Wills needed Italian citizenship. His Italian friends said it would be “automatico” for him. Forty years resident in Italy, thirty-odd years married to an Italian, two Italian kids and a small fortune paid over the years to the Italian Inland Revenue. It would be a walk in the park. Not so. It was not so much a dawdle through tree-lined avenues, stopping, as he invariably did, to pet strangers’ dogs, as attempting an assault on the north face of the Eiger wearing tennis shoes and boxing gloves. He was nevertheless the ideal candidate, even almost up to date with his taxes. Four years was the statutory time limit for the processing. His would surely be over within a few months as it was an open-and-shut case. Had he known it would take three years and eleven months he may not have summoned the will to go past page one. Since Brexit he had spent time snaking through foreign-passport-holder airport queues, trying to keep under the radar on long stays in Spain when his permitted 90 days were up, looking over his shoulder for the Policía. He gritted his teeth and downloaded the ministry of the interior’s application form. It was like the magna carta without the jokes. He had to access the pages by way of a complicated procedure that involved the use of his governmental access code, for which he regularly forgot the password. Daunting was the word that sprung to mind. First of all, he had to find his birth certificate. Years ago, he had put it in a “safe place”. This place turned out to be so safe that not even he could find it. In the UK the birth-certificate-for-ever should not go astray. His kids in Italy could just pick up a copy of theirs any time at the local town hall. The ironic thing was that he actually did have a copy, but it had to be the original, which was to be translated and notarised with an “Apostille”, whatever that was. He set about writing to London to provide him with another original, not so simple since the Municipality he had been born in, way back in the fifties, no longer existed. Finally, the document arrived. He found a notary on line, who naturally wanted his cut to legalise it. After his birth certificate had done a couple of round trips to the UK he could move on. Wills had a pathological aversion to bureaucracy and a tendency to fall into a mix of anger, anxiety and depression if a government web site crashed, if he lacked the information requested, or if a reply to a question did not answer the question. Time passed. He dug out his permanent resident permit, which itself had been a trial to obtain, necessitating long waits, queuing at Verona police headquarters, providing finger prints, and performing the numerous post-Brexit actions required of a non-European.

One bit looked easy. A B1 Italian language exam certification to prove he could order a cappuccino in Italian and gather together enough vocabulary to ask an accountant to sort his daily affairs out. Finally, this would be a stress-free requirement. Not so. He hunted online for an examination centre and to make an appointment. It seemed they only did the exams when Venus was rising in Aquarius and there was a six-month wait.

“What date did you move to Italy?” the form asked. Wills never actually moved to Italy, he just went back and forth for a few years and one day did not go back again. He took a stab in the dark, “August 1^st 1986” it was as good a date as any random number could be. Wills could not remember his last UK address, which for some reason they wanted. He had gone through so many flats, none of the addresses of which he could remember. He opted for his parental home near Chester. He got the number of the house by dragging the yellow man on Google maps down the street as he had no idea what it had been. Was it 26? It turned out it was number 92.

His educational qualifications to upload were complicated. He had spent most of his life in UK as a student, acquiring qualifications that qualified him for nothing really, but a pile of certificates had accumulated. “A” levels, a degree in English, a master’s in philosophy and then there was law school. All of this followed by a complete absence of employment data. Everything was uploaded. No jobs whatsoever, but a few letters after his name.

At the Italian language centre in a school in a Verona back street Wills spent his time chatting up a rather attractive not-quite-yet-middle-aged blonde lady at the desk. The rest of the time he conversed in broken French with a Moroccan truck driver who was sweating at the thought of his upcoming ordeal. He only seemed to know enough Italian to fill up a truck and get himself a coffee. Wills said he’d be fine.

The blonde administrator ushered Wills into a room and sat opposite him. “Where’s the examiner?” Asked wills. “That would be me”, she replied. She then started speaking very slowly in Italian. She smiled, chatted a little off record in Italian and then started the exam procedure. “Obviously you passed”, she said as he breezed out the door five minutes later. Wills had to wait several months before he received online certification confirming the fact. When he did, he uploaded it onto his aging citizenship form, and quickly saved it again before anything crashed.

The rap sheet. There should be no problems with his UK police record. His memory was not what it was but he did not recall ever having done time at her majesty’s pleasure. There was that episode when he was sixteen, up before the judge for drinking underage but surely that would have been wiped by now. More forms to fill in, money to be sent to London, and in due time receipt in the post of a “nothing to see here” certificate from the police offices.

Wills went through the uploading of his wedding certificate, passport and rather a lot of details about his life and times, some remembered, some guessed, and some made up but feasible.

Proud of having completed his copy of the magna carta he clicked the “send” button, many months after he had started. A feeling of relief swept over him, all he now had to was wait. Regular logins to the Ministry of the Interior website saw him informed his application was being processed. One day the Ministry announced the application’s “Rejection”. Wills’ heart sank. He hardly had the energy left to kick his desk and see translation documents flutter to the floor.

Apparently, an educational document had not been translated and legalised. Had he not earned the qualification the application would have gone through. He thought of telling them he didn’t really have a master’s so it didn’t matter, but that wouldn’t work.

By this time his police record had expired. He could not have committed any crimes in the UK in the interim as he had not been there since the last time he applied for one. Another application was submitted, more money was sent, and a further wait ensued.

Some time after form re-submission to the “Ministero dell’interno” he received a notification to say that his application was being processed again. Hardly three years later a note in his personal login informed him it had been accepted.

It took a stressful month trying to work out how to get to the link for the code required by the Town Hall, as it was they who would have to swear him in. At the last hurdle Wills felt like giving up. Mercifully he knew an interpreter who acted as an all-round fixer for Brits who were unable to find the end of the string they had dragged into the ministry’s labyrinth.

The Mayor stood there in his finery. Wills had donned a suit and tie and his son was there to support him in case he fainted or choked. The tricolour sash cut the official’s smart outfit diagonally in half. He asked Wills to recite an oath of allegiance in Italian. He did not have to give up supporting Manchester United, (though he believed quite a few already had). He suddenly felt quite emotional as the Mayor proffered his hand to Wills’ now Italian hand. It had up to that moment been just a bureaucratic Odyssey but now it dawned on him that he had become officially accepted into a country in which he had made his home, married his wife and brought up their family. There were smiles all around and the ministerial scars were already beginning to heal.