The girls work too

While I was driving to Ealing, loading up the van and driving back to Cambridge, Anne was sitting on her arse doing sod all.

That's not quite true.

She and her mother-in-law were hard at work at the house back in Cambridge. By the time I got back to the house they'd cleaned it, moved stuff around, and moved a lot of our stuff from the Cambridge flat. I staggered in, exhausted, to find them exhausted too. I was greeted by a cup of coffee and a Club biscuit (not as chocolaty as I remember). It was bliss, only spoiled (for us all) by then having to unload the van.

That took a good hour or two. We were worried about getting the sofas into the lounge, but that proved not to be too much of a problem. The problems were getting the chests of drawers and the beds up the stairs. We got quite jammed with one of the bed frames. We ended up unscrewing it whilst it was jammed between the wall and the bannister. It collapsed on us in a rain of planks! How we laughed.


It was time to go to Sainsburys to get a box of easy-to-cook Chinese food and a bottle of Champagne. This must be what removal men's days are like every day.

After dinner we made our beds (literally) and collapsed into them. Knackered.

You'd have thought that would have been a full weekend's work, wouldn't you? You would, yes. But no - we spent Sunday driving about in the van collecting even more stuff and taking old carpets and stuff to the tip. We emptied the Cambridge flat and moved all our stuff from my mum's house. She's been storing loads of stuff since we went travelling in February 2003, and must be glad to be rid of it all.

Anne nearly broke down when she saw how much stuff we had (most of it junk). We threw out a lot of stuff before we went travelling, and had a car boot sale to rid ourselves of yet more. How do we still have so much?? After surviving for a year with only what we could carry we're determined not to build up a stash of rubbish now we're in our house. What do you think the chances are?

My sister and her boyfriend, Chris (fiance really I suppose!) came up to help us. They had the pleasant task of helping me move my 32" widescreen TV. Owning one of those things is enough to make you want to never move home. It's heavier than me I think! Worse, it's very difficult to grip.

I was a little sad to drop the van back at the rental place on Monday morning (though glad that the hard work was over - our stuff is finally in one place now after nearly two years of upheaval). I drove to work in my Fiesta feeling very low down. All the van drivers were looking down on me and I didn't like it. I didn't like it one bit. Anne and I will need a new car soon. I may start looking at getting a 3.5 tonne Luton van with tail-lift!