Moving house is a pain in the neck. We have moved more times than I can count. It used to be bin liners and a bashed suitcase. Then we graduated to cardboard boxes and a pal with a car. Then a van and this week it involves a great steaming long heavy weight lorry type thing. Nightmare. A very tiring nightmare . Not that I will be doing the heavy lifting. Just the bossing. Or pointing. And eating the chocolate biscuits. Or all three.
Yup we are downsizing, from a place with walls to an altogether more open plan sort of affair. Wall free.This sounds lovely and New York apartmentish until you realise we are possibly the most untidy family in Europe or possibly even the world.
As the walls disappear the feeling of openess is wonderful –of course this is because we haven’t moved in yet. The minute we get there with our clumps of keys, papers, laptops, odd socks, geriatric dogs, coat hangers, puffy winter jackets and embarrassing hats that feeling of open plan spaciousness will be gone and quickly forgotten. Once the boxes of stuff arrive we may well disappear under it for days, weeks or even months. Honestly I feel like running to the hills until it’s all done.
The biggest and most annoying thing is the great moaning groaning mountain of socks that will come with us. Every few years I purge my life of the multiple single sock phenomenon and day by day it creeps up on me again. I have a few pairs – obviously girlie size 6 ones and as I am the only human woman in the place it is not difficult to focus on the source of my anguish – yes the two socked males I share my world with. Both size 11 feet, both with an allergy to washing machines and both with a high probability of being wapped on the side of the head with the laundry basket if they don’t get a grip of them soon. I can feel a bonfire coming on.
Black socks. Winter socks. Sports socks. Old gnarly holey socks. Individual stripey socks who have long lost their partner. Threadbare favourite sock who sits perched behind the tap optimistically waiting as each load of washing is spat out forlornly looking for his doppelganger. The bane of my life. I tried to putting them in a huge laundry basket so they can just live there but within this black hole of sock disappears things like – my socks, time, patience, life. So at the end of my rope I call a hormonal overbearing summit during which the male inhabitants remain seated, exchange glances and roll their eyes at me and I warn then I am not joking and shall move to Borneo if they don’t sort the sock mountain out once and for all.
‘How can you move to Borneo if you don’t like flying?’ asks the fruit of my loins.
‘I will walk’. I state calmly through gritted teeth as I mince past clenched to run a bath.
Count to ten.
Cut to 7.45am the following morning. I hear the teenwolf loping past my bedroom door closely followed by a yowl
‘M….u…….m I can’t find any socks’
Bulgy eyed, red faced and hair on end I leap up, stomp through to the sock black hole, swing my head round the door ready to vent my spleen and give him the evil eye but before I can blurt a word out his face snaps into a vast cheesy grin. ‘Ha Mum – got ya!’.
Correct.
You live a long time after you’re laughed at.
I should make 132.
