Writer, EFL teacher, trainer, and translator, I was born in Tanzania, have lived in a dozen countries over three continents, and describe myself as an ‘expatriate sin patria’. Wherever I go I make it my business to learn the language, get to know the local people and customs, and discover the country’s remotest corners. I became interested in writing in mid-2006, did a short Open University creative writing course and a Writers’ Bureau course, and began getting articles published in 2007.

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By some strange quirk of fate, I have voting rights in Abbateggio. I only discovered this recently, and I’m delighted, as I’ve never been able to vote anywhere else in my life.

Some of you will have read about Abbateggio in my ‘Family History’: it’s a pretty village, with 450 inhabitants, on the barren, rocky hillside near Mount Maiella in Abruzzo, a couple of hundred kilometers east of Rome. I have never lived there, and none of my family is from there.

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Pope Celestine V didn’t much like the glitz and glamour of the Papacy. In 1294 he issued a decree allowing Popes to abdicate, and after only five months ‘the desire for humility, for a purer life’ pushed him to return to his hermit’s life on the rugged Mount Maiella in Abruzzo.

Not a bad spot to find tranquility, especially in November.

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I’m sitting at the tram stop. An elderly lady, well-dressed, tall and strong-looking, sits down beside me.

‘Let's enjoy the last few rays of sunshine,’ I say to her.

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