It's the second largest of the islands that make up the country of Malta, and yet it thinks it's a country in its own right, a little like Wales or Scotland perhaps? That the larger island is known as Malta but the country of Malta includes the islands of Gozo, Comino and two smaller ones causes a little confusion at first. But viewed from Gozo Malta is almost another country. All clear now?
The islands lie on a line between Sicily and Tunisia, about 90km from the former and twice that from the latter. Historically Malta (the country) has been controlled by Sicilians, Romans, Phoenicians, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, Sicily again for the Catholic church, Napoleon and most recently Britain. It's now an independent state with full membership of the EU.
A bit about me:
I'm a IT consultant in my late forties - very late, as in three weeks left late, with three children, the first two grown up, and separated.
I've been working for a leading hedge fund for four years developing and maintaining their settlement systems, single handed most of that time. At the peak last year it was processing transactions of around $6Bn/day. I'd start my day logging in from home by 7am at to make sure everything overnight had worked because teams in London and Hong Kong were relying on it and be logged in again in the evening until I went to bed around 1.30.
Then earlier this year a friend died of cancer at just 51 and over the next few everything changed. I'd spent 25 years working my balls off, obsessed with providing for the family, ensuring the roof over their heads, food on the table and much more, and now the mortgage was paid off, there was money in the bank, one of the nicest people is the world was dead at much the same age as me and suddenly the things that had seemed so important didn't matter any more. A good friend said he'd realised that middle age had started one day in his early forties when he woke up one morning with the realisation that one day he was going to die but this was different.
So enough of this morbid stuff already. I figured I can manage for a year or two, possibly indefinitely, on some part time clients and maybe short contracts in the longer term. So I handed in my notice and I'm going to live dangerously from now on. Probably not skydiving or bungee jumping but some of those things I always wanted to do one day like scuba diving, learning to fly, relearn piano and guitar, maybe learn drums and join a band, write a book, start a dotcom 2.0 venture, it's now or never...
I'd vaguely planned that at some point I'd get a second home in Trieste in northern Italy, where I'd spent a lot of my childhood but I recently discovered Gozo and as I think I wrote elsewhere, if I wasn't going to do anything for a while, Gozo seemed like a fine place to not do anything.
I'm going to leave it here or this will never get published. The gaps will fill themselves in later, so now as we head for Gozo please adjust your watches forward one hour and your mindset back forty years.
