The day after my last post Sue got confirmation of her job in Borneo along with a whole raft of information, so we are now running around like maniacs. Sue sets off for Kota Kinabalu from Bari Airport on Friday.  Last weekend we spent booking tickets and pouring over Google Earth at the 20 possible postings Sue had to chose from.  She finally settled on Mukah a small fishing town in Sarawak. Originally I planned to join her before Christmas, but already I can feel the pull of a new adventure and hope to depart by the end of November if possible.  This would mean leaving Puglia in mid October to go to the UK where my current plan is to do my British Humanist Society celebrant training and a one month Teaching English as a Foreign Language course in Brighton. I feel scared and disorientated by the speed with which all this is happening and I will be sad to see Sue off on Friday, even though we will hopefully see each other again before November is out. The local spe...

Ha, ha!  Nearly two weeks ago I expected that our lives would by now have some shape and clarity.  Well not quite.  Sue had her interview and on Monday was made a provisional job offer by the British Council in Borneo.  However, since then we have heard nothing further despite the fact that the job is meant to start in less than two weeks.  Knowing how Byzantine the processes are for this kind of overseas aid work Sue can’t yet be sure that the job is in the bag and therefore can’t really begin preparing to go.  I know she is excited about the job and in her head she is already driving around remote village schools, but she is also conflicted about leaving our home.  Over the last couple of days she has been taking pot plants from off our terrace and planting them on our land – as if she is releasing them into the wild, which made me sad. I heard nothing about the interim management job I went for and sent an email to the agency last Friday when the ...

Considering it's the dog days of high summer our lives have been very stressful waiting for things to happen.  Usually I write about this stuff after the event, but this time I'm in the middle of it.  Last Thursday I was accepted onto a training course to become a "celebrant" at humanist funerals.  It's a short course, but after it I will be able to officiate in crematoria and other places in the UK where people want a non-religious funeral or memorial service.  Last Wednesday I sent my CV off to an agency for a well paid interim management job in London.  I know that I would be very good at this particular job, but that because of my age and (for an accountant) "exotic" lifestyle I don't stand much chance of getting an interview.  Realistically, if I don't hear today I can forget it and I will need to start accepting that the chances of finding well paid consultancy work in the UK are getting increasingly remote.  As a fall-back I am considerin...

Dad rang me last Monday from A&E to say he had had a fall. Since then I’ve been putting in calls to try to piece together what actually happened.  Not easy as he is pathologically incapable of telling the truth about himself and even at the best of times the NHS has trouble getting its story straight. If I took the various things he has told me at face value then his strength has been failing rapidly over the last few weeks leading to a fall in which he probably broke his hip and he is now awaiting a “special scan”, which will determine if he has a fracture and possibly the extent to which he is riddled with bone cancer.  Following the “special scan” the doctors will finally realise how badly they have misdiagnosed his increasing mobility problems and will operate on his hip or his knee or both, leading to death on the operating table or a “cure”. Reading between the lines a more believable storyline might read:  Dad is obese and has bad arthritis in several joint...