Time to move on

Photo: St. Katharine Docks, one of our destinations whilst taking our exercise walks

Our London Lockdown is coming to an end. At least we hope so. It’s all subject to President Macron’s speech to the nation on Sunday evening. Unless there is a surprise in store we’re booked to drive to Cartoceto on Wednesday. The Italian border is open, we just need the French border to open on Monday as announced.

Our lockdown hasn’t been too bad. We have at least been able to get out for exercise and help people out at the same time. We are both NHS Volunteer Responders. It’s fair to say that our experienced has been mixed. Colin has had a few tasks, but then they tailed off. Jan’s experience was very different. So far she has had calls to assist people from Yeovil to Nottingham. On the rare occasion she got got calls from people in London they all said they didn’t request any help or that they’ve been helped by someone else. Frustrating.

Colin has been out every week on a cargo bike collecting for a food bank in Islington. Riding with ICC team mates, we managed to recruit 27 riders in total. The team is now collecting twice a day. Lunchtime is the veggie run, the evening is the bakery run.

Jan has started running again after more than a year off following her mad 2,018km challenge in 2018 for Alzheimer’s research. She re-graduated from Couch to 5K and is now running 3 or 4 times a week.

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On non running or riding days we’ve been out for walks, mostly in and around the very quiet City. Its been a joy to see the City so quiet but we’d be happy to see the people back again. Sometimes it’s been like walking through a zombie film set with not a soul about.

It’s not all been exercise. We’ve been enjoying our vast expanse of outdoor space. A 1m x 3m balcony for lunch, dinner and cocktails.

Just like so many others we’ve been using our time to sort out our nest. We’ve completed our annual clear out. One room at a time we’ve emptied everything. If we’ve not used something for a year then we get rid of it, clean the room with an inch of it’s life then decide where everything goes.

Jan has also been re-painting the apartment. She’s had a particularly frustrating time with one wall in particular. You can read how she has cleverly weaved the story of the wall into her running blog at jancanrun.

One thing we’ve had plenty of time to discuss is what do we do after Brexit? Our choice is visit Casa Angeletti as tourists under the Schengen arrangements which would limit us to 90 days in any rolling 180 days. This puts paid to us spending the summers in Italy and the winters in London as we could only stay for 3 months at a time.

If we want to stay for longer we have to become resident. Peculiar to Italy residents are not allowed to own foreign registered cars, so we’d have to either register the car as Italian (expensive as we have to modify the lighting clusters etc. for driving on the right) or sell it and buy an Italian car. And we have to change our driving, licenses to Italian ones. And pay a lot more tax. Fewer rights and increased costs. Thank you Brexit.

We have a few months to decide. Shall we visit our own home as tourists or do we become resident?