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.
