Our little break in Yorkshire

I spent many months in Italy dreaming of being back in our Yorkshire penthouse.  We have been back three weeks and it's been more of a nightmare.  A few things that we haven't had working 

The internet

The landline that operates the front door intercom and access

The car air conditioning

My sense of humour

MrFF, ever hopeful, has worked tirelessly to try to improve things.  He even opened a special secure email account in Italy, a PEC, in order to obtain an unlock code for the device we use there for internet.  He paid his 12 euro and sent off the request, of course he's heard nothing, I imagine a response will arrive around Christmas, not necessarily the one this year.

Against my wishes, he got our garage to order a replacement part for the car air conditioning from ebay, a second hand part.  It arrived late and didn't work, a week later he paid almost half the car's value for a genuine part which has finally been fitted and does work.  We took the car for a test run today, it was lovely and cool but the engine warning light was back on, that's another problem.  Since we drove over 1000 miles on the way home with this alarm displaying MrFF is quite blase about it.  I on the other hand panic when the light comes on to say we are low on petrol.

However I have had the most wonderful haircut, so short I just need to run my fingers through it and its styled.  We've socialised with friends in the building, I've sat out on our balcony and in the communal gardens knitting, we've had friends for coffee, we've been to friends for tea and cakes and early one evening shared a bottle of prosecco with a lovely neighbour in her pretty ground floor patio garden.

But what could have been a calm and pleasurable 3 weeks of mostly the latter activities has been majorly stressful and its only now that normal service is being partially restored.  I don't know if its the covid effect or old age that makes us both so tetchy when things don't work, maybe its just the complications of modern technology.  Of course MrFF is more anxious than ever to get back to Italy and start the major project of installing a new damp proof course and replacing all the tiles on our large upper terrace.  I cannot even contemplate the drive back to Lazio let alone all that upheaval and then picking the olives, I am not yet restored.