl out of Cumbria.