The Final Countdown

We are into the final week at the house. We have a van booked for next Tuesday, where we will pack up the last of our life here and move it onto a seventy foot long boat moored in a basin off the Thames.

I am still not excited. That’s not because it isn’t exciting. It’s because the constant trickle of things that need doing is now a fairly steady deluge and there is barely time to breathe, let alone think. As with so many things that are stressful, all the extra things are still playing out against a backdrop of regular, day to day stuff. Oscar had prom and his last day at secondary school. The cats are back and forth to the vets for various things. Tilly is in the throes of getting her life organised because she is off to Finland for a year in August, which is too soon. Tallulah has finally sorted herself a job for the holidays. It is her 20th birthday this weekend. At this rate she will be getting an empty cardboard box and some packing tape.

The terrible things are still being terrible, running along in the background like a ticker tape of awfulness.

All this is punctuated by tiny moments of wonder that make me glad to be alive (thank the ever living fuck for that). The godsend of friends who make the time to listen and care. The loveliness of parents who have dinner waiting for you when you’ve only dropped round to deliver garden tools and it isn’t until you see it that you realise how hungry you are. The tickets to see Nick Offerman in concert that your daughter got you, and even though you had to drive to Manchester, it was a perfect evening after a long and brutal week. There’s always things to be grateful for.

And even when there is still so much to do, there is so much that has been done. I finally finished sorting the garden out, which is major. I spent a lot of last week being lacerated by out of control brambles and squaring up to a bastard, massive mahonia bush. In not unrelated news, when I went down to the boat on Thursday I fell asleep and dreamed that the roof of the boat was made of ferns, through which I could see glimpses of night sky.

We also managed to clear the outbuildings and the cupboard under the stairs over the weekend, which had been giving me a much more claustrophobic level of anxiety dream. Now there are piles of things everywhere that require us to take action so that they leave the house and never come back. I have made a thousand cryptic notes on my phone, hopefully I will remember what most of them actually mean when the time comes.