After 10 years in the same house, we have decided to up sticks and move over the other side of town.
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For me this will be house/flat number 24 in 47 years so I should be a pro at this packing up stuff.
But a decade off has made me rusty. For example, my daughter’s friend brought us a heap of flat boxes to start packing and several rolls of tape.
I looked at him blankly and asked what the tape was for. “To make the boxes boxy,” he said, peering intently into my eyes like he could actually see the kangaroos jumping around in the top paddock.
But 10 years in the one house also means an awful lot of stuff has been accumulated.
Daughter number one is a hoarder and hasn’t actually seen her carpet for nine and a half of those 10 years.
She has requested a skip bin be placed outside her bedroom window to facilitate her part of the big pilgrimage.
Daughter number two is the complete opposite. She will have everything wrapped, bound and tagged to within an inch of its life. It will sit neatly in the trailer like it’s been packed by the dude who invented tetris. And it will be unpacked at the other end before it even has time to say hi to the carpet.
Anyway, I’ve been spending my nights packing and I’ve decided that I have an addiction – to books. If it’s an English literature classic, apparently I have to have it.
I’ve never actually read Anna Karenina – come on, show me someone who has a spare 20 years – but it looks damn fine on my bookshelf.
As does anything that says Bronte, Austen or any dusty old English writer who wrote as a bloke but was later revealed to be a girl dying from consumption. I think it’s because I think it makes me look smarter.
Anyway, we have six weeks to get ourselves all organised. Or rather, for the very organised daughter to get our other two acts together.