I Did It!!

And now a hop skip and a jump into 2025 and I’m ashamed to say I started writing this in 2024!! It seems the world has gone completely mad with so many horrific things happening everywhere that really, my tumultuous last 12-18 months in the grand scheme of things wasn’t so dreadful. I am in reality one tiny speck of sand and my woes are not at all important, but I truly am eternally grateful to those of you who wrote to me privately and expressed your love and concern and to all of you for reading and having interest in my diatribe.

Once again time seems to be running ever faster and I cannot believe it is now July 2025!!!. It feels like Christmas was just a few weeks ago on one hand and decades ago on another. Time is a funny thing and so I sit here cm’s from a fan blowing full blast enduring days and days of 38 degrees in temperature.

Anyway, my mum has returned to Lucca and is now fully ensconced in her apartment after staying with me for roughly 5 months when she returned in November. We settled on her apartment at the end of December

After months and months of back and forth in Italian with the notary, the completely incompetent real estate agency, and our wonderful geometra the day finally came to get the keys. Honestly it was like signing the declaration of independence or something, such pomp and circumstance, so unlike when a house settles in Australia and the conveyancer calls you to tell you, that you can now pick up the keys. Here in Italy it is quite the ceremony that can last many hours (especially when the real estate agent not only messed us around but also lied to our geometra about filing our land tax registration that could have got us into all kinds of trouble. Our geometry who is such a lovely guy even called the agent an imbecile so the meeting at the notary’s office was a tense affair to put it lightly and it seemed to go on forever).

The notary had to read the 30 page contract in Italian and make sure the translator had the correct information. They asked mum and I all kinds of personal info if we were married, single etc, what that has got to do with anything god only knows. The sellers, their geometry, the real estate agent, her boss “the imbecile”, the notary, mum and I, various assistants and the translator agent all convened in a small meeting room as the reading of the contract dragged on and on and on. The bank draft for the apartment was finally handed to the owners, lots of hand shaking and 3 hours later we left. We thought we’d go to the apartment and then have a celebratory lunch only for me to suddenly get bombarded with phone calls,

Apparently the sellers bank refused to accept the bank draft because the date on the bank draft was too light and therefore deemed illegible and they would not cash it. After a flurry of conversations in my broken Italian trying to understand the dilemma we met the seller and her son at our bank only for it to be closed, when it was supposed to be open according to the opening hours. Luckily there was a door bell which we rang and after some time someone let us in and we explained their printer did not print the bank draft dark enough for the other bank to accept it. It was all so crazy. In fact getting the bank draft in the first place had been a bit of a process because this was all taking place between Christmas and New Years and we had a tiny window of opportunity to get the actual bank draft and our first attempt was thwarted because the bank’s computer suddenly “carked it” (broke down) and so it could not be done, so we had to wait until the actual morning of the settlement and cross our fingers and toes that everything at the bank was up and running again.

Anyway, after such a crazy morning we headed back to the apartment only to find they had taken every single lightbulb, knocked the intercom off the wall, left random ugly bits of furniture and a kitchen full of old pots and pans plus I think 50 years worth of dirt because when I finally procured some lightbulbs and put one into the socket in the kitchen my fingers stuck to the lightshade which was covered in grease…eek I still feel nauseas just thinking about it.

My greatest achievement this year (or perhaps in my entire life) has been getting my Italian drivers license. The written test for the license is an absolute nightmare and when I first embarked on it, I honestly thought I am never going to be able to do this. There are over 7000 questions of which a random 30 are chosen for the test and you can only get 3 wrong in order to pass. It’s all in Italian, French or German and some of the questions are several paragraphs long and don’t even make sense in English. You have to learn everything from road signs, insurance policies, to first aid procedures to how many kilowatts a motociclo can have, which is different to a ciclomotore, to the different speed limits for every type of vehicle known to man, to all the different license types (there are several), the different railway crossing signals because what reason could there be for all of them to be uniform? There are trick questions too. For the first month I sat in driving school staring blankly at the quizzes and the blackboard wondering if I should perhaps move to another country in Europe and try and get my license there and then swap it for an Italian one.

You see, one can swap a UK license for an Italian one and I have always had a UK license which was previously an EU license for over 28 years, so I thought, this will be a breeze and I can just swap my license. Alas my plans were foiled once again, because that would be far too logical for Italian bureaccracy! I waltzed happily into the Motor Vehicle place only to be told that since I acquired my UK/EU license 28 years ago by swapping it from a Canadian license, I can’t swap my license for an Italian one because they don’t have a reciprocal agreement with Canada!! Uhm…but you have a reciprocal agreement with the UK..nope….so that is how I found myself in driving school making plans to potentially move again…..but I am SO PROUD to say I persisted and was victorious. Cue Rocky theme music! I did quizzes on an App every spare second of the day, sitting in the doctors surgery, waiting for a bus, eating my dinner . I failed the test the first time the day after my birthday by getting 4 wrong not 3. I was rather disappointed . A month later with very little study done in between I passed and only got 1 wrong!! I honestly studied more for this exam than I did in three years at university for my degree!

The place where the exam takes place is high security like in an airport. You can’t take anything in with you. You have to leave your phones bags etc outside and then you go through a metal detector. Apparently someone was caught with a microscopic camera device and earpiece just the week prior, that somehow got through undetected and the police descended on the place like a SWAT team and it was an Italian who was trying to cheat that got carted away! Fancy that, a test in your native language that is so hard to pass, so you can only imagine what it is like for someone who is not fluent yet! At the end of the test which you have 30 minutes to complete, they then call your number out and announce to all and sundry whether you passed or failed. One after another Italians failed and then my number was called out and I had passed. I literally did a jump in the air and clicked my heels. I couldn't believe it, I was so happy. Then I had to have 6 hours of driving lessons and I’ve had a drivers license longer than my instructor has been on this planet, but he was super cool and we just drove around the countryside and had a laugh. The actual driving test lasted about 6 minutes. I drove from the school to a roundabout, reversed into a parking spot in a nearby industrial carpark and then drove back to the school while my teacher and the examiner chatted non-stop not taking a bit of notice at all of what I was doing. The examiner then handed me my license immediately and that was that.

Easy peasy…. but I’m like a large animal that was chained to a post when it was little and didn’t realise when it was fully grown that it could easily escape. I kept taking out my phone when sitting still and would start doing quizzes only to remember a few minutes later wait I don’t need to do that anymore!! I finally deleted the app off my phone and am free to drive on the open road in my Fiat Qubo. I am considered a Neopatente (new driver) for 3 years and can only go at a 100km on the autostrada as everyone whizzes by at 180km when the speed limit is actually 130km but that’s Italia for you, where every driver breaks the rules probably as payback for having to go through that written driving test! People park on zebra crossings vertically and horizontally. They never stop for anyone and you take your life into your hands crossing the road. Speed limits, braking distance who needs them!! More coming soon as I catch you up on a years worth of life stuff. Love to everyone xx