We're moving to rural Italy!

Also I might be autistic

Here’s an experiment. Can I write this post, spell-check and publish it, while simultaneously looking after you, Jasper? I’d better get used to it because we are…

Drumroll…

… moving to Italy! In April. You, me, Julius, Laska (canine), Tinkle and Tiger (felines), carrying an awful lot of suitcases. And as it stands I’ll have no childcare all summer.

When you were very little, I wrote a few articles with you strapped to my chest. Then in your earlier stages of toddlerhood, you napped for two hours during the day, which also gave me a window to work. You are now at an age where you are awake and very full-on all the livelong day. And our nanny isn’t here today because there’s a cyclone warning in Mauritius.

So here we go. My efforts have been thwarted many times already but the wind is whipping up outside, we just got back from a walk and you are now watching Finding Nemo for the 1,917th time.

Why are we moving AGAIN?… you might wonder.

Well, it’s long been a dream of ours to end up in rural somewhere, with land and livestock and a vegetable garden. Italy feels like the best place in Europe for that: the food wins and the language is beautiful (I will have to learn it of course, and I’m not the best at that).

We have a lovely wonky looking farmhouse in Umbria rented for the first year while we house-hunt for the place in which we will, at last, plant some roots down and stay.

Beautiful Umbria

Now that we’ve planned it, naturally, I’m overtly impatient and can’t wait to leave and get on with it. It’s been unfathomably, unbearably hot and humid here for months now, the mosquitoes are eating me slowly to death, I continue to miss Amazon and eBay and I’m feeling a bit very itchy and grouchy at the moment. But also excited.

In other news, I’m getting formally assessed for autism next week…