Let the last week begin...

Well, it seems we'll be moving on Friday.  We appear to have bought a house in Rugby, HT and I.  Together.  So this is my last week in my beautiful house with a beautiful garden, which I'm selling to an old lady who will make it smell of wee and cabbage.  And it's my last week of being more or less single.

I hate moving.  I did tell HT this, but I don't think he thought I meant it.  Unfortunately for him, I'm a very literal person.  I really hate moving.  *Really* hate it.  I think this stems from when I was little.  I went to boarding school in Kent, and my parents were in the army, in Germany.  They moved every two years, and they always arranged the moves to happen in term time.  Which is perfectly sensible, as it keeps the children out of the way...

Except that it meant that I'd be at school, desperately homesick, only I wouldn't know what home *looked* like any more.  Because it would be somewhere different from the home I left.  So I couldn't picture my Mum in the kitchen.  I didn't know what my bedroom was like (after I was 11ish and till Sissy came to school, I didn't have a bedroom anyway, because we had an au pair then.  And I had the spare bedroom in the school holidays.)  I couldn't tell you where the dining room was in relation to the other rooms, or how many toilets there were, or where which picture hung on what wall.  I had no mental image of home.  And I wouldn't know whether there were other children around.  Or if there were (there usually were, to be fair) whether they'd be nice children. Or children I'd be allowed to play with.  And I'd fly home from school and worry - all the way (and it's quite a long way) - that they wouldn't be at the airport to meet me.  And then I wouldn't know where to go, because the addresses were all like Capt so and so, 36 BTY, 50 missile regt, BFPO 45, Germany - and that doesn't mean anything to a taxi driver.  And if the old house had nice friends around it, I wouldn't know whether I'd see them again (usually not), or where they were any more.  It was all terribly worrying and distressing.

I think part of the point of boarding school was to get round at least some of that - to give me some continuity of education and friendships.  But I hated boarding school, and I didn't really have friends there.  The girls in my dormitory were, without exception, such bitches that even now it would cause me no trouble to name them here.  I didn't fit in with them and their little cliques, so I was prickly and difficult (and utterly, utterly miserable) and despite the fact that it was supposed to be a school for intelligent, socially well-adjusted girls, not one of them had the nous to pick up on that and try to include me.  So for 9 years we just avoided each other.

So anyway, I hate moving.  I've hired some very nice smiley men to come and do the lion's share of it for me.  And even then I've spent the last few weeks in a weepy, tumultuous mess to the point where people are beginning to ask if I'm having second thoughts about my re-domestication.  I'm not.  I just hate moving.

The jobs I have to do, still, by Thursday morning, are to sort out Daisy's room (Dan's is done).  To encourage Moo to pack and move out all the stuff she's having (including my bed) by Wednesday.  To identify what's going into storage pending another move to a bigger house, and pack that up on Wednesday.  To identify and freecycle/ebay the stuff that's just going.  To sort out my clothes.  That's a mountain right there, folks. 

Comments

[Grak]

I somehow had it in my head that you were moving to Africa for a year, H, kids and all. Which is why you'd sold car, taken and left the cats in the woods and put piles of stuff in storage. For a grand year touring in Africa, climbing mountains, avoiding mosquitoes and watching zebra from the comfort of an old battered Landrover. Somehow THIS move seems small in comparison - if that helps. Good luck for Friday / the weekend / the future! x

[Silver Lining]

Blimey. I don't know where you got *that* idea from??? But that would be exciting. Possibly almost to the point of not counting as a move...

[Tim]

Good luck and all that.

I went to boarding school. Hated it at first, grew into it later, but only after what seemed like to a little person, like, forever. Boo hoo. There are probably support groups for the likes of us.