England 2009 - Day 1 Monday

Well…I’ve been in England for less than a week and I can’t believe how much we’ve fitted into that timescale!

As you know, I’m here with my friend who has moved back for good from France. All her belongings were packed up on Monday – there’s a story in that alone! Obviously, as anyone would expect, we all expected a big lorry in order to moves someone’s entire life to a different country. But oh no, the bloke (who shall henceforth be referred to as Numpty) turned up in a transit van with a trailer. There was no choice but to use him, as it was far too short notice to involve anyone else. At one glance, we could all see that he wouldn’t be able to fit everything in, but he assured us (at least for the first hour) that it was possible. After that, he kept saying ‘We need to prioritise’ with a glottal stop and an Essex accent, which is actually quite hard to say! He managed to get the two sofas into the trailer, with nothing packed between them so there was a big empty space there. He kept asking for bags to fill gaps, but everything had been very efficiently packed in boxes. The next thing was “We can only fit in what we can fit in”, “We can only prioritise what we can prioritise”, “We can only do what we can do” – God that man was an idiot. Eventually, with the help of two other blokes the van and trailer were packed full. Without those two though, we would not have got half the stuff in the van that we managed to. The only problem was that there was the same amount again left in the house, which had to be removed in order for people to move in. My mate whizzed up the road and enlisted two French friends, who really came through for her. They arrived in another transit type van, much bigger than the original one, and managed to get all the rest of her stuff into it to transport it to another location for storage until Numpty was able to make a second trip.

The only problem was that after all his guff about prioritising, very little of the priority items had been packed. We had to pack the car with the entire contents of the kitchen, cases of wine (to be dropped off elsewhere on the journey), clothes for us to wear, food for the journey, the printer (for job applications and CV’s) and a dog. This is all in a normal estate car. The car was sitting at an angle, and on the small country roads in grounded on every bump. As soon as the house had been packed up, my mate had to rush off to the airport and I took her car back to our house as she was spending her last night with us. She had taken our non-loaded car to the airport!

When I got home, I discovered that my iPod didn’t work. Now, if you know me you will know that this would, indeed, be a tragedy of high proportions! Well, I panicked. Nothing I did seemed to work. I did the whole reset thing – pressing menu and select together and nothing happened. I just thought it was a shitty end to a shitty day. Luckily another friend phoned to wish us Bon Voyage, and he told me to reset it but to hold the buttons down until the screen changed. I did, and it worked! What a relief!