Oct 19

Oct 19 The Italian Connection ~ Hosting International Students and Tales Of The Cities.

By July 2017 I had been renovating by myself the ‘was this a crack den’ house I had bought in a city I didn’t know for almost a year and even though I had loved every minute of it, I had reached that breaking point of tipping into madness from a combination of total social isolation and ‘Forth Bridge Syndrome’ (going round and round renovating and decorating and finding a new beginning when you’ve reached the end). I had been grafting away at it alone for so long without a telly, the Internet, electric light, human interaction that even the voices in my head had run out of things to say. So, acting on the suggestion of a couple of new local friends who had done something similar in the past, I decided I needed to give myself a deadline to have the house finished to a high enough standard to host international students from an English Language School in the city. I needed it. I needed to stop working, to have a structure to my day, I needed people around me and some money flow in.

I had been extremely reluctant to rent out the rooms, as I had long passed that stage of having to tolerate other people in a shared house, Christ, sometimes I can’t even stand myself being in my own home, but after a long process of research and emotional readjustment, it seemed like a tolerable option and in a more optimistic era, when I was still looking to buy a house, I had planned to fill it with warm and kindly exotic people to fulfill old friends expectations of my Tales Of The City Mrs Madrigal persona.

In reality, however, bitterness, resentment and disappointment had been carved into my heart from every single previous harrowing experience of having toxic, psychotic and hellish flat mates, lodgers and tenants.

What swung it for me was, with hosting international students you are not held hostage by a tenancy agreement which empowers even the seemingly most reasonable person with an inflated sense of entitlement and assumed rights to the deeds on your house and ownership of your soul. If they pissed you off, you could call the school and have them removed, immediately. Safety net, excellent. Also, many of the students were around 30 years old or older, I was not interested in hosting teenagers for every obvious foreseeable reason. Adults, grand.

Perfect. I passed the home check, I finished and furnished all the rooms, installed the Internet, had hot water in the bathroom, a new sink without a crack and a new toilet with a seat that didn’t swivel and a growing sense of anxiety that was brewing into an epileptic convulsion.

One by one the day, and they, came. I was so physically exhausted, physiologically spent and emotionally drained from single-handedly renovating the house that I thought I was going to turn to dust the night before my first arrival, but I was also excited enough to maintain a faint pulse. The guests were a mixed bag to be honest, in spite of my profound assertions that I did not want a teenager, the school managed to crowbar one in and predictably it did not end well. However, one glorious evening I opened the door to the most joyous human being anyone could hope to have stood on their stoop. Some people grace this world emitting generosity and their she was radiating warmth, Prisca, whose first words sang out in a sing song Italian melody: “Oh Florrie, I’m so happy”. Not as happy as me Prisca, won’t you come on in, por favore?

We shared a love of vintage fashion, so I took her on a cultural trawl of charity shops and carboot sales, watched Elvis in Jailhouse Rock in the local art house cinema and clapped at the end and swooned over the Victorian grandeur of the glass Palm House in Sefton Park. She arrived with gifts, including some sugared almonds and she left a treasure chest of gifts in her room including a swinging Elvis and a pink plant that I’ll treasure forever.

She was only here for two weeks but it was the start of a friendship that will last a lifetime. I felt bereft when she left and I still call it Prisca’s room. We kept in touch through Instagram and WhatsApp and a few weeks after she had departed my world an invitation to her wedding arrived. In Milan. In the Duomo. In my life. What what? Naturally my first response was “I don’t deserve an invitation, I couldn’t possibly impose in such a way, what should I wear?”