Description of Book on Amazon

John Lomas grew up as a normal lad in a suburb of Derby, England, then, at the age of 22 went on holiday to Italy, and somehow managed to spend most of the rest of his life there.

Following BREXIT, he had to apply for Italian citizenship so that he could stay in Italy, and when asked by the local policeman “how long have you lived here” surprised the young man by replying “about 25 years longer than you have!”

He married twice, and noted that although there is a clear procedure to divorce a wife, there seems to be no known procedure to divorce a mother-in-law or any other of the acquired relatives.

This book is mainly a collection of anecdotes loosely linked together. It does try to start out by describing his early life, but soon abandons all logic and starts telling stories, how he participated in a charity walk with cricketer Ian Botham and his elephants following Hannibals’s trail and so accidentally met Eric Clapton; how he was involved in meetings a couple of times with a young Bill Gates “who seems to have succeeded somewhat more than me”; how meeting him was clearly the greatest day in the life of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother; how he ended up being the chairman of the worldwide computer consortium Unix International; how he unwittingly wrote the wrong words in his curriculum and so got a job he knew nothing about; how he chatted over the fence in Beverly Hills to Mr Spock; and so on.

This is the story of a lad who grew up in Dorchester Avenue, Derby in the 1950s, but lived and worked in 5 different countries before he was 30 years old! Although he moved permanently to Italy in 1971, he still listens to the morning news on BBC Radio Derby, so that he can understand all the local traffic problems, and hear the delights of the local accent. In particular, he likes the jingle that says:

“BBC Radio Derby, the sounds of where we live”.
Hmm, a lifetime ago, yes, but then he wonders:

“how on Earth did I end up spending most of my life in Italy?”

John Lomas
1 February 2024