Just stuff

Firstly, it has come to my notice (i.e. Stephen told me) that people don’t realise that the pictures heading my blog entries are actually clips from YouTube. So I’m wasting my time, spending ages finding witty, apposite and diverse musical accompaniments to your reading. As they say: such is life.

Anyway, let’s review the past couple of days – which will not take long as we have just be getting on with the humdrum things of everyday life.

Yesterday morning we went to Cuore Adriatico, the newish mall in Civitanova Marche (which Maddalena thinks is the vibrant hub of Le Marche and where she is desperate to live: think of St Annes on steroids). Our mission was to visit Vodafone to purchase a mobile Wi-Fi connection to use in the house and a basic phone for me so Stephen can let me know when he is leaving work. Both were successful, or so we thought till we got home and Stephen realised we didn’t have a sim card. I charged the phone up anyway, even it was a bit like opening a toy without batteries on Christmas morning.

After lunch I had my meeting with my prospective student, Alessandro, a charming and typically dapper young Italian – I’m not sure how many British students carry a folding umbrella with them; they’d just get wet thinking it was more macho. We have arranged for our first session for next Saturday, when he is home for the weekend.

Other than that, it was a bit of a drive around doing a recce on pet shops and any ‘For Sale’ notices that Stephen had missed, then it was post-dinner coffee with Marco and Maddalena. They had kindly bought Harry a ball and a plastic bone to play with in an attempt to stop him roaming the house and pinching plastic bottles from the recycling bin.

As for today, other than an English session with Irene, Elsa’s eldest daughter, it was very much business as usual. She had told me, with prompting, that she was not very good at English, especially her pronunciation. Well, if she’s not very good, I’d like to see the standard of her classmates as she coped very well with the work she had been set. Besides, I can’t see very much wrong with a 16 year old girl who will happily sit there and work for two hours on her homework without complaining or looking at her phone. But there again, maybe she, like me, has no sim card…