Lisbon (November/December 2019)

In late November we had our first conventional holiday for years when we got a cheap Ryanair flight to Lisbon and stayed for a week in a pleasant city centre hotel.  It was the first time for both of us in mainland Portugal and our days were occupied by leisurely breakfasts, sightseeing and big dinners.  I became an instant convert to Pastel de Nata, the delicious Portuguese custard tarts and we both really enjoyed the food in general.

We navigated the city by tram and underground and on foot.  We've both always enjoyed pavement pounding as it's down the backstreets and byways that you really to get to know somewhere, sometimes too well.  Of the several museums we visited the one that left the most lasting impression was the Museu do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade.  Located in a former Bastille-like prison and at one time a home for the secret police, it's dedicated to the history of the Salazar regime, which had many similarities to Franco's Spain.

Looking back from the vantage point of January 2021 our holiday feels like it took place in a different world, where we were free to travel as we pleased and everything was open to folks with money in their bank accounts.  Had I been writing this closer to the time I would instead have been reflecting on how different it felt to be a tourist for a week by comparison with most of our travels over the last twenty years, where we've had the opportunity to immerse ourselves in new cultures and experiences for months and sometimes years.  How quickly the World can turn.

 

Settling down (August to October 2019)

Apart from anything else our recent property sales and purchases have essentially sorted out my lifetime finances, leaving me with a lump of cash and, when I start to get my old age pension in July 2021, a decent income stream.  I had no idea when we gave up our jobs and left the UK in 2002 that it would be this simple and I have to touch wood that there will be no down the line economic and/or personal catastrophes that render this conclusion hopelessly misguided.  Anyway, it seemed like the time to acquire a new motorbike and here it is - a Motoguzzi V9 bobber.  My first brand new motorbike, well almost, it had zero miles on the clock when I picked it up from the dealers in Peterborough, though it had been pre-registered the previous November and came with a stonking discount.  It's actually very similar to the Motoguzzi Nevada I used to have in Puglia and it suits me very well as it's really pleasant to ride, has some useful modern improvements like ABS and a gear shift indicator, looks cool and costs a lot less than a Harley Davidson.

In early September I returned to Puglia for my second Italian wedding of the Summer.  This time I was conducting a humanist ceremony at a smart masseria to follow a Roman Catholic wedding at  church in Ostuni for a lovely couple -   a really enjoyable experience.  Nicholas, the buyer of our house, had said that we were welcome to come back and stay anytime and so I emailed him to take up the offer.  Charmingly he said "of course" and then said they would not be there at the time, so I had the place to myself.  Staying out our old home, with most of the same furniture was a deeply unsettling experience.  I had a profound feeling of being home and not home at the same time and had to check myself carefully to stop treating the place and its contents like I owned them.  During my short stay I managed to catch up with our old friends Claude and Jane over a good lunch at their place on the outskirts of Martina Franca.

The one downside of 31 Winthorpe Road is that the garden is quite small and this was a big concession for Sue.  Fortunately our neighbour Nick is a keen allotmenteer and let Sue know that there was a plot available at his allotments in the village of Winthorpe about a mile and a half down the road.  Sue quickly acquired the plot and also put her name down for another one in the Fleming Drive allotments just a five-minute walk from the house.  To her surprise she was offered an allotment there too after a relatively short wait.

Yet more moves (January-July 2019)

The New Year saw Sue and I begin our new lives as a UK-based retired couple and life quickly settled into a relaxed swing of shopping, TV, outings, house hunting and eating out.  Frankly, even in January we were still good for little else, having exhausted ourselves over the move from Italy.  We spent New Year’s Eve with our old friends Carole and Kevin in their newly adopted town of Chester-le-Street and in late January Sue’s friend Sheila came to visit us in Newark.

In March we went to Dorset to visit Sue’s friend Cathy and as Spring arrived we began to seriously start looking for a new house.  This was given momentum when we also put the apartment in Newark on the market.  As a result of having the apartment since 2016 Sue and I had grown comfortable with living in an English market town and decided that a town with an attractive centre, decent shops and good connections with London would be our ideal.  We checked out Melton Mowbray, Oakham and several other possible locations, but eventually decided that we would prefer to stay in Newark, not least because we’d already invested a lot of time getting to know the place.

After viewing several houses we finally hit on 31 Winthorpe Road on the West side of town, an unpretentious three-bedroom 1930s semi which needed very little doing to it.  As with the sale in Puglia everything went pretty smoothly and we even managed to coordinate the purchase with the sale of the apartment, moving into our new home at the end of July.  A couple of days later a large storage crate arrived with the remainder of our things from Puglia, which had been in storage with a company in Newark, so that after many years of living in several places at once we and all our stuff were finally gathered in one place, a strangely satisfying experience after so long.

While the sale and purchase were going on we returned to Puglia in late May/June for a few days, ostensibly so I could conduct a wedding in the Salento, my first where I was to act as a translator for an Italian civil ceremony, followed by a humanist ceremony conducted by me.  The wedding was a great success and a welcome reminder of the joys of dealing with Italian bureaucracy.  We stayed in a charming agriturismo not far from the lovely old town of Otranto and we had a pleasant time, not least because it reinforced our feeling that Italy is a fantastic country to holiday in when you don’t have to live and work there.