You are allowed a few days off to recover when your stuff arrives from the UK.
Moving house is supposed to be one of the truly traumatic occasions in an ordinary life; when your life is defined by the physical presence of books around you, then the word ‘traumatic’ hardly comes close to describing the cataclysmic emotional maelstrom that is occasioned by moving your personal library.
Although Toni doesn’t believe a volume of it, the number of books which were carted off to Oxfam in St Mary Street before the move was enough to make a hardened bibliophile weep. Whole sections of my library were placed in plastic boxes which then disappeared into the maw of the repository of literary charity. My seriously depleted library (together with other odds and ends like a table and chairs; a dinner service; cutlery and clothing) was packed into a commodious van and the contents unloaded in Castelldefels.
By a strange process of ‘close proximity tome bonding’ the boxes containing my books seem to have increased so that now one room of the flat is entirely filled with the basic essential books that any self respecting occasional reader would want to have with him; including of course that necessary work for living in a thoroughly Roman Catholic country – Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
I might add that the boxes of books also partially fill another bedroom, and the negative (that has to be one of the most understated words in context) approach to the seemingly never ending procession of sweating workmen bringing yet another box into the flat has meant that I have not had the courage to unpack any of them. The fact that they have all been packed according to room/unit/shelf means that they should be unpacked in order so that total chaos is avoided – but, I need a book, almost any book – and I do not think it politic to buy new in the present book box filled environment!
The aftermath of Pickfords has been a little trying: boxes everywhere (usually filled with clothes that neither of us can get into now) and generally too little space for too many things. What I have thrown out is heartbreaking not only in terms of the emotional value and dear memories associated with each individual item, but also because I have paid vast amounts to store and transport things only to have them grace the green refuse boxes at the end of the road in Castelldefels. I suppose this has been one of those ‘life lessons’ that I keep reading about. They are the sort of things which drive the narrative forward in well paced novels, but one doesn’t really want them happening in one’s own life.
To add to the precious irony of it all, the weather has not been at its best either – we’ve even had a day of rain. What next? Snow?
On a more positive note, the cheque from UK which I paid into my Spanish bank has cleared in just less than a month! When you think of all those ancient bank couriers creeping steadfastly somewhere or other, clutching the cleft stick with my cheque firmly wedged therein, just behind the man carrying the red flag - one can only wonder at the dispatch of it all! And you thought that most of the banking transactions carried on today were electronic! How foolish! That’s why it costs so much; and you thought they were merely thieves. Shame on you!
We have now paid our second month’s rent and our first electricity payment – all the little (!) expenses that convince you that living in Castelldefels is a reality.
Tomorrow a dishwasher – too much reality is obviously a bad thing!
Moving house is supposed to be one of the truly traumatic occasions in an ordinary life; when your life is defined by the physical presence of books around you, then the word ‘traumatic’ hardly comes close to describing the cataclysmic emotional maelstrom that is occasioned by moving your personal library.
Although Toni doesn’t believe a volume of it, the number of books which were carted off to Oxfam in St Mary Street before the move was enough to make a hardened bibliophile weep. Whole sections of my library were placed in plastic boxes which then disappeared into the maw of the repository of literary charity. My seriously depleted library (together with other odds and ends like a table and chairs; a dinner service; cutlery and clothing) was packed into a commodious van and the contents unloaded in Castelldefels.
By a strange process of ‘close proximity tome bonding’ the boxes containing my books seem to have increased so that now one room of the flat is entirely filled with the basic essential books that any self respecting occasional reader would want to have with him; including of course that necessary work for living in a thoroughly Roman Catholic country – Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
I might add that the boxes of books also partially fill another bedroom, and the negative (that has to be one of the most understated words in context) approach to the seemingly never ending procession of sweating workmen bringing yet another box into the flat has meant that I have not had the courage to unpack any of them. The fact that they have all been packed according to room/unit/shelf means that they should be unpacked in order so that total chaos is avoided – but, I need a book, almost any book – and I do not think it politic to buy new in the present book box filled environment!
The aftermath of Pickfords has been a little trying: boxes everywhere (usually filled with clothes that neither of us can get into now) and generally too little space for too many things. What I have thrown out is heartbreaking not only in terms of the emotional value and dear memories associated with each individual item, but also because I have paid vast amounts to store and transport things only to have them grace the green refuse boxes at the end of the road in Castelldefels. I suppose this has been one of those ‘life lessons’ that I keep reading about. They are the sort of things which drive the narrative forward in well paced novels, but one doesn’t really want them happening in one’s own life.
To add to the precious irony of it all, the weather has not been at its best either – we’ve even had a day of rain. What next? Snow?
On a more positive note, the cheque from UK which I paid into my Spanish bank has cleared in just less than a month! When you think of all those ancient bank couriers creeping steadfastly somewhere or other, clutching the cleft stick with my cheque firmly wedged therein, just behind the man carrying the red flag - one can only wonder at the dispatch of it all! And you thought that most of the banking transactions carried on today were electronic! How foolish! That’s why it costs so much; and you thought they were merely thieves. Shame on you!
We have now paid our second month’s rent and our first electricity payment – all the little (!) expenses that convince you that living in Castelldefels is a reality.
Tomorrow a dishwasher – too much reality is obviously a bad thing!
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