Scribbling #42: The Big Move (Part One)

This is not a blog post about being able to move abroad.  That you’re going to have to look up in a book that relates to the country that you’re going to.  Or some sort of website.  But not the phone, since people in immigration are usually very busy and there is a very high probability that a citizen of your favourite new country will be very rude to you, making you wonder why you’re bothering in the first place.  On this note, do not move to France, because everybody is rude, never mind the immigration authorities.

No, this is a post that details my experience of moving abroad – again – and this time from the UK to the literally great nation of Canada.  After all the boring stuff had happened, such as making sure that we had enough money, waiting for ages for the visa to come through, feeling that you were stuck in a waiting room marked ‘life’, thinking that it would be a good idea not to bother since our lives seemed to be working out all right, thank you – once that was all out of the way, I had to pack up the house.  My parents, who were kind enough to let our family stay at theirs while we slowly counted down to flight day, well, they lived *here*, while I lived *here*.  This turned out to be a daily routine that lasted from 7am to 2am because our house was a rental. 

Put kids and Crayola together, and you quickly find out that said stationary is never used on paper.  Put a young toddler in a carpeted room, and there will be excrement that has irrevocably stained the shag pile.  Stuff accumulates.  Stuff needs to be re-painted, cleaned, etc.  Otherwise you’re going to be mauled for fines because you’ve left a bit of fluff next to where the fridge was standing before you sold it.  At least, that’s what our big and scary rental agreement said, anyway.  From this, you’re wanting a clear out, so friends, family and Help the Wizened Wise Sages all get to reap the benefits of your so-called worldly goods which is really, at the end of the day,  nothing more than tat.

Nice tat, but still, nonetheless, tat.

You name your dog after eBay. 

At this point, if we actually owned a house, we would have gone stark raving bonkers in order to sell it and all the rubbish inside.  Now, imagine that you’ve done all this over a period of three days before you hand the keys over to the estate agent.  The estate agent walks around the house for 4 minutes and 32 seconds before declaring that your condensed 50-odd hours of work of getting the house so spotless you could drink straight from the toilet is "adequate for the area".  You say thank you, then drive back to the parents. 

The next day, you sell your car. 

You spend the next couple of days getting very comfy in the bathroom, discussing interesting items with the porcelain throne since your immune system is now completely shot.  Your children don’t know you anymore because you’ve been away for four days, and everything that you thought was not okay for your mum back in the day is now okay for your children to do in the very same house that you grew up in.  This confuses and bemuses you. 

You go back to talking to the toilet. 

It’s now D-Day and it’s time to go.  Your lovely wife has put all nine pieces (count them, nine) of luggage in an order that won’t have a hope in an icy Canadian wasteland that any of them would go through luggage control because they are all overweight.  You spend a literally feverish two hours sorting out the luggage just before the taxi arrives to find out that the taxi has already arrived.  You say goodbye to the parents, the children say goodbye, we all say goodbye.  We get everything into the taxi – just - strap the kids in, make sure that we all have our passports and paperwork for the umpteenth time and the friendly ex-police officer ex-ministerial bodyguard taxi driver drove us away.  And yes, you’re really doing this.