I decided to leave BT at the party they’d organised for me at the top of the BT Tower. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that the party was awful – it was a fantastic event, and a complete surprise. It was just that they’d thrown it to celebrate the 30 years I’d spent in the company. 30 years! I kept casting my mind back to all those dreadful farewell parties in the past for those really old buggers. Was I like just like them – old, exhausted and past it? I had a really good job as Head of Sponsorship and could look back on some great times and be proud of certain achievements. But I felt like I needed to do something else with my life.
That was in July 2005 and it took another 9 months before I actually left the company. Around the same time, my wife C and I had been toying with the idea of moving house now that 2 of our 3 daughters were settled and living their own lives elsewhere. We didn’t really have an ambition to move to a particular place within the UK and one night C said, why don’t we move abroad?
We’d been spending more and more time holidaying in Italy and were just in love with the place. The idea of living there began to take root. C started trawling the net for potential houses and locations and that’s when we found our home to be in le Marche. We moved there in March 2006 and, whilst there have been many ups and downs, we have enjoyed the life there enormously.
Inevitably we have missed family and friends and, once our broadband line was connected, I started to send regular e-mail updates to them just to let them know how things were working out and, of course, it also meant we could keep in touch with things in the UK. Online access also meant that I could develop my marketing consultancy business at last (shameless plug: there’s a link to the paul leonard consultancy on this site’s homepage, have a look see).
I have really enjoyed writing about the side of Italian life where things don’t go exactly to plan since that’s what creates the charm of the place and the people. Anyway a number of friends said they found them un usually honest and mildly amusing, except when they filled up their inboxes. One of our oldest friends, who runs the creative marketing company Knapp Goodwin, then generously offered to create this weblog site for me to host the pieces and maybe generate some wider interest. They do some fantastic work (go check out their website from the homepage too). Another top friend, a wizard of all things online, did all the set up – his own website will be linked soon. The name ‘Pasta Paulie’ came out of one of my earliest messages and it kind of stuck, just like the pasta round my waist. I hope you enjoy these ramblings from a man who is searching for la dolce vita, and thinks he may get there one day……
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