The Axe is Falling?

The Coronavirus didn’t so much ‘hit’ as ‘sucker punch’ us all, yeah?

What began as an outbreak in late December 2019, within a few short weeks raced across the planet like a global tsunami of dread and disease.

Advice to heed!

 Until now I find myself updating this blog while in lockdown in London. And, while an optimist, it became increasingly difficult to remain so as the stats, and the body count, keep going only one way.
My ‘European Dream’? Well, that was very rapidly fading to black, overwhelmed under an avalanche of dreadful news.
However, the lockdown had one ‘advantage’: It gave me even more time for detailed research. So, I closed iPlayer, turned off Netflix, tuned out the tunes, and did just that.
My first conclusion was that Italian bureaucracy was indeed everything you’ve ever read about. That it required patience, long queues, patience, and reams of paperwork. Did I mention patience?
Although Dante didn’t coin his “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” specifically to describe entering any Italian state or local government office, he f’sure could’ve done!
Something I actually knew about because, many years ago, I’d applied for a permesso di soggiorno (residence permit) in Verona.
An exercise involving yards of red tape, worn shoes, much frustration and wine, and a mountain of official papers. The latter receiving more stamps than I ever got at primary school for being ‘a good boy’.
But, as I had nothing better to do right now, I persevered.

Cloudy with a Chance of No Meatballs

Samuel Johnson may've said: "Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance".
But it did require strength to keep going in the face of such adversity. There were (now) so many more uncertainties thrown into an already cloudy mix.
Not the least of which was not knowing when the UK's borders would open again? And then when the Italian government would allow foreigners to visit once more?
To confuse things even further, and of course, the UK government is still hell-bent on exiting the EU by December 2020, and regardless.

Nevertheless, I plastered on a stiff upper lip, and carried on carrying on.

Plenty of this...

I researched getting a tax code (codice fiscale), residence certificate (certificato di residenza), identity card (carta d’identita), and how to register with the Italian equivalent of the NHS (Servizio Sanitario Nazionale or SSN) to get a health insurance card (tessera sanitaria).
And that is just for starters, okay?
We'd also need to open Italian bank accounts, apply to the Ministry of Transport (Uffici della Motorizzazione Civile) and swap our UK driving licences for local ones, and don't get me started on the rigmarole of buying a car in Italy!
And then ... there was actually buying that 'forever home'.
Which involved, at least, finding a trusty lawyer (avvocato), a decent real estate agent (agente immobiliare), engaging a notary (notaio), and then a surveyor-come-architect hybrid (geometra).
Getting the idea now?
If we were to do this, it’d require strength and perseverance.

Some Small Advantages

However, even the big black cloud bearing such a blizzard of bureaucracy had a silver lining.
A faint one maybe, but one nevertheless.
Because, regardless of all of the above, we did have some advantages here.
For a start we would be going in with our eyes wide open. And not only thanks to my megabytes of research.

Always thinking of you

These advantages included: My wife having lived there for seven years; that together we'd visited many times; and had even attempted to settle once. Albeit many years ago, before I had a UK passport, and with a baby.
By far the biggest advantage we have though is that Alice is half Italian, and can speak the language fluently. Which certainly had to be in our favour.
So, we have all of the above in the ‘plus’ column.
Although, of course, given the current distressing situation, this was all moot at the minute.
What really mattered right now had to be our age, our okay mild medical complaints, and also that we have one son and partner in Montreal, and another with his wife in New York.
These are the things that should concern us. And they do.
Nevertheless, I remain optimistic that we'll all come through this. That we, and the world, would f’sure be changed, not always for the better, but come through it we would!
And my wife was slowly coming around to the idea that maybe … just maybe … I was actually making some sort of sense now?

More Soon…