Wait a moment

25th May 2025

It was all go on Tuesday morning, if you count hanging around and waiting all go – but as we should know after a decade in Italy, that is all part of life and part of the charm of Il Bel Paese.

Our first port of call, before breakfast at Pina and then shopping, was the Post Office. We had struck lucky in our previous couple of visits in being seen to straight away. Not so this time, there being six people ahead of me when I pushed open the door while Stephen went to find a parking space (down near the church – for some reason happening on a space in the square has become very hit and miss, mostly miss, since the local guardia stopped checking to see if people were abiding by the one hour time limit).

Six would usually be about four too many, prompting a strategic retreat to return another day, but on Tuesday there were a couple of pressing matters. One was to collect the signed for letter that the notification left in our post box said would be waiting for me. The other was a parcel Stephen was sending, the result of his new venture of selling the stuff hanging around unworn in our wardrobes on Vinted.

The good news was that most of those ahead of us were there for simple transactions, so we only had to wait twenty minutes for our turn. The bad news is that when I handed over the notification, Paolo said that it wasn’t there yet and to try again on Friday. At least we had Stephen’s parcel and a birthday card to post so our time wasn’t completely wasted.

That was just a warm-up, though, before the main event of a visit to the bank. Stephen received a call last week, saying that they had been trying to get in touch with us as there were things to sign so could we call in. We opted for Tuesday morning as it fitted in not only with our schedules but with when the Montegranaro branch is actually open, and it’s just as well neither of us had anything pressing to see to with the business taking over two hours.

What we had to sign was some new document for non-Italians confirming where they paid tax, if we understood correctly, and you would think it would be in, flourish the pen and out, but no. Firstly the man wasn’t sure what exactly was needed, so he phoned an associate, but he wasn’t available so he then contacted a female colleague and they had a vague chat about the form but mostly about the importance of drinking plenty of water to keep your eyes healthy. Most of the details were then filled in on the forms – by his assistant until her pen ran out – but there was a hiccup when it came to our NI numbers – which, of course, we didn’t have.

That wasn’t so much of a problem, said the man, we could send him an email with the information, but then there was another hiccup as we had also raised using the bank app on my phone. That was all fine too, until it transpired that the man needed me to input the pin number, which, as it is automatically entered as a saved password on my laptop, I had no idea about, and so we said that we would go home and get all the information and return before they closed for lunch – or we said that when we had the man’s attention again after he took a call from the colleague he had tried to contact earlier and they had a chat about the weekend’s tennis.

We went home, found the information, and returned to the bank. The NI numbers were handed over, the app was successfully accessed and that, you would have thought, would have been it. How foolish. We then had to go and spend some quality time with the nice young lady again as she printed off documents for us to sign before getting me to enter my signature electronically. Two attempts were needed at this as the system rejected my first set of three because they were not a good enough match. The second set obviously were, as not only did the system accept them, but when I signed electronically for something else, it accepted that too.

And that was, at last, it. The nice lady bid us farewell as if we were old friends, which I suppose we were by that time, and Stephen took me back home, depositing me just before 1pm. He headed to work to catch up on all he had missed that morning while I went in for a spot of lunch and a lie down in a darkened room.

Stephen had a couple more takers on Wednesday, with t-shirts proving of interest on Vinted, but he wasn’t the only person looking for a buyer. We had just settled down to dinner when he suddenly shot from his chair and out onto the terrazzo where he started conversing with someone below. Wondering what could have prompted such a reaction I half stood, enough to see through the window the top of a white transit van, and putting this together with the voice came to the (correct) conclusion that Luigi had dropped by. I returned to my dinner – no point in two plates getting cold – and waited for Stephen to return and fill me in.

I won’t go into the complicated backstory, involving as it does people who have not featured in these pages before, but Luigi, working on the basis that as we are British, we must know a horde of compatriots clutching wads of cash wanting to buy a house in downtown Le Marche that has been put on the market by someone he knows. Stephen tried to demur, but Luigi was most insistent. To keep him happy, and to be able to get back to his dinner – and to satisfy his curiosity – Stephen agreed to go with him on Saturday morning to take a look at the house somewhere round about in the countryside.

Thursday the Panda was booked in with Ivano and son for a service prior to it going next week for its MOT – hopefully pre-empting any work that might need doing and avoiding two trips. The only thing was a new bulb over the back number plate which we already knew about, so with that sorted and an overhaul and an oil change, our fingers are crossed for the revisione, as it’s known in these parts.

Friday was the rematch with the post office, which went surprisingly smoothly. We made good time with the shopping and Stephen’s haircut, and the three people ahead of us were seen to smartly, and we whipped through our three transactions in double-quick time. Three because when Paolo retrieved the letter from a box behind him, we saw it was from the water company. “Open it, and if it’s a bill we can pay it now,” said Stephen with great presence of mind. I did and it was (we had apparently missed one in January somehow – maybe because we didn’t get it) so I settled the debt while Stephen handed over another Vinted parcel, and we were still home not much later than our usual time.

Apart from a trip out to collect a new set of lenses from the nice optician in Corridonia (where we seemed to confuse the new assistant who thought Webster was the brand name until he stepped in to help her) the weekend has been spent at home, with Stephen conveniently forgetting about going to see the house and making the most of two successive days of dry weather and sunshine by cutting the grass this afternoon. It was a tad damp in places so still needed a bit more of an effort, but Harry and Peggy showed their appreciation by running around with madcap abandon after he’d finished, and what better incentive do you want?