The Beginning

A wise person once advised starting at the beginning, and that is what I intend to do. Readers, we're about to head back in time: back to June 30th 2009, to be precise, and my first Italian adventure.

Actually, I've gotten a little ahead of myself, I'm not starting at the beginning at all, what would Maria say... This is not my first Italian adventure, it's my third. I had breakfast in Aosta after traversing the Mont Blanc tunnel on one particularly memorable family holiday, and a few years later I spent another family holiday sunning myself in Tuscany. Lovely.

Ok, back to June. Oh no wait. That's still not the beginning. Maria, this is not as easy as you made it sound. Let's flesh out the deets a bit. I went to university in September 2007 to study English at the University of St Andrews. Yes, before you ask, it was full of posh people; no, I did not meet Prince William (or his lovely lady wife). One of my biggest problems in life is indecision. I began by studying English with a little casual Italian and linguistics on the side. It really was vair interesting. And then, all of a sudden, English ceased to be so.

There I am, a year and a bit into my university career, and in the midst of a quandry. I had to make some decisions that though, at the time, seemed relatively minor, had quite a large impact on the course of the next few years of my life.

I changed my degree. I stopped studying English with its unfriendly staff and peculiar book lists, and I made myself a student of Italian. Fun times. Many, many months later I had decided that the subsequent year would see me trot off to study in Verona and that I would have to do a spot of practice before throwing myself into second year lectures about the Roman Empire in Italian.

So, now we've made all that a bit more fleshy, we can reconvene on June 30th where I happened to be flying out to Nice en France, before dashing over the border to learn how to become an English tutor that would hopefully give me some soft exposure to the Italian people and the Italian language before I started to learn about Emperor Trajan's social reforms.

Well, Maria, what I seemed to have done is to start at the end of the beginning. Oh dear.