We are moving house.

It is said that moving house is up there with marriage and divorce in terms of stress. What?? Packing a few boxes, putting them in a van and unloading them at the other end is really on a par with the gut-wrenching  horror of looking into someone’s eyes and telling them that it’s over: standing firm while they rock in the corner sobbing hysterically as you tell them that you’ve made a horrible mistake and they have to leave now.  (My  first marriage was a ridiculous mistake I like to think I wouldn’t have made had my mother been around to say, ‘get a grip girl, what are you doing?’). 

 I always thought it insane to compare moving house with divorce, but judging by the recent upsurge in naughtiness, crying, shouting, sulking, leg clinging and slapping (not necessarily confined to the kids) I may have to concede that they have a point.  3 days to go until we give back the keys to our lovely flat, half the furniture already gone, waiting for us, eager to be part of the next chapter  we are still here  in echoey loudland,  surrounded by boxes, table-less, sofa-less and patience-less all of us .

When I asked my husband the other day about the first thing he was going to do when we move into the house, “bring back the love” was his reply.

Things we have found in the house so far:

1. Everything a family could ever need (when we got the keys to the house, it was as if old Ludi had gone out for a packet of fags and thought, ‘you know what? I’m not going back,’ and just kept on walking. The heavy chestnut draws were crammed with perfectly laundered sheets, pillow cases, lovely old blankets that remind me of youth hostelling and a fictitious granny’s house (blue or pink wool with a thick satiny border.), rosary beads, bibles and religious icons, which I have a thing for despite not having a thing for the man himself, family photos and certificates, plastic flowers on neatly arranged lace doilies, a fully stocked mini bar at the foot of the stairs ( oh the hours I could spend playing Coronation Street), shower gel, hand cream, tons of toilet paper and a hair brush. The drawers on the ‘other side of the house’ were full of man things: light bulbs, batteries, screws and other small metal things and the chicken house (which is an actual brick house with tiled roof a fancy iron fence and a gate positioned 2 metres outside our front door) could have been abandoned mid-DIY job 30 years earlier, a piece of 4 by 2 and a rusty saw laid expectantly on the work bench. The cobwebs and weeds, cold and damp appear to have moved in here earlier than they did at the main house, perhaps when Ludi’s husband died.
2. And enormous 1 metre by 1 metre bowl carved out of a single piece of rock buried under the floor under the stairs. The builders who unearthed it said that people originally did their washing in these basins using wood ash as a bleaching agent.
3. A clay oven built into the back facing exterior wall!! Cool, a massive old barbeque built directly into the house.
4. Spiders as big as your palm
5. A snake
6. A sense of direction and purpose.

I haven’t written anything for ages because I haven’t wanted to think any more than is absolutely necessary about it all, filling my spare moments instead with crappy American TV, but that just leaves  me feeling generally scuzzy and bloated, so I’ve returned.

My husband was right; the money did come from somewhere. Our families between them have managed to lend us what we need. ..I’m extremely grateful.

When I told a friend about it, feeling  shamefaced about not being able to run up a debt in my own name, he said to me, ‘it’s the best way, that’s how the Chinese and the Jews do it, they don’t go to banks, it’s only us ( Europeans) who get banks to help.’ . I don’t know what to think about that really.

The day after we learned that we wouldn’t have to live in a building site (albeit with some very fetching stonework) cobbling together a home from things that the everyday folk leave behind, we went to the house and I asked about the garden. I didn’t want it to be forgotten and since the architect had told me it was in his hands and not to worry about it, I was starting to feel a bit panicky. And good job too- the builder told me that he didn’t have the permission to re-build the garden and containing wall and that if it didn’t come in the following 7ish days, we’d have to wait another year to start the job. The civil servants issuing the licence would soon be going on holiday ( in July they work a summer timetable (ha ha ha) and in August they don’t work at all) and in September the river would grow again, bringing new  possible floods and no chance of rescuing our garden until the water receded again in May or June 2012.

I make an effort never to speak English in front of the builders- it’s rude, they don’t understand and it leaves them standing around grinning like idiots, which is how I spend a lot of my life and it’s not nice. When he told me this, my husband said under his breath, ‘are you angry?’…..‘Angry?, I’m fuming’ I roared in full brazen ear shot, ‘blah blah they said it was all taken care of blah blah, how are we going to move in here and not allow the kids out of the back door for fear of being swept downstream for the next 12months never mind start a business?’  A big clanging gong of silence reverberated round the the front yard where we stood, the builders did that thing that you do if you’re caught up in a domestic at a friend’s house; they looked at their feet and tried to shrink themselves. I left barely managing to grunt a goodbye before reaching for my phone to ask the bloody architect what the bloody hell he was playing at.  The phone was engaged, I sat down at a bar too angry to stop the kids from chasing a balding chicken off down the road, ordered a large coffee and picked up the phone to try again at which point it started ringing and the builder started telling me that the licence was ready and would be with him recorded delivery in the next couple of days. Really..? Is that what happens when you shout in your own language..? Because I can do that, I could do that in the banks, I could do that to the grant application people, I could even do it to the Mayor if it might speed along the dripping sewage pipe.

What i’m not going to mention however, is how the physical permission arrived as promised, the builders started working- machines in the river, men digging and drilling until somebody from the town hall stopped the builders to tell them that we don’t have permission from them (the Town Hall and the Rivers’ Authority being two separate bodies) to build in their river because I completely forgot to apply to them too. I’m not going to mention it because that would be too depressing.