Robin Ashenden

To nearly any English tourist, the small southern Italian town I’m currently living in, half an hour from my daughter’s school, would seem idyllic. It has an old castle, a monastery and olive groves in all directions, but in Puglian guidebooks it barely rates a mention. It’s the scruffy, down-to-earth cousin of richer or bigger towns nearby, places like Monopoli or Bari, but has nearly everything I could want. There are arches and stone stairways, pot-plants everywhere (80 in my alleyway alone), and that delicious, ivory-coloured stone which paves the streets in Puglia and which long use has polished to a shine. At night the street-lanterns turn the white buildings orange, and the sky above is inky blue with stars.

In 2020, the year of coronavirus, I came to a fork in the road. I’d just turned 50, a moment of looking back over your life, realising what you’ve failed to achieve, and accepting there’s only a finite number of years left to you. It was clearly a time for making a change of some sort, something fundamental and radical, and I duly made one. I faced reality, took myself in hand, and decided to switch to a new aftershave.  Until then, it had been Dunhill Edition all the way. Launched in 1984, it had caught me in my mid-teens, was my first taste of adult sophistication (Jeremy Irons wore it!) and it hadn’t really occurred to me in the intervening decades to wear anything else.

On visits to the continent as a child, what struck me was the strangeness of other European countries. Going to France or Italy, pre-internet, you cut off your connections to the outside world, and even got the British news a day or two late. People ate horse meat, tortellini in brodo or croque monsieurs, and the kids drank Orangina and watered down wine. The smell of black tobacco smoke – dignified and with a kind of ancient wisdom to it – seemed to permeate every public building. But what you also noticed was the cars – Renault 4s on the Riviera, Citroen DS-23s in Paris, and in Italy, overwhelmingly, the tiny, toy-like Fiat 500, a design classic thrumming with character and a part of postwar history.

I suppose there are people who stay in four or five-star hotels all their lives and become a kind of expert in them, turning their noses up at rooms I would regard as the acme of comfort, but since my parents stopped paying, I never have. In adulthood my standards have plummeted and, as a traveller, I’ve stayed in any number of grotty places. I’m not complaining either – you have much more fun in life when there’s nothing to protect you from what Maxim Gorky, in a lyrical moment, called the ‘lower depths.’  None of this was erotic in any way but had a kind of anthropological edge to it My real travels started when I moved to Estonia at 26.

A year or two ago I got my first expensive watch, a Longines Conquest Heritage. It wasn’t quite my dream timepiece – that was a 1960s Omega Seamaster automatic (think Bond films at the Sean Connery stage) but these are priced off the scale and need plenty of specialist upkeep. The Longines Conquest, very much out of the same retro stable (it’s a copy of a 1954 model) was selling at a discount before they upped the prices and released a new model in a much bigger size, and as I have wrists more or less the width of fettucine, it was clearly time to act.

As a young man I sought out the company of much older people in the arts, feeling they had some secret to life, often the same one in different guises, which I wanted, needed to discover. In the let-it-all-hang-out youth culture of the 1990s I felt awash, and the elderly (which to a 20-year-old meant anyone over 60) were also kinder, less threatening, more generous with their time. Two people who influenced me most were Daniel Farson – roistering Soho writer and broadcaster, a kind of modern-day Toby Belch – and Karin Jonzen, a septuagenarian Swedish sculptress with a studio off the King’s Road. It was all pure gold, a kind of heightened life you swore you’d always strive for Dan I met by design.

One of the perks – a perilous one – of visiting the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s was the cheapness of the vodka. I was used to paying London prices for it but in Estonia (where I lived for two years) you could find bunker-bars where they’d serve you a generous tumbler – enough to blitz you for an evening – for about 40 pence. Most people wanted nothing more from alcohol than that it should anaesthetise them and help them forget, and vodka was ideal for this. Unlike whisky or brandy, you couldn’t crow over its ‘vanilla overtones’, its ‘hints of butterscotch’ or its ‘aged in the wood’ qualities. It simply got you drunk, no more, no less. And the bars served it that way: doled out, clinic style, in a measuring beaker.

It’s 7 in the morning, I’ve got to Milan Linate airport two hours before my plane to Bari, and already things are going horribly wrong. The airline aren’t letting my cats fly with me. I’ve got documents to show they’re microchipped and all their vaccines are in order, but two uniformed men, straight out of Mussolini central casting, are telling me the carry-cage is all wrong. Perhaps I should resent these animals and all the hassle they’ve brought me ‘It should have metal sides,’ they snap. ‘You cannot fly with this cage.’ I tell them honestly that I flew with it from Britain the day before – the very same airline to this very airport – that I always fly with it, but they’re having none of it.

I’m off to South Italy for a few months having recently sold my late mother’s house and, if I can find a nice immigration lawyer, perhaps longer. This means my home is now full of cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, marker pens and panic. It’s a feeling I’m perfectly familiar with, having changed my living space (and country) more times in life than I care to count. The boxes won’t be going with me abroad. Instead, I’ll be renting local accommodation for my worldly goods: a storage space. Such austerity’s strictly for saints or lunatics, and most of us don’t make the grade as either The buildings that house storage spaces are nearly always the same. They’re plonked down in industrial estates and look faintly like car-showrooms without cars or windows.