Sunday 6 November 2011

How Not to Move ... or Whose Idea WAS This, Anyway?

Not in the style of my last move, definitely, involving a pantechnicon and a highly trained crack team of three who made the whole thing effortless – when I arrived next day boxes had been put in the right rooms and they sensibly left me enough space to walk around and open the cupboards. They put the big tables up for me. They put the beds up. You could be civilised, taking one box at a time from the two designated storage rooms and gradually putting contents away.

There are trees and a boat in there somewhere


it was the white house in the middle of three, on the village green, all very picturesque
However...

Fast forward 20 months.....There I am, still in the halcyon days of the House–by–the–River….   It is this Spring – late March. 
Packing steadily but stalling, truth be told, because I was eking out my time there, making the most of every minute, staring out of the windows at the hens and the baby chicks and the rabbits and the pheasants – wandering about aimlessly with a parcel tape dispenser apparently grafted on to my right hand but pointedly ignoring any actual constructive use of said object. 

When I told my friends (until now known as Friend One and Two, but henceforth to be referred to as Red and Mari as they've requested) that I was moving house, they said in perfect unison “But how on earth are you going to cope with shifting all this STUFF?”

“Oh that’s easy,” I said. “I’m going to do most of it in the car, empty the stuff into the cupboards (which I will have already cleaned, in rooms which I will already have painted where necessary), drop off the empty boxes at the recycling place on the way back and fill up the car again. Probably about three journeys a day.” (I had a loft full to bursting with empty boxes from moving before.) 

Plus, I added, nearly all the books and some other stuff never came out of their boxes in the first place, so I’m ahead already. I’m booking a van for the big furniture at the end. 

They believed me. It all sounded so simple, so organised, so confident. 

Astonishingly, I really believed me too. 


Ha ha ha ha ha ha. 

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, BANGING HEAD ON DESK WRONG.

Never, ever, EVER again will I do a move like this one. I will not hire someone who is apparently nice person and cheap with large–ish van just one size up from transit (and who thank God has brilliant and helpful sidekick who thinks nothing of running up my steep flights of stairs carrying heavy boxes), whereas himself actually leaves a dozen boxes marked “Top Floor / Heavy” on the ground floor (that's when he gets out of the back of the van at all)  or who dumps boxes any–old–where so you can’t actually get past them to the cupboards, or cooker, or back door. 
After loading up at the house–by–the–river, with everything still going pretty well, he suddenly says “Van’s full. We’re going over to T St to unload.”

“Oh.”   I look around me at the stuff which was supposed to go on that shift. Which was the second shift, ten days after the first one. This is because in another clause of my Master Plan to move all this STUFF without having a nervous breakdown – nearly another glorious Fail – I overlapped the tenancies by nearly a month, enabling me to carry out the car plan outlined above.  What I saved in removal costs I could spend on rent. 

So they offer to move the last of the stuff on the Friday evening, their only gap in schedules, after they’ve done another job during the day. Which is noble of them, really. Because I have to be out by the Saturday morning when the new tenants arrive. 

And I haven’t moved Chocolate cat yet, either.  

When Friday evening comes around, mid-April by now, with all the doors open in exceptionally warm and sultry weather, Chocolate spends the whole time being skittish and nervous, as is his wont on a good day, let alone when strange people are walking in and out - so he’s too scared to come into the house at all, even for food.  My neighbour has lent me a large cage which she uses for her labrador, and I’ve put Chocolate’s cushion into it. He has shown no sign of going near it. I have naïvely imagined the cage was so big he wouldn’t cotton on it was actually a cage in the first place. 

So the van is packed and they’re ready to go. Mari has been packing the last kitchen stuff and making tea constantly for about seven hours and we are all exhausted. And they still have to unload at the other end. It’s nearly midnight and unfortunately the removal man has had a particularly heavy day which he wasn’t expecting with the other move, and this is because he never calls round to estimate the size of a job before the appointed removal day. Which is only partly why we’re in this mess tonight. The rest of the fault is mine, entirely mine, my car plan having failed so successfully.

Anyway, I come up with a plan. 

“All of you go and sit in your car or van and leave me and Chocolate in the house. I will feed him and he’ll be fine because he’ll think everyone’s gone home and he can relax." He will conveniently ignore the fact that all the beds have gone, so we won’t be going upstairs any minute now, and that he hasn’t heard any car engines driving away. He will also forget that he's been here before, with all his landscape vanishing around him, and what happened after that (eight hours mewing in the back of the car coming down from his Ross-Shire village, miserable as sin despite the pill which had little effect).

I put his food inside the cage on top of his long foam cushion and deliberately walk a yard or two away, whistling a happy tune. He looks at me. “You must think I’m thick,” he says.  

With a sigh, and an extra bowl of food in his usual place in the kitchen, and the cushion hauled out of the cage to a more friendly place, I leave. Mari goes home, the rest of us go over to T St and start unloading. Around one in the morning I take pity and start saying things like Never mind carrying those up to the top floor. Just leave them on the landing. Or try to find a spare inch in the kitchen. (Joke, but nobody was listening.)

It’s two in the morning when we’re done. I crawl into bed at three, texting the incoming tenant that Chocolate is still in the house and I’ll be back in the morning to get him (and the kettle, and leftover bits which are in the hall for everybody to fall over). New tenant and her fiancé are lovely couple and I don’t expect a problem. And they like cats too.

She texts back around 9 in the morning: Don’t worry – their move has been delayed for a week.
 
I go to the vet in Glossop. “Can I have a sedative pill for the cat?” 

“Is he registered with us?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Well he’ll have to come in for a check–up first. If his heart or lungs are dodgy then he can’t have a pill anyway.” 

“Oh.”  Catch 22 if ever there was one. 
I explain the unfortunate facts. An adopted starving stray with a blatantly scary childhood and broken home, nervous wreck, doesn’t go near strangers, pugnacious, not even me allowed to pick him up, and Generally Not Like Your Normal Pussycats. “Could he have a home visit?” 

“No, because over the weekend it’s only one vet and a nurse and there might be an emergency at the same time.” She doesn’t dare add – and because you insist on living out in the wilderness it would mean a bigger delay for them...  

Understandable, of course, like calling ambulances for a busted toe, but we seem to be at an impasse. Then the receptionist says she’ll go and have a word with the vet in the Saturday morning surgery. 

She comes back. “He’ll do a home visit, and do an injection.” Glory Be and Hallelujah.  It will cost a hundred pounds but I’m past caring. Worth every penny.  It’s exactly what I’d been hoping for – a knock–out jab.

At two o’clock that afternoon, while Mari and Red are crushing six months’ worth of plastic water bottles and cardboard into sacks in the garden shed (I’d lost the key to the shed for ages and then the recycling centre closed for a year because of a weak bridge – and I can’t say too much about this bit because it’s when my mobile phone vanished and I know I left it perched on something by the bottles) the vet arrives at the house with the nurse. 

I outline the only way this is going to work. We need a very small room to catch him in. Every time I go to the bathroom for a pee and don’t shut the door, Chocolate follows me in to get a stroke from what is basically a captive audience. I suggest they wait in hiding until I call softly. All other doors are shut. True to form, while I’m sitting on the loo (fully dressed, obv, in case you were wondering) in he comes, followed by stealthy vet and nurse, who close the door behind them.

Naturally, cat panics but has blanket thrown over him and vet grabs him firmly.  Not firmly enough. With considerable strength (huge strong Burmese that he is) the cat is out from under and dives to the back of the loo in the corner. His backside is jammed against the skirting and his neck is wedged under the soil–pipe.
The vet is now on his knees, arms cradling the toilet bowl, bum in the air, trying to conduct a totally serious examination. Chocolate is rigid with fear and doesn't move a muscle.

A few minutes later the vet emerges, backwards. He has estimated Chocolate’s weight at 5 – 5½  kilos for the injection. (Sounds bang on, knowing what it’s like when he lies on my shins every night.) Lungs, kidneys and liver are sound. Although his heart rate is exactly what you’d expect from a terrified cat, all is well, and in goes the injection. A short interval for it to take effect, and cat is gently hauled out from behind the loo and shoved carefully, headfirst, into the catbox. He will sleep for a few hours, and will have none of the trauma normally expected from the ordeal. I am beside myself with gratitude. I would have paid double if anybody had asked me at that moment. 

And in the next episode….

I give away a car in exchange for a tiny wooden elephant, and discover life with no telly, no cooking, no computer and precious little common sense either.