The Water in Majorca (via the Thames)

As you may have gathered from my last post, we are moving house.

I have moved house a great many times in my life. I have moved countries as well as counties. I have moved into and out of single rooms in shared houses, halls of residence, barn conversions, new houses, old houses and even a semi-detached mansion with a turret. I have never lived in a windmill or a shoe, but at some point in the future I expect I will tick them off my list.

I have moved as a single person, as a couple and as a family. I have helped move other people and other people’s people. I have even moved (twice) during a pandemic.

And everything they tell you about the stress of moving is 100% true. There is a lot to be said for setting fire to all your belongings and travelling the world with a toothbrush and a credit card, living in hotels and eating overpriced macadamia nuts from an expensively veneered fridge.

And yet here we are again. Moving once more.

This time though, is the first time I have ever moved onto water.

That sentence makes me sound quite miraculous doesn’t it? Like I’m going to step off a pontoon with a tea chest balanced in one hand, a key in the other and beams of light radiating out of my face. Like that time Bill Bailey swallowed The Little Book of Calm in Black Books.

Would that it were true. Alas, it is far more mundane than that.

Oscar got a place at a drama school in South London. Since the acceptance letter we have tried on several occasions to do the grown up thing and buy a house. It did not work. It is clear that the universe is refusing to accept our letters of official grown-up-ness, written in crayon on the back of a beer mat. I don’t camp. Damp tarpaulin makes me weep uncontrollably and the thought of beetles in my groundsheet is the final straw. So the only thing to do was buy a boat.

So we did.

We bought a shiny, wide beamed barge which resembles no other boat I have ever been on. It has three televisions and a wine fridge for a start. Clearly the river Gods did believe the crayon on a beer mat or that would never have happened.

It is beautiful and nobody else has ever owned it before, and now it is ours. We get to name it and everything (more of this later).

It is also quite tiny compared to a house and most of the things in it, with the exception of dining chairs and a sofa, are already fitted. This means that a lot of downsizing has to be done. And when I say a lot, I mean it’s a bit like trying to fit the mass of an elephant into the fur of a mouse a lot.

So even though the boat will be ours very soon, we have a metric tonne of things to do before we can climb aboard without sinking it under the combined weight of all our belongings. This weekend has been largely spent listing things on Facebook Marketplace and making piles of ‘stuff’ adorned with hastily scribbled and largely illegible post-it notes stuck to them.

Treasures will be stored and squirrelled away with various family and friends but everything else must go in less of a Marie Kondo fashion and more of a fleeing the country way. Eventually I will be the sort of person who owns one, carefully curated bibelot, a life jacket, three televisions and an empty wine fridge, but at least I will be able to sail to the Off Licence.