It's been a while since I last posted to this blog, mainly because I've been active online as a celebrant, first with my website hosted by Humanists UK and then for the last few months with my new website douglasduckworth.com .   Over the last few months I've been reinventing myself as a celebrant and developing a more distinctive brand with this new logo, inspired by the mysterious images painted on so many of the trullo cones of my beloved Puglia. But I've also begun to realise that this blog is an important part of my story and that in my work as a celebrant I draw a lot on my experience of living in Italy for fifteen years and travelling around the mediterranean and South East asia.  So in future I'm going to write some new posts here and also delve into my past posts with a view to making more connections between them and my recent work as a celebrant.

On the first of the month we had a delightful surprise visit from our friends Ruth and Subash and their children Suresh and Ezhilvizhi to introduce us to their new baby, Rajendra.  On the fourth I got my second covid jab at the Newark showground, just outside the town.  I can't help feeling a peculiar kind of pride in the way human science has risen to the challenge and developed effective vaccines in just a few short months.  It seems the risk has to be immediate and palpable before we can mobilise our efforts in this way, while we look on in despair at the challenge of climate change or just carry on as if it doesn't exist. Our daily Poppy walks continue to give us exercise and continuity and a widening circle of friends.  This is Zak, a gentle giant who Poppy seems to adore. This year has been fairly busy with celebrancy work and May was no exception, including my first funeral where I encountered rival funeral parties.  I met most of the mourners in the...

After months of browsing Ebay and a mysteriously named site called Apollo Duck I finally made the decision to buy another boat.  For the first time in my boating career I let experience triumph over hope and actually went shopping for something sensible - a dinghy, which I could sail occasionally and store inexpensively at a local sailing club.  I then spent weeks trying to work out what kind of dinghy and even made an offer on a type of boat called a "scaffie", only to realise just in time that it would actually be too heavy for me manhandle.  To cut a long story short I ended up making an offer on a Cornish Cormorant which was kept down in Christchurch on the South Coast near Bournemouth. Having got a tow bar fitted to our little Fiat Panda I drove down to Christchurch to pick up the boat in early April, my first long car journey since the first lockdown in March 2020.  Here it is fully rigged in our front garden.  It has a little bowsprit and a traditional gu...

What a strange Winter it's been, biding time and tuning in to the various Coronavirus dashboards each day watching the numbers soaring and declining and reflecting on what it means for oneself and the wider world.  Sue and I have weathered it better than most I reckon, blessed by relative financial security and through our travels a degree of resilience to hardship and uncertainty.  Routine has helped, every other day I go for a run - this is the Queen's Scone and Devon Park on a wintry February, usually the home of Newark Parkrun, now suspended for more than a year. Sue's two allotments have given her much needed space and as well as working on these she's turned the house into an impromptu greenhouse.  Here her cucumber plants are slowly taking over.  Fortunately they've now been relocated to the poly tunnel on the nearby allotment at Fleming Drive.  Actually I was quite sad to see them go. On the days I don't run I take Poppy for her morning constitutional an...

One of the good things about having a dog in lockdown is that you get out and meet people.  Poppy has made lots of friends on our regular walks around town and this is Charlie, one of her favourites.  Charlie comes to the riverside walk on our side of Newark most mornings on his mobility scooter.  He exercises his dodgy knee and feeds the birds (and the rats).  Poppy is always pleased to see him and he her.  Over the months we've passed the time of day together I've learned that he used to be in the Pioneer Corps and that he buys and sells antiques.  He also knows a lot about the town and its inhabitants.  Sometimes he gets to know one of the transient rough sleepers who turn up on the benches on the riverside walk from time to time and he has been known to bring them sandwiches. Then there's Ruby, a lovely black poodley looking dog who has similar energy levels and who she loves to wrestle.  Ruby's owner Judy lives with her partner in a house ove...

Early this month we got the very sad news from our friend Bernie that his wife Anne had died, following her second liver transplant just before Christmas.  Anne was a fellow public sector accountant and I'd known her since the mid-nineties.  Bernie and Anne came out to see us when La Fulica was in Catania harbour in Sicily in August 2003, when we were in the middle of that fantastic hot summer cruising the Italian coast and islands.  They did us the great and very generous favour of paying for us to jojn them in the Villa Politi, a beautiful hotel with pool in Syracusa.  Later they came to visit us in Puglia.  Anne's liver failed catastrophically and without warning about ten years ago and she showed enormous courage and determination over her first transplant, which gave her another decade of active life.  She was such a force in life it's hard to comprehend she's no longer here and I'm sad we didn't see her more often in recent years. Last week my ex-wife...

November and December rolled on in much the same way as the rest of 2020, with our lives narrowed and simplified by Coronavirus.  I took this photo on one of my morning walks with Poppy, the weather bright and misty for a change, instead of grey and damp.  Sometimes I really miss those bright dry winter days in Puglia, where despite the cold wind if you can find a sheltered spot the sun starts to warm your bones. Every day I check out the infection and deaths data on the UK Covid dashboard and the international one maintained by the New York Times.  As the number of cases climbed relentlessly from early December it seemed inevitable there would be a new lockdown and Sue and I cancelled already tentative plans to spend Christmas in Devon with her sister Julie.  In the end we stayed home and had a Christmas not unlike the last one, gorging on duck, Netflix and Quality Street. Poppy has been oblivious to it all and such an enormous psychological asset over the last few ...

Through the first lockdown and then the easing of restrictions the allotments were a lifeline for Sue, and I also came to value the steady stream of fresh veggies they produced, such as tomatoes, fava beans and tons of green salad stuff.  One of my favourites was radicchio di Treviso, the long, dark red and bitter tasting endive that is almost impossible to find in the UK, but is highly prized in Italy and is fantastic oven roasted in olive oil as an accompaniment to a big juicy rare steak. By the time our birthdays in July we were actually able to have a birthday meal in a local pub and also begin to meet our friend Beryl again for our monthly lunchtime get togethers.  For Sue's birthday I gave her the money to buy a second shed for her allotment at nearby Fleming Drive, which we built together in September. In October, increasingly desperate for a break from our narrow existence in Newark we booked an airbnb in Bridlington, for the price that we would usually have paid for a...

Writing this from the perspective of January 2021 it's already hard to remember the speed with which the Covid 19 story went from being an unsettling footnote to the daily news, to the shock of the UK lockdown at the end of March.  On the Friday before the lockdown I was conducting a funeral where I was in a tiny funeral director's "chapel" with a dozen or so mourners, cheek by jowl with the coffin.  Later we went on to the Tithe Green natural burial ground where we were joined by more mourners, one of whom was presciently warning everyone to take great care. Also writing this after the event I'm now suddenly aware how the pandemic has imposed a common narrative on humankind.  In that first lockdown we were allowed out for exercise just once per day and I remember that strange sense of threat I felt just walking around all to familiar places.  In fact Sue and I adapted quickly, agreeing that we would take our exercise separately, with one of us walking Poppy on al...

In early December Sue got news that her friend Annisha, who was one of the feisty group of teachers she mentored in Sarawak, was coming to the UK for a holiday with her daughter and her cousin Leeza and her family.  We decided to meet them all in London and to take them out for lunch as a way of repaying a tiny fraction of the hospitality Annisha gave to us during our stay in Saratok in 2011-13.  We met them all at the V&A and then had the tricky task of finding somewhere to take seven people who only eat halal in Knightsbridge a few days before Christmas.  As luck would have it we found a Lebanese restaurant with an enterprising Russian manager who organised a fixed price lunch for us around a big back-room table.  We had a really convivial meal and Sue and Annisha's bond, was instantly renewed, as it had been when we met for that wonderful barbecue by the South China Sea in February 2018.  We had another quiet Christmas, away from the stresses of a big fam...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

In April we finally returned to Contrada Papariello to find the place in not bad shape despite being neglected for more than four months.  The fava beans Sue had planted before we left had produced an abundant crop and the weeds were soon brought back under control with the rotovator. But the most time-consuming task in the maintenance of our little acre of Puglia is the pruning of the olive trees, an especially important task this year as the tree-killing disease xylella fastidiosa advances from the South and one of the only ways to stop the insects that spread it is to keep the land clear of growth and the trees well maintained.  This year we used a fairly new technique, paying our neighbour Paolo to help, which is like having a turbo-boost as he can prune approximately five tress to our one.  While he was at it he also felled our big old walnut tree, which was diseased and we’ve been meaning to get around to removing for years. After the big prune our land w...

At the end of our month of volunteering it was with a sense of relief that we escaped into the departure lounge of Trichy airport to wait for our Air Asia flight to KL and then on to Kuching in Sarawak.  At Kuching airport we got a familiar red and yellow taxi to the Basaga, our old favourite haunt when staying over in the provincial capital.  Breathing in the warm and humid air en route to the hotel my pervasive feeling was one of coming home. Next morning I had a wander round the town and got a haircut and was reminded what a cool place Kuching or Cat City really is.  Culturally diverse with Chinese and Malay communities and tribal influences everywhere.  There is now a new bridge over the Kuching River to the Sarawak parliament house, a kind of Asiatic county hall. That evening we dined with Mr Steve, Sue’s old colleague from our time in the little town of Saratok, a few hundred miles further up the coast.  Steve has stayed here since the British C...