I understand that in many ways this is meant to be a sales pitch, but it just sounds quite violent. And hot.

I have these mental images of the delivery boy ringing the doorbell and then shoving the thing directly into your face shouting “EAT IT!!!” before leaving you with a smoking-hot sandwich sticking half out of your gob, confused and suffering 80% mouth burns.

Really, who wants food delivered directly to their mouth?
Unless you’re a toddler?
Or have no arms, of course: but is that then something you should be paying a delivery food outlet to do for you?

We don’t go in for grand redesigns around here, as you know as I’m too lazy a fan of classic design and the importance of building brand identity. However, as a mark of my move and while I’m somewhere other (here), my lovely seeeeeester has drawn a marvellous new background for my boat.

Anyone reading this post by some fancy ‘rss’ means won’t have a clue what I’m talking about, of course.

But she’s a marvel. And I miss her already.

Staying in a hotel the night before we flew was, can I just state for the record, one of the best ideas in the history of my good ideas. With everything done, packed, thrown away, cleaned and locked up, there was simply nothing to do. We got to the hotel showered, threw away our packing clothes (for one more item might have taken the bags over their weight) dressed in our finest - or at least cleanest) and sat looking at each other, suddenly with nothing to do until the morning.

Well, that’s a lie. We both had some work to do, but that makes us sound not as admirably organised. And the plan had been to go out for a final night’s dinner in London, but tiredness was washing over us, as well as some kind of encroaching lurgy that we were both trying to fight off, and there had been enough saying goodbyes already.

“We should eat” one of us grunted.
“Umph” said the other.
“Should we get room service?”
“Have you seen the price of it?”

This was a problem. Having managed to get a reasonable deal on an over-comfortable bed for the night, I had forgotten that everything in and around the room would be extortionately priced.

“There was a drive-thru McDonalds in the car park, I think?”
“T! We aren’t going to McDonalds on our last night in The UK. We’ll go downstairs to that brasserie thing.”
“Pffff!”
“Brasserie. Not brassiere. You big child.”

______________________

“Ah - that’s not quite right” my Beloved said to the waitress as she artfully swung the two plates down toward the table in front of us “One of us ordered pink peppercorn sauce - the other was a red wine sauce, I think”

“Oh!” said the waitress. She looked briefly at the two steaks in front of her, sitting disconsolately on a mound of chips, both of them with an unidentifiable smooth brown liquid in a bowl on the side.

“Sorry about that!” she said, and crossed her arms, so one steak + bowl of brown liquid got placed in front of me “Of course. I’ll go and get that changed right now”. She put the steak in front of him, removed the bowl of brown liquid and scurried off toward the kitchen … and then came back. She placed a new bowl onto his plate with a flourish. “There you are! Sorry about that!” she said, and ran away, slightly too quickly.

We looked down at the plates.

There was no disputing it - one of them must have been a red wine sauce, one a pink peppercorn sauce. It HAD to be so. We’d had one of them changed so surely it must be so. But on the plate was …

Wait. I have pictures.

“What does yours taste like?”
“Gravy”
“Peppery gravy?”
“Um. Yes. Yes, a bit. Is yours a bit winish?”
“Not really. I mean, I suppose. It’s also a bit peppery. It’s more, you know, gravyish”
“Yes.”

We sit and contemplate our food.

“This is gravy, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“The same gravy. Twice”
“Yesbut. But but… Why did she go and exchange it?”
“Shut up and eat your steak and gravy”

There is silent chewing.

“We should have gone to the McDonalds in the carpark”
“Oh, next time we are totally going to the McDonalds in the car park.”

“Mew”
“MEW”
“Roooooow”
“mew’
“MEAIOW”
“Rooeuiouow”

At least I *guess* that’s what they were saying all on the way over, because that’s certainly all they said for the first hour of arriving in the apartment.

The cats arrived. Both very hot, very confused, very vocal and not remotely dead. I was expecting them to be dead, I can’t deny it. I was so scared.

In fact, when the woman from the firm that was meant to be delivering them called unexpectedly, I was so scared I hid in the wardrobe while my beloved answered the phone (a duvet being unavailable to me at that time).

She rang not to say they were dead, but to say they were on their way. And then half an hour later, they arrived, and they ran out of their wooden crates and suspiciously strode around the flat, shouting, loudly. And panting. And generally looking very hot, very confused, dehydrated and quite pissed off, frankly.

We took them to where the new litter tray was, and showed them the water bowls and the food laid out in the bowls brought from the kitchen floor at home (the bowls, I mean, the ones that say ‘CAT’ and ‘RABBIT’ - see, I told you the fact our baggage wasn’t too heavy was a fucking miracle)

And they continued striding around, drinking a lot and shouting for the next hour or so. And then, at some point, they suddenly became ok with the fact that it was really us and everything was ok. The purring started, and the normal behaviour, and now Widget’s lying on the windowsill behind me, tired from chasing shadows around the room, and Squirrel’s perched on the very tallest thing she can find in the room - which is a two and a half foot tall suitcase, disappointingly for her, as we still don’t have any sodding furniture.

And that’s it. I’m going to have some strawberries and some sparkling Californian wine to celebrate having got here and not having any dead cats.

But I’m done with the diaryising now. Not the blogging, obvs. But the move-diary. The straight forward “And today I did this. And then I did this” because I don’t *really* do that. No, I’m afraid we’re back to the normal tiny stories and observations and musings and things.

Otherwise it’s all a bit un-private. And also I’m quite boring, day to day: “Waited in for a sofa to arrive. It didn’t so I made some coffee and then read the internets”. So back to normal service around here. Kind of.

Kind of normal service, but outsourced to California. And far, FAR more frequent.

[aka I've landed now and at least I've got internet]

“Are you excited?”
*nods*
“It’s all gone very smoothly, hasn’t it?”
*nods*
“And it’s only eleven more hours”
*nods*
“And when we land, we’ll be home”
“What?”
“When we land, we’ll be home”
“No, we’ll be in San Francisco”
“Which is where we live. Which makes it …”
*splutters*
“.. home”
“Well now, don’t let get hasty, we haven’t bloody taken off yet. Wah. What? I mean, that’s just silly-talk. Home? What? Can I get off please?”

And just then, the plane sped up and tipped back, and headed off into the unknown.

____________

Or rather ‘the sky’ which isn’t really that unknown. Not to, like, physicists and stuff. Do physicists do ‘sky’? Or is that geographers? Is it not too ‘uppy’ for geographers? Geographers are more ‘downny’ in their area of expertise, are they not? Well, you know, scientists anyway. They know.
So it is not unknown to them. To the unknown scientists, whichever scientists those may be.

And also pilots. Hopefully. Really, seriously hopefully, because if they don’t know about it I’m going to start panicking, because we’ve still an hour till we land and if the pilots are sitting up there in the cab going
‘wow, what’s all this unknown outside the windscreen?’
‘yeah, I dunno graham, but if it’s unknown we should totally just crash before it bites us or something’
‘yeah, tony, totally.’
then I’m not sure I’m quite so happy about being on this flight anymore.

I’m quite bored.

Not by the time you read this. Bored, I mean. I’ll be in my new flat that I’ve never seen by the time you read this, so that will be quite an exciting time. Though also, arguably by the time you read this you’ll be asleep, so it won’t make that much difference. Or it might be a different time. Because by the time you read this I’ll be asleep so I won’t be bored, but it won’t be that exciting either.

Anyway: point being, by the time you read this, I won’t be on the flight anymore, because they haven’t installed in-flight blogging. Yet. They’ve installed inflight seat-to-seat text messages on a little infuriating handset - I managed to message my Beloved saying: HELLO I LOVE YOU THIS THING IS COCKING RUBBISH WE ARE MOVING TO CALIFORNIA HOW EXCITING IS THAT I AM PLANE-GASSY IT DOESN’T SMELL THOUGH which was testament to how bored I was at that point in the flight already, because it took me 40 minutes and an awful lot of frustration to type that. And because he was sitting right next to me.
And he already knew about the gas thing because I kept tapping him on the shoulder and doing mini-burps for his entertainment (his in-flight entertainment system had broken down so it was the least I could do).

I watched some films - In Bruges I loved an awful lot, I must say, some dreck with Helen Hunt I didn’t so much. There were other films I had wanted to see, but then thought I could save them for the way back, but then I remembered I wasn’t coming back, and then freaked out, quietly.

Someone’s going to come along in a minute and ask me to shut my laptop. Outside the window there are patchworks of fields around rivers, and stretches of drier-looking land stretching toward mountains. Soon we’ll land, and pick up the bags that weigh half a tonne each (though only a few millikilos under their allowed weight, which was a fucking miracle, frankly) we’ll get a cab, because anything else would be arm-breaking insanity, we’ll go and pick up keys and then … well, then excitement. Excitement and a bunch of trying to work out if we can improvise a bed, because otherwise we haven’t *strictly* got one. But we do have jetlag. So that’s almost as good. I know I was going to tell you about dinner last night - I just need to upload those photos first and oh

The seatbelt light’s just gone on, and there’s a stern looking woman in uniform walking toward me. I have to

transmission ends

Day! One day! That was what I meant!

One day to go until we fly. Twelve hours. I’ve already checked in.

The house is packed up (into one little storage box, weee!) the cats went off, mewing and confused, but in good and capable hands.

And now I sit here in a hotel bedroom after perhaps the most comical dining experience I’ve had in at least a while (I’ll upload the photos in a bit, well, perhaps a few days) trying to work, but failing because I’m too excited.

So yes. Tomorrow, we fly.

I just wanted you to knkow everything’s going fabulously, and I have only cried 8 times in the last 24 hours. But they were only little cries. And tinged with happy excitement.

See you on the other side.

It’s not even Sunday anymore. It’s Monday. And Monday is one day until we fly.

So let’s just say it’s still Sunday.

It’s Sunday, and we’ve just got back from dinner at some dear lovely Brightonean friends’ flat after a day of hard packing and cleaning and forgetting to eat anything at all. And we’re back in a very empty house talking about how much we’ve felt at home here, and how little we expected to leave it any time soon.

We really didn’t. Both of us are big on itchy feet and getting up and moving just because new things are exciting - but when we moved here, we thought we might actually settle for quite a good long while; otherwise we wouldn’t have got the cats. But then things suddenly changed, and suddenly we’re off again.

And it’s brilliant, and it’s exciting, and I’m lucky, and it’s amazing and it’s everything I’ve ever wanted to do - but right now, the day before, or two days before or whatever; I can’t see that. I can only see this ENORMOUS WALL O’STUFF - from the pile of boxes in my living room to the piles of money that it’s costing for various things; to the friends I’m leaving behind in the city I’ve grown ridiculously fond of ridiculously fast; to the worry about leaving behind avenues of career to anxiety about how to create new ones; from the moment the first person arrives in the morning to the moment we step off the plane 36 hours later. It’s all just a huge WALL of STUFF.

But you know what? All fine. All going to be fine. Sorry, I forget:

DIARY:

Friday there were drinks, and they were magnificent, and I got drunk.

Saturday quite a lot of our furniture set sail into a sea of friends, and that was good, although did leave us watching Law’n'order on Saturday night cross-legged on the floor with pizza on our knees. Then there was pub. That was good.

Sunday my lovely sister and brotherinlaw came down with a car and took many many carloads to the recycly-dump. We cleaned a whole lot more (seriously, how much more cleaning can there be? But everytime we do something else, everything seems to grow dirt again)

Tomorrow there will be someone coming to pick up the cats. They’ll bring carry cases, but the convicts are allowed blankets, so we’ve set those aside ready to go. The cats, whose primary position when someone knocks at the door has been the same since everything in the house started changing, will need to be prised out from under the duvet in order to go. Except they won’t, because the duvet will be packed by then.

Tomorrow there will be someone coming to pick up a storage container worth of books and childhood and precious things.

Tomorrow we will throw away a bunch more stuff that hasn’t made the cut, and say goodbye to a good friend, and climb on a bus to Heathrow with a bunch of large bags barely half a mini-kilo less than they are allowed to be.

Tomorrow we will get to a hotel, then do a few hours work each that we both have left over to do, because we are stupid, then we will relax for a few hours. Then we will go to bed and the next day, the NEXT day we ….

Of course, I say all this, and it’s 1am. Today we will do all this.

I don’t want to say goodbye to this house. To the cats. To Brighton. To my friends. To my family. To all the things I know and love and hate but just KNOW.
I just don’t want to right now.

I want to go - don’t get me wrong. I want to live somewhere different. I want to appreciate things for the first time, to be the stranger and the outsider. I want to live somewhere with a different outlook on life, a different perspective. I want to appreciate the things I have at home, and understand why people like their lives that aren’t just like mine. I want to go. I want the opportuinity to reinvent myself a bit, be braver, bolder, more confident because I’m in a new environment with all new people. I want to see different scenery, wake up to unfamiliar smells and sounds in a new place and be different. I want it all. And I want to do it all with my Beloved. I really, really want to go.

But right now? Right now, this second, I don’t want any of it.
I want to wake up tomorrow and discover it’s all been a joke, that we can just settle back into life as we’ve made it for ourselves, and nothing has to be different.

But that wouldn’t be as much fun.

You’ll have to excuse me. I’m slightly overwineated and just am keeping typing because if I keep typing then I won’t have to go to sleep and then it won’t be tomorrow and then I won’t have to …

Oh all right.

Will check in tomorrow night.
Here, I mean. Not to the flight. I’ll check in to that in ten hours time (online, god bless the interwebnets). I’ll check in here.

Did I say this all was fun?
I was lying.

You know what else is a lie?
People who say you can never have too many socks. That’s balls. You CAN, and I know that for sure because we do. That is all.

My Beloved just let out a loud snore. I’m taking that as a protest against typing noises rather than a symptom of the very fierce head cold that is beginning to take both of us firmly in hand. That’s my cue.

Bed then.
Damn.

Yeah, this was clearly the world’s greatest idea. Why don’t I just keep a cute little diary of my ten day descent into complete carnage and, quite possibly, mental breakdown?! That would be MARVELLOUS.

Yesterday was pure brilliance; I told myself that I had to get out of the house because I couldn’t work without getting led off by packing or cleaning, so I took myself off into London since I had to go to the dentist anyway, and then I was going to sit around and work all day undistracted until dinner. And I totally would have managed it if I hadn’t left every shred of notes that I needed to finish my work on the coffee table. Because I’m a frigging genius.

Dentist? This is also an act of small-time over-enthusiasm with the organisedness on my part: I went to the dentist and said “If you can see a hole, fill it. If there’s anything that you can see the might not be a hole but might become one in a couple of years time, fill it. Whatever you think might need doing, do it”. Of course, the problem of saying this to a private dentist is that the main thing they’re going to see needs doing is them helping you out by relieving you of some more money. So that was great.

I passed some people talking about football on the stairs as I went into the office. I felt a bit sad because the echoey stairs were so horribly mid-60s British office-building, and the men were so earnest and footballish and THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is how organised I am: I’m even scheduling in time to get homesick in advance.

Today I saw my accountant - the best moment of that by far being the one where I had to say “I hope you don’t mind but I’ve brought my boyfriend because if I’m here alone I won’t understand a word you’re saying” and get looked at like the financial idiot I really am.

It’s true, though. I’ve tried to have several conversations with accountants and each time I sit there nodding enthusiastically because I want them to like me, and looking like I’m following what they’re saying, but actually thinking about bunnies and rainbows and what to make for dinner.

The irony in this situation was that what was said in the meeting even I should have been able to understand. I didn’t, of course.

“In terms of jubilatant and exorcismic profile hat-law of 1988, I cannot reasonably imagine how the bunny can make any flipjoy” said the accountant.
“He says it’s going to be all the same” translated My Beloved.
“But whu-wha-hm? Why? And the thing?” I enquired.
“She wants to know when to file her tax return” My Beloved helped.
A feedback noise came from the other side of the room.
“He says October with your next VAT thing” My beloved explained.

So I stumbled through the half hour, and everything seemed pretty sensible and actually straight-forward, and I was proud of myself and I didn’t even cry once, which is usually my response to people trying to talk to me about money, shortly before screaming “Oh GOD just take it! Take it ALL just don’t TALK anymore! I don’t UNDERSTAND! Just bloody TAKE IT!” and running off to hide under a duvet, penniless but calmer.

Then of course the accountant rang a few hours later and, with only me on the other end of the phone, said something about how it wasn’t all simple after all but very complicated instead and especially this one bit that was so complex he’d had to ring the helpline himself and then read a whole book about it all. And now all I had to do was decide whether I thought I’d be better off paying tax in the UK or the US so what did I think?

I remember remarking that that was what i had hoped my accountant might tell me, but then it gets all a bit fuzzy and the next thing I remember I was under the duvet, hiding from the world.

Packing continues apace, apart from the fact I’ve pretty much run out of things to pack.
We’re becoming convinced, however, that if we just shed a little more stuff, all our belongings will fit in half the space, and therefore only need one storage container and thus be ‘full of win’ as I believe the kids say nowadays. It would be cheaper by half, basically.

Tomorrow leaving drinks for some work friends and some friend-friends. Which will be nice. Although I also have to do all that work I was supposed to finish yesterday but couldn’t because I am a dizzy fool with a head full of fluff and wind and weevils right now.

Five days though. Four and a half, really.

Seven days.

Seven days until I won’t live in Brighton anymore. I won’t even live in Britain anymore.

I love Brighton. We’ve only been down here three years but I’ve felt more at home, more settled, than I have before for a long long time. There are many many ugly things about the city - I’m not denying it (what would be the point?) - but there are many lovely things about it too. But that’s for another day.

Anyway. Seven days. Seven days and I won’t live in Britain anymore.

I folded and piled the clothes we have left that weren’t in the wash on the end of the bed.
With only one suitcase left to fill to bring with us next week, I was suddenly struck by both the realisation that I may have thrown away too much and the feeling that I wanted to get rid of everything - everything - and just go.

I thought through the things that have gone off in lots and lots of bags and wondered whether it would be alright to go up to this nice little lady in the charity hut and say “You know that nice little blue number I brought in yesterday? Can I have it back?” before deciding it wouldn’t and getting the hoover out instead.

I’m going to go into the office tomorrow; force myself to sit at a desk staring at a computer where there’s nothing to do but work; no packing, no sorting, and No Cleaning.

Because if in doubt, I clean things. Carpets, walls, cupboard doors, floor tiles, showers and everything in them. Throw things away, sort things out into neat little piles and stack them neatly, but most of all: clean.
If in doubt: clean.

There’s something wrong with me.

No one says that and enjoys it.
(Well, unless they’re trying not to think about lots of more scary things, of course…)

(And posted one day late)

Monday was mainly taken up by a family visit. Descending first thing in the morning, and staying for a lovely day of games and food and blustery walks on the beach. It was lovely.

I missed most of the walky bits and the food bits, however, as I holed myself up and tried to finish some work. I’ve not organised this too well, as (doing the freelance thing it’s REALLY hard to say no, because it’s scary not to accept work when offered, I think) I decided to scale back during the move but not take a break completely, so I’ve still had a bunch of deadlines to work to.

Which is fine and good and groovy and all - just means I have to stop being useful every now and again and lock myself in a room which is already finished (so I can’t get distracted sorted something out) and do something completely useless (like silly writing things).

There being a three-year-old in the house - an incredibly cute one, but one who liked chasing the kittings around shouting ‘SQUIDGET! SQUIDGET!’ and swinging a toy mouse on a stick around his head - Squirrel and Widget spent almost the whole day hiding in the bed. Not behind the bed, not under the bed but buried deep under the duvet, looking out whenever someone checked on them there with big, round eyes.

I’m worried about them the most. Which is silly, in a lot of ways, because there are a lot of things to worry about, but having decided to take them with us, I’m kind of obsessing about the fact that I want them to get there in one shape and not completely traumatised by the episode.

They’ll be picked up on Monday, a few hours before all our belongings (well, books, mainly but some important furniture) gets picked up and put into a storage container, and a few more before we leave the house and drag ourselves and our worldly stuff to the airport.

On Monday and Tuesday nights, they’ll stay in a cattery near Heathrow where they’ll get looked over by the house vet and given their final clearance (they’ve already had all the immunisations required for California, and rabies vaccinations for when they come back - and no, no quarantine either way) and on Wednesday they’ll fly out, and arrive 11 hours later, hopefully, then be delivered in one piece - or two pieces, more accurately, as there are two of them - to our new flat.

Hopefully we’ll have furniture by then, but we’ll certainly have cat things ready and waiting.
Litter and food and the basic stuff is already waiting in the storage unit out there: familiar blankets and treats we’ll have taken with us.

And yes, I know it sounds like they’re precious and they’re spoiled. But I am obsessing about one certain thing. Because there’s a lot of things involved here, a lot of complicated decisions and new situations and unknown quantities. And the more I obsess with one little bit of it, the calmer I am about the rest.

I know, I know. It’s silly. But if it wasn’t the cats it would be something else.
At least I can tell and keep it in perspective.
Or sort of.
Anyway.
I have work to do.
And cats to fuss.

Ahem. Well, um, today I spent mainly alternating sleeping with lying around groaning and being hungover.

And then after ineffectually putting some small things in a box I sat down heavily on the stairs and had a big cry wailing “I don’t want to go, this is where I live, I live here, it’s all too big, it’s all too much, I can’t do it” before going and hiding under a duvet and refusing to come out until it all went away for a bit.

Well, we can’t all be perfect and organised all the time, right?

I did, however, then get started on some previews and some other stuff that needs to be filed tomorrow, and booked an airport hotel for the night before the flight (because I refuse to let ‘getting to the flight’ be one more thing for me to be anxious about)(and also we won’t have a bed that last night, so, y’know). But still. I did fuck-all useful in terms of moving house, country, continent today. Whoopses.

You’ll have to excuse me for being quite plain and informative. I’m just trying to keep a record - both to remind me of this time and because my therapist once said that it was important for me to keep lists of things I’d achieved in a day as well as things to do for the next day or the next week: something to do with realising I achieved things as well as always feeling like I was running behind. I don’t know. He put it in more fancy therapist-speak than that obviously. Anyway. This is where we are at ten days before we fly.

There are boxes everywhere. Mainly in the living room, where an area the size of our storage unit has been carefully measure out in the floor - if we can’t fit everything in there, it’s just not going to be stored.

Upstairs are four large suitcases and two small ones. The large ones will come with us on the flight and have to contain all the clothes and books and pictures and knick-knacks we can’t do without for the next wee while - the two smaller will come out with family members in a few months time. That’s all we’re moving with. Oh, and a poster tube. I hope they’ll take it as hand luggage. Things are stupid-expensive to post.

Yesterday I packed two of the suitcases. Allowed 23k per case, they currently weigh in at 22.9, which I think might be chancing it a little, but at least that’s two done. One has a DVD case, an enormous one, containing pocket after pocket of TV box set discs. The ones that wouldn’t fit in are in envelopes at the bottom of another, with a stack of books packed in tightly beside them. The similarly-sized film -filled case went over with My Beloved when he went to find a flat. I’m worried everything left won’t fit in the remaining cases, but there’s time to repack, if not. I think. I hope.

Back to today. We ordered all our furniture from the US online site of those crazy Swedes with their crazy names in bed this morning and ordered it to hopefully arrive at the flat the day after we do. This was a triumph of global consumerism: we’d gone and sat on sofas and bounced on mattresses and picked out what we wanted at their Bristol branch a few weeks ago, down in Somerset for a wedding and driven there by a lovely local blogger after a hungover breakfast in Bath.

I vacuumed upstairs and stared dolefully at suitcases while My Beloved went to buy the ingredients for tonight’s ultra-British dinner of sausage and mash and gravy, then packed up the last of the things for the clothes recycling thing while he made a bread and butter pudding with marmalade I made last week at my little mother’s house.

Then, when a lovely Brightonian friend with a little car arrived, the two of them took seven ginormous bags of clothes and a big sack of barely-worn shoes to the charity recycling place, and I started throwing out things in the bathroom.

The rest of the day: we cleared out the garden, Miss Tickle and I - she having some mysterious affinity for plants, and I having none at all. How small is my plantaffinity? After more than a year of being here and discovering that the planters we’d so hopefully planted all the lovely things in had no drainage at all, followed by a rainy rainy summer and an even rainier winter, I have busily been growing mainly buckets of mud with a small dead stick sticking out of the top. Trying to work out both what she could salvage and how the hell you could get rid of 8 buckets of mud in a town centre patio garden took up most of the afternoon. Buckets of mud that really smell, may I add. Another thousand years and they might have been peat, or mud, or coal. But I think you might have to sit on them first.

The cats did sit on them, of course. They have been helping. Widget, mainly. She’s sitting in every suitcase you want to pack, every box you want to fill, and in every bucket of mud you otherwise have no idea what to do with. She is helping. Squirrel has been jumping to the top of any stack of boxes we make, and watching carefully and suspiciously as her house gets deconstructed around her.

I cleaned the bathroom, scrubbing all the grouting and the tiles on the floors and the space behind the toilet seat. It’s the thing about leaving a rented house; you have to leave it perfect, and the earlier it’s done, the less chaotic I feel, and then I just have to wipe over it next week and it’s done.

In the bathroom, lotions and potions are lined up to be used, years of random Christmas presents and impulse-buys - we may both smell like a cross between a fruit-market and a whorehouse from up close this week if you come near us, but we’ll be cleaner than possibly ever before.

That will be the theme of meals for the rest of the week, eating all the things in the cupboard in increasingly random concoctions before whatever’s left over becomes a grab bag for any lovely person in Brighton that wants it.

Friends will arrive in a minute for their Very-English dinner. I’m even going to make them play board games after it, though they don’t know it yet.

In the meantime we’re sitting in the emptier garden, drinking a bottle of champagne to celebrate the fact that there happened to be a bottle of champagne in the fridge.

Everything’s going ok, I think. Though there’s a very low-level anxiety still present that just comes from being me. But everything seems to be ok. Sorry for a boring post.

I promise you, something calamitous *will* happen to spice things up over the next ten days.

… ‘place’ mainly turning out to be the bin, as it happens.

Well, not the bin. One of the modern wooly liberal variants on the bin. The airing cupboard is literally full of clothes to take to the clothes recycling place (two of those outsized ikea sacks and five large carrier bags stuffed full of clothes, to date)

We now have enough clothes between us to fill a chest of drawers - and, we’re hoping, two suitcases each with some room left over for important house things and books that we can’t possibly be without until they follow us over in a couple of small parcels a few weeks later.

Everything else is being piled up in the section of the living room that has been marked out to represent the storage unit we’ll be renting, apart from the furniture that we can loan or give out to friends. And the electronics that, similarly, will most likely be near-obsolete when we get back, so I’d rather they would be used than in a box are starting to pile up, waiting to go to their new homes. Apart from the ones we need for work until we leave, obviously.

And there are a couple of boxes full of random wonderfulness that will find their way to a charity shop as soon as someone can be arsed.

I even cleared up every small jar of coppers and mug of change from around the house and bagged them up to go to the bank, the other day - have I told you about My Beloved’s Bizarre and Maddening Problem with small-denomination coins? I will, one day… - and there was £54. In 1, 2 and 5 pences, yes. So that puts a (tiny) dent in the pet travel agent fund.

But, I realised, I’m being very organised about things that I already HAVE. But what about things I will miss?

It was so many people mentioning tea in your lovely comments on the last post that made me think of it. I mean, I don’t drink tea*, so that’s ok, but otherwise…

I was wondering if anyone had any other ideas of things I should definitely remember to take with me. If you are abroad, and British, what do you want, I mean? And if you aren’t (but are still one of us) what would you miss?

And yes - I’ve already checked that we can get marmite (and vegemite) there.
Scami Fries though?
No, not a one.
My favourite Peri Peri sauce?
None of it! WAH!

So just so as I don’t start using this as a brand new thing to panic about - what might I miss, do you think? What would you?

(more…)

But since it wasn’t my news but news concerning My Beloved (writing about it here), and I’m just tagging along (well, kinda), and now the announcement has officially been made …

In two weeks time we’re moving to San Francisco. Yes, me too. All of us.
Exactly two weeks. In two weeks time I will be on a plane to my new flat, which is in San Francsico.
For how long? I don’t know. A few years. Long enough to take the cats.

There is my news.

If there’s any questions, be sure to ask them, I’ll probably be blogging a lot more often from now on, as a person in a new country (and a person in a new country with no friends, more importantly) though for the next few weeks I might be, if not quieter, certainly more fraught (now I can finally talk about it). I was rather superstitious about not wanting to pack too much until it was officially announced.

So I’ve got two weeks to pile my house into ’storage’ ‘recycle’ ‘post’ and ‘chuck’ piles and make sure all the piles go into the right boxes. I’ve also got dentists appointments, doctor’s appointments, accountants to see, meetings to have and cats to worry about. I’m flipping out, basically.

But in a really really excited way.