Tom and Luke Get Their Degrees

Next day we returned to Camford and went to see Marcello. He said that the cities whose opera houses might shortly be recruiting an assistant to the manager were Bari, Potenza, Trabizona and Como. All these cities except Como had universities as well as opera houses, but Marcello said that Potenza and Bari were too far south and too hot for British people. So it looked as though Trabizona in Emilia-Romagna was our best bet. It was reasonably near to the main cities of Northern Italy, and in addition, Luke knew it slightly, having spent a month there in his second year on an intensive Italian course for foreigners. We looked up its web site on the Internet and found that it had a large and prestigious Chemistry department. I found the name and E-mail address of the departmental chairman, and sent him my CV and details of my Leonardo award. Then we looked up the Teatro Musicale in the city. It was a very respectable, reasonably big opera house with a good attendance record. Marcelllo said that he would get in touch with the manager and give him Luke's E-mail address.

By now, there were just five weeks to go if I was to make my self-assigned deadline of October 31 to submit my M.Chem. thesis. Most of the lab work was complete. About 70% of the material was already ready, having been used in my Part II dissertation. Two weeks of frantic lab work and three weeks of writing, in which my darling boy helped with checking text and references, led to me completing the job on schedule. I hoped that the department would not delay in appointing examiners, as we hoped to be able to take our degrees in the December degree ceremony.

As it turned out, I was unable to meet the deadline for the degree ceremony. But there was another one at the end of January. The viva voce exam took place in the first week of December. The External Examiner was a don from Oxbridge, the Internal Examiner was the Head of Department himself, which was unheard of for a Master's student. The questions about the work were very brief, and the rest were essentially about my future, and various offers were made if I ever decided to come back to England.

In November I began 'speed lessons' in Italian with the elderly man who had taught Luke's two fathers twenty years before. I have a good memory for words and facts, but even so, learning a language was a big struggle for me, much harder than anything I had done in chemistry. I rapidly built up a decent-sized vocabulary, but putting sentences together grammatically was a struggle. Luke and his parents helped me a lot by decreeing that no-one in the house or flat should speak English. In that way, I learnt to understand the language more quickly than I could formulate sentences. It was clear that lessons would have to continue after we had got to Trabizona. Luke in the end said that from then on, all our conversation during lovemaking was to be in Italian, but the only words I knew were 'ti amo' (I love you). He said he would teach me the necessary words.

By the time of my viva, I had heard from the head of the lab in Trabizona, both by E-mail and phone, that I had got a place there to do a Ph.D., and offering me a range of topics to work on. Luke's fate took longer to settle. Many phone calls were necessary before a job offer was forthcoming, and even then, the pay offered was pretty meagre. But as Luke said, experience costs money. A starting date for each of us was fixed for February 1, and we had to find accommodation in the meantime, so January would be a busy month for us. I also needed to talk to various prospective Ph.D. supervisors. We wondered about not taking our degrees till later in the following year, but the University of Trabizona insisted on seeing my Master's degree certificate before I could register, so we booked an expensive four-day return trip to England at the end of January to take our degrees and celebrate Luke's twenty-third birthday.

My mother and Massimo had very kindly offered to accommodate us and our chattels while we were looking for somewhere to live. We went to Loxton for Christmas as usual, but left before New Year to get our things packed for our sojourn in Italy. On January 2, having paid a huge sum in excess baggage, Pop put us on a plane to Valerio Catullo-Villafranca airport to begin our new life together, away from our families.

At this point, our story ends. Luke and I had enjoyed four wonderful undergraduate years together, years of hard work, hard drinking, hard swimming and hard sex. I had acquired not only the best man in the world, but also a pretty substantial fortune. We had a lot to thank God for. Now both our lives were going to be very different. Luke had to deal with the problems of a new life and a patience-testing job dealing with volatile Italians. I was going to start work in a new lab, on a new research topic and meet and work with new people whose language I could scarcely understand. We would have to find somewhere to live, and adopt a totally different daily routine. It was scary, but challenging, and the best thing about it was that whether or not things went well with us, we had each other to love and to cherish, and for that alone I felt eternally grateful to God.

There may or may not be a sequel to this story!

THE END