Our last days in Puglia (2018)

It’s been two and half years since I last updated this blog.  I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with blogging and whether it’s an activity I do for myself or to gain the attention of others.  If it’s for others then I don’t exactly go out of my way to publicise its existence, so I’ll continue on the basis that it’s a diary which I happen to post on the world wide web.

This confusion over why I blog also extends to whether my periodic breaks from blogging are a good or bad thing.  Sometimes I think that I stop blogging because I have too much going on in the real world to be bothered with it and at others I feel it’s because I can’t bear to look at my life ebbing its way into oblivion.  Anyway, enough of the musing, here is a version of what’s been happening to me…

Looking back over my old posts I don’t think I mentioned that having become a Director of the management company of Dobsons Quay, where we’d bought an apartment in 2016, I became embroiled in a bitter dispute with the managing agents Lambert Smith Hampton.  This came to a head in the Spring and Summer of 2018 and working with my fellow Director Hans we managed to win a £10k pay-out from LSH and at the same time changed managing agent.  It was a real victory but came at the personal cost of hours spent slaving over accounts, doing Internet research and drafting memos and complaints.  Some of this time was spent sweating in my underpants in our hotel in Allepey and in the school in Keeranur.  The best moment of this debacle was when in early June at a meeting with LSH in their Lincoln office I slapped a bunch of papers on the table proving that a supposed trusted contractor of theirs was actually trading fraudulently and from that point it was all downhill.

Having sold my beloved Suzuki Bandit in April I bought an Indian made Enfield Bullet in June and then made a hare-brained dash from the UK to Puglia on it, without having checked it properly.  Just outside Verdun in Northern France the inevitable happened and the rear sprocket disintegrated, leaving me stuck in Verdun for a few days awaiting a new chain and sprocket set from the UK.  The wait was frustrating but also a useful time out from my increasingly frenetic behaviour.  With nothing to do but wander round Verdun I was forced to slow down and think about what I was doing, actually I was reminded of the time in 1992 when having sold my house in Conyer in East Kent I set off in my little sailing yacht up Conyer Creek heading for London when I ran aground on a falling tide and had to wait until the next day before setting off on my new adventure.  While at Verdun I visited the fort which was at the centre of the French defences in the First World War and was left with many haunting images of life underground on the Western front.

The enforced break helped me see sense and cut my losses, so after the bike was fixed I rode back to the UK and then flew out to Puglia.  On my return to the UK a few weeks later I discovered the bike had been stolen from our parking space at Dobsons Quay, but had been recovered and was just about to be scrapped.  I managed to rescue the damaged bike, before patching it up and selling it a loss – sometimes you just have to accept that a bike is unlucky for you, I guess it evens out given the largely trouble-free twenty-odd years I had with my old Bandit.

Sometime during the summer of 2018 Sue and I came to the joint conclusion that our time in Puglia was drawing to a close and that it was time to put our little stone house in Contrada Papariello up for sale.  When we bought the house in 2004 we had no plan to sell at some point down the road.  For us buying in Puglia was never an “investment,” more an adventure and we had no expectation that we would ever get our money back.  But as the years passed we began to feel that Southern Italy is not a place for foreigners to grow old in and that at some point we would return to the UK or some other English-speaking land.

We both thought the time to move on would probably come in our 70s as the land became more of a chore, but post-Borneo and our trip to India our ties had already begun to loosen and so in the Summer of 2018 we made the call to the local estate agent.  We didn’t expect this to be a quick process, Southern Italians tend to measure selling a house as an activity that takes years, rather than weeks or months.  It really caught us on the hop when after just a few days on the market a charming English/Israeli couple viewed the house and instantly fell in love with it, signing a preliminary sale contract in early September with completion scheduled for early December. As a result what we expected to be a long goodbye turned into a frantic few months planning our relocation to the UK.  

Before the sale our friends Ruth and Subash and their children Suresh and Ezhilvizhi came to stay for a couple of weeks.  Unbeknown to us they would be our last guests and it was a pleasure to introduce them to the beaches, food, life and culture of Southern Italy.  I have particularly good memories of a trip with them to Punto Prosciutto, a lovely little beach resort overlooking the Gulf of Taranto.

Having agreed the sale of the house with most of its contents we decided to hire a Mercedes van and driver to bring back to the UK only those things which were precious to us and this made the process simpler but the choices of what to take and what to leave a lot harder.  Generally things went fairly smoothly once you accept that selling a house in Italy involves being mugged by a bunch of professional bandits, including estate agents, lawyers and surveyors all of whom must be paid handsomely for producing piles of beautiful and essentially irrelevant paperwork.  

The only major hiccup in the process was that shortly after signing the sale contract in September and while we were back in the UK the house was burgled.  We’d conveniently left the keys to our old Fiat Punto in the house which the burglars were able to make use of to take away our large pellet stove and sundry TVs and other electrical items.  They didn’t do a lot of damage but irritatingly did remove two sofa cushions to help move the stove, which proved difficult to replace.  

Paolo phoned us to advise of the burglary just ten days before Nicholas and Hadassa our buyers were due to return for a further viewing and follow up questions.  We had no desire to conceal the burglary from them, but did want to make sure that we broke the news after the damage had been repaired and the missing items replaced.  This meant I had to rush back to Puglia and hire a car then furiously rush around tidying up and commissioning repairs and replacements, including sourcing and installing a replacement pellet stove.  With Paolo’s help I was able to achieve my goal and break the news of the burglary to our buyers in a house that looked the same or better than when they’d last seen it.

Finally, the day arrived when Sue, I and Nicholas met in the offices of the Notary in the nearby town of Fassano to sign the final sale contract, the “atto” in Italian, literally the “Act”.  That was 12 December on a cold, dark evening.  The Notary, a big woman with a smoker’s purr to her voice sped through the process like a true pro, including reading the entire contract at lightning speed.  The reading aloud of the contract is a tradition that dates back to the time when many Italians were illiterate, although the speed of the reading makes the contract pretty unintelligible anyway.

After the “Act” we drove back to an Agriturismo just down the road from our old house to spend our last night in Puglia.  We returned to the UK the next day exhausted and spent the next couple of weeks followed by Christmas and the New Year hunkered down in our apartment in Newark resting up and watching “the Crown” and other goodies on Netflix and eating Quality Street.