Chapter Nine: (un)Welcome Home

I get it. I fudged up and this is a day late. I’m sorry. I really am. But what’s an extra twenty-four hours between friends? Particularly when you’ve been waiting two years.

If you’re sitting comfortably, then I shall begin. And we’ll start where all the best stories start: 974 days after the beginning.

Now the organised of you will have no doubt done your pre-reading and have caught up on the previous eight chapters in advance. I thank you for your diligence. Ten points to Gryffindor. But for those of you that have not, well I’m in no position to pass judgement. So here’s a recap:

In June 2022, we bought a house in rural Italy. It hadn’t been lived in for 17 years. It was (and to this day remains) from both an interior design and basic hygiene perspective, unacceptable. At the time of us becoming legal owners of the property, my wife was 34 weeks pregnant. We returned to London, and welcomed our second daughter. We boxed our flat up, said bye to London and ran off into the sunset.

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Cut to: September 2022.

The journey down to the house was supposed to take, traffic permitting, about seventeen hours. Given our daughter was only a few months old, we decided to take it slower and make the drive down over the course of a week, stopping in the quaint Hauts-de-France town of Laon, almost getting hypothermia in the national park of Lorraine, before enjoying some warmth outside of Annecy, crossing Mont Blanc, and then blitzing it to the house via Turin and Bologna. The hypothermia isn’t creative licence. We thought, for some utterly bizarre reason, that it’d be a brilliant idea to stay in what can only be described as a wooden cube in the forest. Notionally, cute. Why not? An experience. A detox. In reality: less than ideal as I note in my below review. And if that doesn’t put you off, and you’re desperate for an ‘experience’ or a ‘detox,’ you can absolutely book it here.

With the benefit of hindsight, a two star rating was the greatest display of generosity I have ever made. The mind boggles at what a place would need to have exposed me to to warrant a one star review.

Days after our detox, we found ourselves fast approaching our new home. As we drove through the last village before our house, we were greeted by the most vivid double rainbow I’ve ever seen. The whole sky was illuminated in multicolour as we drove the last few miles home. Tears were shed. Predominantly by our daughters who were hungry/bored/too hot/too cold/tired/wanting this song on louder and for the ninth time in a row, but also by us me. It had been a long, trying ride down, but if we thought the journey to the house, and all that had preceded it, was a testing experience, little did we know what was waiting for us.

We spent the first few months, settling in to our new home. Our early priorities included manically over-cleaning and enjoying the holy trinity of bug identifying>bug paranoia>bug removal. In Daisy’s case, she was busy decorating and installing a temporary kitchen. In my case, I was busy watching Daisy decorating and installing a temporary kitchen. Once the basic tasks were complete, we were able to fully immerse ourself with the most important job of all: spending time with our young daughters in the garden, enjoying the late summer-early autumn transition. Our morning ritual included being woken excitedly by our then 2 year old to go outside to harvest peaches from the trees to add to her breakfast. It was, as close to the wholesome daydreams we envisaged before we bought the house as it was possible for it to be. Right up until it wasn’t.

This story doesn’t need to be made political, so I’ll tread gently. But in June 2016, 51.89% of the voting-age population of the United Kingdom made a decision that resulted in hundreds of millions of pounds going directly to the National Health Service each week, in doing so, saving it from impending doom. An unfortunate side-effect however was that it did make things a little more challenging for us from a visa perspective. We were only allowed to be in the EU for 90 days in every 180.

Fortunately, before we bought the house, the Italian government announced plans to introduce a new type of visa for people that can work remotely. After COVID, lots of countries implemented these as a way to bring families over long-term to supplement the lost tourist income. But after the collapse and subsequent change of government in Italy in late September, it became unclear whether it would still be prioritised.

We spoke to the questura (the equivalent of the local council), the mayor, and immigration advisors to see whether there was anything we could do. All said any progress would take time. But by late November the uncertainty meant we were faced with a difficult decision. We could stay in Italy, risk overstaying our 90 days and hope that we could sort something out. Or we could return to London, accept defeat in the short-term, and wait for the visa to materialise. Or, we could keep moving onwards.

Our 90th day in the EU was December 11. We knew we had to be out of the EU by then. It felt heartbreaking to pack up the house and say goodbye to a place that we had just started to make a home. A place that our two young daughters had just started to settle in to. A place where I had just about nailed ordering a cappuccino incorrectly. But on December 10, we arrived in the architectural gem that is Calais to cross the Channel to return to London in the cold.

Thankfully, we weren’t there for long.

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I know, first a delay in receiving this, and now a major cliffhanger. Double sorry:

But fear not friends, next week, I’ll reveal what is already incredibly well-documented, publicly available information that anyone can access via Daisy’s Instagram.

Until then.

Xoxo