Move a-foot: the worries brought by moving home
Oh my days. A General Election. 6th May. See how I have my finger on the political pulse?
Anyway, election shmelection. More importantly, Lenny Henry and Dawn French have split! What’s the world coming to?
In other news, I’ve finally moved house. I’ve been a veritable maelstrom of activity. I am living on my own for the first time since I emerged from the compact and bijou studio apartment that was my mother’s womb. I am Independent Woman. I am strong. I am invincible. I am woman. Hear me roar. Rarrrrr. See?
Actually it’s a bit scary. Caring friends have put a support package in place, such is my ineptitude and slothfulness. Left to my own devices, I’d lie around in my pants all day watching telly and shunning healthy foodstuffs in favour of a diet of carbohydrate and lard.
In my experience, moving home requires a good deal of up-skilling. One has to unlearn processes and habits reinforced by years of repeated behaviours. Sadly, my hippocampus refuses to co-operate.
Allow me to illustrate by example. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you - The Stubbing of the Toe. One quickly learns to avoid certain bits of furniture in one’s home after the inaugural stubbing of the toe, doesn’t one?
I have a particularly cruel cornered wicker box thing, which houses all manner of mouldy dust covered frippery-frappery which I am too scared to investigate, so I just humph it from one house to another, much like someone attempting to conceal a dead body over a period of decades.
Which reminds me – during my daily trawl through the popular news stories I discovered a news article about the two women who allegedly tried to take a dead person on to a plane in a wheelchair. What the actual heck were they thinking? They protested “He wasn’t in an emergency situation”. No you’re right dearie, he wasn’t. He was dead - which is pretty much beyond an emergency in my half-arsed, non medical opinion, and by anybody’s dodgy standards.
As I was saying, the inaugural stubbing of the toe is a nasty business. I’m pretty tempted to deliberately stub my toe on something in New House just to get it out of the way, such is my dread. I may even do a double stub, which takes place when you kick an object, and then just when the pain has travelled from toe to brain, reached a crescendo, and subsided, and you’ve cried a bit, you walk back the way you came and stub your toe again.
Another skill my hippocampus refuses to help me with is retaining the knowledge of when bin day is. I’ve missed it twice already. This has resulted in my stockpiling bin-liners of rubbish, (including associated bin juice) at the back door.
I assumed I’d secured them properly, but during my early morning stumble to the bathroom I noticed through the back window that the rubbish had staged a Frank Sinatra style comeback and was liberally strewn all over the back garden. I’ve since decided that as my rubbish bags contained the meaty string off the previous day’s fancy pants dinner consisting of lamb noisettes and creamed leeks, a posh fox is obviously responsible for the bin liner ransacking. He’s probably wearing a deerstalker and tweed jacket.
Posh fox notwithstanding, I still had to clear up the resulting mess. The problem is, I can’t touch dirty things. It gives me the heave. I was forced, however, to collect up the bits that posh fox didn’t want with full length rubber gloves and a peg on my nose, prompting a visiting friend to exclaim “Oh for God’s sake Mason, this isn’t Vietnam. It’s just some rubbish. Get on with it”. Harsh. Yet fair.
Wish me luck for the inaugural toe stubbing.
PS I bet you’re googling “hippocampus” aren’t you?
