England now. I was supposed to come back to England on the 6th June, but after Easter it all got a bit good. It was at that point, kind of April-time, that I actually felt pretty settled in to the little life I’d carved out for myself out there. It wasn’t bad before, apart from some boring spells in the winter, but it took that amount of months to get properly into the swing of it and think, hey, I like this, this is really good.
So I changed my flight to come back on the 19th August and I had myself a lovely summer. I wrote the previous post when my students had finished their exams. After that, work didn’t actually stop completely, it just went down to a steady and pleasant trickle of individual lessons, which I kept in the mornings so I had afternoons free to lye down on the beach and other important activities. I never got used to the holiday-life-on-the-doorstep thing, so the fact that I could go and have a mini-seaside holiday made me delighted every day that I did it. Apart from that, general life was just as easy as it is when you’ve been living there on your own for a full calendar year. I just didn’t have day-to-day issues at all.
The thing with going to a place like Modica is that it’s a normal-life type place, not an Erasmus-placement type place. This was a disadvantage sometimes - it would have certainly been easier to have some friends who were doing the same thing as me. However, the end result is that I didn’t feel like I was on some kind of process/programme/scheme thing; by the time I got used to it, I felt like I was just living my normal life. In the build-up to leaving, it was just difficult to get my head round it. I liked my house, I was enjoying the challenge of a new job and I had a nice network of people around me - I didn’t really feel like I should be leaving, and it seemed very far removed from my situation that there should be a degree programme telling me it was time to come back to England.
My brother and sister came out right at the end of my stay, and my sister got my flight back with me so I could have her baggage allowance. Big kudos for a huge amount of help packing up, cleaning up and getting going. Having guests was just the right motivation to not sulk for the last couple of weeks too.
Since I’ve come back, I’ve had a fair amount of out-and-out sadness, but much more just foggy head syndrome. It has been such a big change that I just haven’t properly come down to earth yet.
I am sure that I’ll be in Sicily again. The jury’s out on whether it’s a good place to actually live - the thing is that the placement gave me something different and a bit out there that I wouldn’t have done on my own, so I always sort of thought that, apart from a holiday or two, that’d be it for me and the little island. I don’t know, I’m not drawing any conclusions at all. I miss it already and I liked my little life there. What an incredible year.
I still have some stuff I would like to record - little anecdotes and things that I haven’t written yet, so keep on checking if you’re interested. Thank you for reading.
