Reliably unreliable

Mr FF always keeps the faith, he believes people when they say they will do something.  His sentences often start with ‘you’d think they’d’ or ‘I cant believe they’d’ when he is let down again. I base my judgements on experience and generally have low expectations.   So last week we had four different days for delivery of our original order for logs, none of which materialised and there was no communication at all expect when we chased our supplier.  It didn’t become an issue because we got an alternative supply quickly and we’ll just bide our time, if the original order ever arrives we’ll be well stocked for winter.  So far we’ve heard nothing.

We continued our deliberations with the comune for residence, like the Brexit deal it’s going to the wire.  Last week we were told we had to go to hospital across the valley to take out health insurance, pay a full years premium to cover the last few weeks of this year and a full years premium for next year, go to the post office to have this verified then back to the hospital to deposit the documents.  We refused, Covid deaths in Italy are at an all time high, we are both 72, why send us twice to a hospital and to an always busy post office for something that was not actually necessary.  The lady at the comune knew that we had applied for form S1 from the UK which covers our health costs throughout Europe, we sent her the confirmation of our application that we received (immediately) from the UK.  She argued it wasn’t acceptable, Mr FF sent copies of the legislation that confirmed it is acceptable, still she said no.  

Sometimes it does pay to keep the faith, the S1 forms arrived and despite the comune saying they would only accept documents in Italian and these were in English, Mr FF copied them and emailed them to our less than helpful civil servant with a link to a sample translated into Italian.  Almost by return there was an email saying ignore all the previous stuff she would be issuing our residency certificate shortly.  No apology for all the misinformation, no apology for saying we hadn’t submitted information when we had and certainly no thanks for doing her job for her.   Shortly of course means something different here, we are waiting but at least we have written confirmation we are acceptable for residency.

We will still have to go to the hospital but just once, and in that town there is a rather nice knitting yarn shop so not a wasted journey at all.  We also have to be visited and checked out by the local police within 45 days, until which time the residency can be cancelled.  Now I’m wondering if we have to stay home for 45 days so as not to miss the visit, not a problem because that’s more or less what we are doing though I expect the police to pitch up when we are doing our weekly shop and reject our residency again.  The log man will probably arrive the same day.