Bye, Bye, Blighty

It’s rather a strange one, but 20 September’s a bit of an anniversary to me.

On 20 September 2019, I returned from England, my home until a few months earlier, to Spain, my new and future home. I was on the way back from what I didn’t yet know would be my last business trip. I had held what I knew was one of my best customer presentations, though I didn’t yet know it would be my last. 

Misty setting an example

I wasn’t alone. I was travelling with Misty, our cat. We’d left him behind when we moved to Spain, because the first home we had here was a flat. From birth, he’d always lived in places that allowed him to go out whenever he chose. It would have been a cruelty to lock him up in a flat where, even if he could go out, he would have found himself only in a street, with no grass to satisfy his needs and plenty of traffic to threaten his wellbeing.

So we’d left him with the friends who’d bought our house and were kind enough to look after him for us. We hadn’t expected so long a separation, but it took six months before we’d moved to a house with a bit of a garden where a cat of his habits, and his by now advancing years, could build a way of life that appealed to his demanding tastes.

Neither of us particularly enjoyed the journey. I arrived at Heathrow airport with a bit of a squelchy shoe, because Misty played a trick that wasn’t at all uncharacteristic of him, on being loaded into his cat carrier: he peed and, while the lining protected the taxi from most of the product, it was my shoe that caught the rest. 

That required a quick change in a Heathrow toilet, before checking in my case.

We didn’t like the flight much either. I’d spent a couple of years flying three or four times a week, without much pleasure. The number of trips had significantly lessened of late, one my first indications that things were turning ominous within my company. That meant that the return flight to London in September had represented a return to a routine I’d been happy to break for a while.

While in England, I had dinner with a new colleague, whose training we’d completed only a few weeks earlier, and her husband-to-be. It was a pleasant evening and her advice, in fact, had been one of the key elements in making my final presentation such a success. That was, however, another experience which I didn’t realise would prove to be the last of its kind – not just the last meeting with her, but the last meeting with any of the seven members of the team I then led.

Misty and I met Danielle, my wife, at Barajas airport in Madrid. Misty had taken the flight well, despite his annoyance and having to undergo it. The final stage of the trip, four or five hours by car through thunderstorms on the way to our home near Valencia, was pretty hellish, and Misty did begin, at that point, to make his displeasure known to us. Loudly and repeatedly.

Still, in time it came to an end. I was, as always, delighted to be home, and all the more so for seeing how pleased Misty was too. He spent a while wandering around the whole place, checking out each room in turn, and then the back and front gardens. It was clear he deemed the place satisfactory and was ready even to consider forgiving us for abandoning him so long.

It was only the next week that I discovered that six of the seven members of my team and I were all being made redundant. We’d been doing great work, as we were regularly told by senior managers in the company, but they decided that what we provided was a luxury service they couldn’t really keep offering their clients. I have to admit that I’d never really understood how our role could be justified in purely financial terms, though I loved working for a company which felt it could offer it anyway. Clearly, at last, hard finance had caught up with soft quality of service.

At my time of life, and on my fourth redundancy, I felt that it was perhaps time to call a halt. No, Danielle and I decided, I wouldn’t go looking for another job. Instead, I’d take my pension and we would learn to enjoy our retirement here.

So we have been, ever since. To my slight astonishment, in the year up to 20 September, I haven’t caught a single flight. When I see planes flying overhead, my only thought is, “thank God I’m not on board”. I haven’t been back to the UK, but frankly I don’t miss it: I find the atmosphere in the Johnsonian Brexitland increasingly meanspirited, inward looking, ungenerous. I haven’t even been out of Spain, but there’s more than enough to discover here, and Covid doesn’t encourage travel in any case.

Besides, I just look at Misty. He clearly loves this place. I only have to see him stretched out in the sun to know he’s saying, “you guys have moved me around a lot more than I’d have wanted. But at least you’ve found the right place for a deserving cat to retire to. For that, at least, you have my thanks.”

Time to relax, pal, time to relax

He’s right, I reckon. And since he seems to have no objection, I’ve decided to join him in his retirement. After all, a cat as discerning as Misty isn’t going to get that wrong, is he?

So 20 September saw me say "bye, bye" to London, shake the dust of England off my shoes, and head into the retirement I’m enjoying now. 

Even if I didn’t know it yet.

Postscript I realise that my native country, Italy, also celebrates 20 September as a bit of an important day. It’s the anniversary of the day in 1870 that the Italian army, led by the gallant Bersaglieri regiment, broke into Rome, which it had been besieging, to end the Papal states and incorporate them into the national territory.

The Bersaglieri lead the charge through the breach at Porta Pia
150 years ago on 20 September

I naturally wish them well on that important anniversary.  But for purely personal reasons, I prefer to mark my own events on that date. Personal, as Terry Pratchett wrote in Men At Arms, isn’t the same as important.