A moving experience
I’ve been helping my mother move house. This mostly consists of my being by turns grumpy, sweaty, sulky and hysterical while my mother organises everything, like a cross between a ringmaster and a cowboy herding sheep.
We were leaving the home that I had lived in for a few teenage years before buggering off for a life of not so gainful employment with a brief but deeply shit career in the private sector so while weekends at home were fun, I did used to rather dread the prospect of work on a Monday. Hence the house held mixed memories and I wasn’t sorry to leave. I did wonder about Mum though, and had nightmare visions about having to pry her fingers off the door, like Thatcher leaving Downing Street (you just know that they had to get rid of the carpets because of her claw marks in them).
Not a bit of it, close door, in car, off to estate agents, not a backwards look or remark.
This was good, because by then my condition could have been described as ‘frazzled’. Mum had been packing for weeks, months even but, Jesus, so much stuff! We had got through all the proper boxes and the big boxes and were slowly having to use smaller and smaller boxes, it was like packing up Russian dolls.
Thankfully, years of playing Tetris paid off and I was able to fill the back of my hire car to the roof with loads of stuff in boxes. This was in addition to the loads of stuff I had taken to the tip.
And that was in addition to the stuff that I had taken to the tip on previous occasions, which was a lot. If the local tip had some sort of loyalty scheme, I’d probably have a skip named after me by now.
Once at the new house, we unpacked all the stuff we had packed. Two things occurred to me, the first was that I could really, really get to hate the smell of cardboard and the second was that nobody, with the exception of the owner of a furniture warehouse, needs that many side-tables. My mother has more side tables than places to put them. The laws of geometry and physics have been bent to allow he to have all her side tables in one room – it’s no coincidence that the large haydron collider went bust, its entire power output is being used to distort my mums front room into ten dimensional space to allow her to display her vast collection of nick-knacks on her side tables.
My melt-down moment came when I discovered that I had packed, transported and unpacked some red and amber glass rock things that are used as part of a flame effect for an electric fire. An electric fire which my mother no longer owns.
My melt-down did not manifest itself in the usual rant. More worryingly, it took the form of a cold and shocking realisation that I. was. Exactly. The. Same.
I helped settle Mum in her new home (realised that I liked it more than the old place) and, a couple of days later, came home and got busy.
First thing to go – my video collection. Hundreds of video tapes. Films and programmes. Thousands of hours of entertainment. This was my entertainment bank, compiled as a young man when I was pretty sure that the rest of my adult life would consist of me living alone with nothing much to do except watch my favourite movies. This was my weapon against boredom.
Three things happened; the invention of the internet, Nintendo and getting married. Believe me, the concept of being bored has not existed for me since about 1998 when the slightest sign of it is met with the perky yet dread enquiry ‘want to chat about our relationship?’.
Anyway, who’s got time to be bored? There’s freeview, digital radio, there’s Mario and Resident Evil, there’s all the stuff on the internet. Bored, alone? Spend a guilty three minutes watching surprising filth and then an hour disinfecting your hard drive, clearing your browser history and showering the guilt off.
We were leaving the home that I had lived in for a few teenage years before buggering off for a life of not so gainful employment with a brief but deeply shit career in the private sector so while weekends at home were fun, I did used to rather dread the prospect of work on a Monday. Hence the house held mixed memories and I wasn’t sorry to leave. I did wonder about Mum though, and had nightmare visions about having to pry her fingers off the door, like Thatcher leaving Downing Street (you just know that they had to get rid of the carpets because of her claw marks in them).
Not a bit of it, close door, in car, off to estate agents, not a backwards look or remark.
This was good, because by then my condition could have been described as ‘frazzled’. Mum had been packing for weeks, months even but, Jesus, so much stuff! We had got through all the proper boxes and the big boxes and were slowly having to use smaller and smaller boxes, it was like packing up Russian dolls.
Thankfully, years of playing Tetris paid off and I was able to fill the back of my hire car to the roof with loads of stuff in boxes. This was in addition to the loads of stuff I had taken to the tip.
And that was in addition to the stuff that I had taken to the tip on previous occasions, which was a lot. If the local tip had some sort of loyalty scheme, I’d probably have a skip named after me by now.
Once at the new house, we unpacked all the stuff we had packed. Two things occurred to me, the first was that I could really, really get to hate the smell of cardboard and the second was that nobody, with the exception of the owner of a furniture warehouse, needs that many side-tables. My mother has more side tables than places to put them. The laws of geometry and physics have been bent to allow he to have all her side tables in one room – it’s no coincidence that the large haydron collider went bust, its entire power output is being used to distort my mums front room into ten dimensional space to allow her to display her vast collection of nick-knacks on her side tables.
My melt-down moment came when I discovered that I had packed, transported and unpacked some red and amber glass rock things that are used as part of a flame effect for an electric fire. An electric fire which my mother no longer owns.
My melt-down did not manifest itself in the usual rant. More worryingly, it took the form of a cold and shocking realisation that I. was. Exactly. The. Same.
I helped settle Mum in her new home (realised that I liked it more than the old place) and, a couple of days later, came home and got busy.
First thing to go – my video collection. Hundreds of video tapes. Films and programmes. Thousands of hours of entertainment. This was my entertainment bank, compiled as a young man when I was pretty sure that the rest of my adult life would consist of me living alone with nothing much to do except watch my favourite movies. This was my weapon against boredom.
Three things happened; the invention of the internet, Nintendo and getting married. Believe me, the concept of being bored has not existed for me since about 1998 when the slightest sign of it is met with the perky yet dread enquiry ‘want to chat about our relationship?’.
Anyway, who’s got time to be bored? There’s freeview, digital radio, there’s Mario and Resident Evil, there’s all the stuff on the internet. Bored, alone? Spend a guilty three minutes watching surprising filth and then an hour disinfecting your hard drive, clearing your browser history and showering the guilt off.
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