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...

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...

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 ...

We met Carole and Kevin in about 2005 when we were still in the first flush of our Italian adventure and they were running a holiday letting business.  We've always associated them with Italy and were frequent visitors to their trullo complex in Puglia and later to their townhouse in Nocera Umbra, to which they returned after it had been renovated some thirteen years after the earthquake that rendered it uninhabitable in 1997. Now we all find ourselves back in the UK, at least temporarily, and so we went up to see them in Kevin's old home town of Newcastle.  Sue and I both feel at home with Carole and Kevin, in part perhaps because we have a shared sense of adventure and a willingness to do things rather than just dream about them. Although we met in a new context we quickly settled down into our easy friendship, strolling around Lindisfarne and Newcastle, chatting eating and drinking.  On the Friday night we found a Malaysian restaurant in the City Centre which...

The weekend before last we travelled up to Newcastle to see our old friends Carole and Kevin and found ourselves on an outing to Lindisfarne, the Holy Island.  It's the third time I'd been there and the memories of those earlier visits dogged my footsteps as we strolled around the island on a cold and unsettlingly bright winter day. The first time was in the early eighties with my ex-wife Rosemary for a camping holiday in our brand new little Fiat Panda.  Thinking back to the younger me I could hardly bear the thought that I am the same person.  I was so ignorant of myself and my peculiar preoccupations and Rosemary and I were, well, so young and so naive. The second time was in 1993, en route to the Edinburgh Festival with my friend Rob, his wife Vivian and my girlfriend at the time, Annabel.  I was just getting over divorce and a fucked up rebound relationship and was feeling full of myself, little knowing that within the week one of us would be dead in a...

Part of Sue and my experiment with retirement seems to involve impromptu outings.  Thus having a celebrants meeting near Wakefield Sue decided we should spend the weekend there and promptly booked us into the Holiday Inn Express in the city centre. In the event my meeting was cancelled but on Saturday we drove to Wakefield anyway.  At least I now know why it was never on my bucket list, although it would be worth going back to just for the delightful tapas bar we went to that evening. The highlight of our trip was a visit on Sunday to the National Coal Mining Museum, just outside the city.  It's actually located in an old coal mine and includes a guided tour underground.  This was especially resonant for me as reflections on his short time "down the pit" figured so strongly in dad's anecdotes about his past.  The tour helped make real just how dangerous, noisy and unpleasant mining work is and how a gas explosion is an ever present danger which requires co...

Sue's dental problems put our planned trip to India for December and January on hold and on 20th December I picked her up from Stansted with the intention of spending Christmas and the New Year in Newark. Just before she arrived I damaged my right knee crawling around the bathroom doing tiling and pipework and we ended up a couple of convalescents, with me hobbling along and Sue often in intense pain from her dental work.  This got so bad that just after Christmas she had to go to a dentist who prescribed her antibiotics to deal with an infection which had flared up. Notwithstanding our health problems we had a remarkably good time chilling out watching TV, going shopping and doing local walks.  On Christmas Day we went for a walk along the River Trent and got chatting to an older man who knew a lot about local history and whose conversation seemed to turn worryingly often to anecdotes about suicide.  Maybe we provided him with a welcome distraction.  He als...

I flew back to Stansted on Saturday night and got the courtesy bus to the Holiday Inn where I crashed for the night. Next morning, lacking the £3 change for the bus ride, I decided to walk back to the airport railway station, just over a mile away. It's not a route designed for pedestrians and I had to edge my way along the side of crash barriers and frost-encrusted embankments navigating by the airport conning tower. I was in a funny mood.  I'd started the day watching Boris Johnson being interviewed by Andrew Marr.  The whole thing had a surreal air, a lop-sided and articulate Marr asking intelligent questions of what looked like a badly-stuffed teddy bear spouting intellectual sounding nonsense interspersed with a constantly repeated tagline - "sturm and drang ... take back control ... blah, blah, blah ... take back control ...".  The one question that I was dying for Andrew Marr to ask was "why do you keep repeating 'take back control'?  Are y...

I've bought a camera to replace the one I left on the train several weeks back.  It's a sophisticated Sony that I got after hours of research on Ebay and is a perfect match for the lenses and accessories left over from the old one.  It has a "panorama" feature, which I used to take this picture of Dobson's Quay, the neighbouring pizzeria and the River Trent. The autumn colours here are amazing and after my morning run I went out with my camera to capture them.  The landscape is covered with these fabulous dead leaves picking out the trees in gold and giving them golden shadows. Then I walked to the market and found there's a stall there selling second hand camera equipment and I bought an old Minolta 50mm prime lens from this man (I used the lens which I was testing) for a mere £30.  It's called a "prime" as it has a fixed focal length, i.e. you can't zoom it, which makes it simple and fast to focus and 50mm is the "classic...

I arrived in the UK last Tuesday on the latest of my bouncings between Locorotondo and Newark.  Ostensibly I'm here to do a wedding and go to the BHA Celebrant's Conference.  The wedding was yesterday in a pub in Lincoln and was lovely and the Conference is next weekend.  I have a few meetings in between.  Actually, I feel sad to be here.  Sue has been having very painful dental work, which from her perspective feels like it's been going on forever and has put her life on hold with no immediate prospect of it finishing and I want to be at home in Italy with her.  We were planning to go to India for a couple of months in December and January, but this may have to be delayed or postponed. Although I have a fair bit to do I feel strangely at a loose end, waiting for things to happen and stuff to arrive.  I feel I should be phoning friends, but something in me keeps putting this off until tomorrow.  It's the same with this blog.  Ever since dad...

After my Saturday run Sue and I got the train to Brighton and met up with Keith's sister Brenda and Jane, Alison and Graham, her old colleagues from Hargrave Park, where Sue first met Keith.  During brunch Brenda gave us each a small pot of Keith's ashes to do with as we wished and confirmed her intention to scatter a larger pot on the beach, Brighton being one of his favourite haunts. After brunch we wandered around the Lanes and Sue and I reminded ourselves why we like Brighton so much - a slightly louche London-on-sea, pretentious but able to take the piss out of itself and home, bless it, of Britain's first green MP.  It doesn't deserve to be stuck in the UK really, it should have itself towed into the middle of the English Channel and begin a new life as a cool version of Jersey.  I bought a pair of Doc Martins with part of Uccello's the Battle of San Romano printed on them, which seemed the right thing to do.  Then we made our way to the seafront, scrunchi...

Sue came over from Italy last weekend for a get-together in Brighton in memory of our friend Keith Ramptahal.  We stayed in Littlehampton in a tired B&B and on Saturday I went for a run along the coast to Angmering-on-sea. It was a very English scene on which to reflect about "Brexit" and this very peculiar little country that I come from.  There was a strong breeze behind me as I ran past neat semi-detached houses, across meadowlands and into secluded private housing estates.  Lots of tidy white people were walking their dogs plus the odd man in a cheap tracksuit nursing a can of strong cider. The return run was hard work in the face of the wind and I began to resent it as I plodded on with a forward lean.  Bloody wind, bloody Littlehampton, bloody country, bloody brexit.

On EU referendum day I had my first funeral at Boston Crematorium, the English heartland of Brexit, with a higher percentage of people who want Britain out of the EU than anywhere else in the country.  It was a damp, grey morning as I drove from Newark across miles of largely empty farmland.  As I pulled into the car park of a large Asda, the Boston Stump loomed out of the mist.  Driving on through the town I saw rows of neat terraced houses interspersed with Eastern European food stores. The crem. is a grim fifties edifice in some well-kept parkland.  I was shown into the Vestry and later given a quick tour of the chapel and shown the buttons for changing the music and closing the curtains.  I drove back to Newark at lunchtime, and in the afternoon picked up my motorbike from the garage and had a nice chat with the garage owner about bikes and touring and double-checking the bill he even found a mistake and knocked a few quid off.  Then I went to the P...