Semina (whose real name is Francesco) likes to hunt and is good at it and usually very successful and known around here as the go-to person if you need any sort of wild game, but especially wild boar, which is his specialty.

A couple of days ago, a chef at a high-end traditional restaurant in town asked if Semina could get him some boars' heads for some sort of ancestral Tuscan delicacy he was planning. So Semina went out and was very lucky, actually getting three boars, very fat from having spent the holidays gorging themselves on the last of the fallen chestnuts.

The chef only wanted the heads, so Semina severed those and put them all together in a bag, but then had to figure out what to do with all the rest of the boar meat. He kept some for himself and some undoubtedly went to Daniele at the pub to be roasted with red wine and wild herbs.

But Semina also knows three Albanian brothers who are sharing a house up here in the hills and could use  little neighborly generosity, so he cut off a couple of nice fat pork haunches and put them in a bag for the brothers as a little New Year's gift and then headed out to make his meat deliveries.

He stopped at the house of the three Albanian brothers first and dropped off their bag of boar meat, for which they were quite grateful, and then continued on towards the restaurant in town. He was only halfway down the mountain when his cellphone rang and it was the eldest of the Albanian brothers.

"Semina," he said, sounding serious and a little scared. "Are you sending us a message? Is this a threat? We don't understand what we have done."

Semina opened the bag of meat still on the floorboard of his car and saw that it had the haunches in it. He had accidentally given the three Albanian brothers three severed boars' heads in a bag.

When he told us this story last night in the pub, Jonathan laughed and laughed and laughed. He is still laughing this morning.

As we were leaving, Semina said to us, "Now remember -- if you don't let me help you move, then we are no longer friends."

So sometime at the beginning of February, we will have a moving party and invite our friends from the pub to help us carry boxes of books to the new house and then eat lasagna and drink wine together all afternoon.