well, it has certainly been a busy 7 days! though it has only been a week since the last blog, it feels like a hell of a lot longer and i can only assume this is because so much has gone down (as they say, on the streets).
i spent most of last sunday panicking, and either shouting (or on certain overly panicked moments squealing incomprehensibly) at, or being patronising to my husband for not having quite enough fear and adrenalin running through his system. i wanted him to be jumping up and down and panicking just like me, that there was just too much packing up to be done, not enough time to do it, and definitely not enough boxes in N4 to accomodate all of our crap, even if we had the time to pack it all away.
the irony is of course, that whilst i was alternating between hysteria and depression and not doing very much, he was just getting on with the job in hand and putting stuff in boxes. good husband.
my monday was taken up with training my replacement for my job (and more panicking and packing in the evening- have you noticed how there is only a little 'ni' denoting the difference between 'panicking' and 'packing'... interesting!). it was quite strange, but having expected to find it quite difficult to hand over the reins, (having been in the same job for 3 1/2 years, which is well over a tenth of my life and by far the longest i've ever worked in one place) by the time this lovely girl arrived for her handover i was practically throwing the reins at her, leaping off my metaphorical horse and running into the sunset.
my last day in the office was tuesday, which (after more handing over) was concluded by a spell in the pub and a bit of a crashing of a wrap party. i was invited, so its not technically crashing, but it most certainly wasn't my leaving party and i fear that i may have tried to make it so... or even perhaps told some people it was... after the preceding spell in the pub, i may have got a bit distracted, and forgotten that the party was about a tv show that the company had produced, and not just about my last day in the office, and a general celebration of me...
i did have a fabulous time though, and felt it was a truly fitting end to my career in television. the wrap party was held in soho, in an edit house where i took my first tentative steps onto the career ladder at the tender age of 22. 6 1/2 years (and several bottles of cava, mostly drunk from the bottle) later, i found myself taking the same tottering steps down oxford street, and buying the same drunken midnight macdonalds, as i had many a time when i was working there all that time ago. the poetic finality of this one last drunken and debauched night in soho gave me wonderful closure.
it also gave me a massive hangover, and a crick in my neck where i fell asleep on my sofa till 6am.
wednesday was my birthday, so i promised myself a day without packing to get over the shock of being just that bit closer to 30. to be entirely honest being 29 felt very similar to being 28- i did wake up feeling awful, and old, and wrinkled and haggard, but that was more to do with the effects of my 'leaving party' than my birthday, and once i'd showered and ironed out my skin and had a cup of tea i felt much the same as usual.
i went to the hairdressers and had my hair chopped into a cute flicky slightly shorter than sholder length style. the official reasoning behind this was to make it more practical for travelling than my long locks (not freakishly long, but bottom of shoulder blades long), but i think also subconsciously i felt the need to make some kind of outward change in my appearance to denote the change in myself. rather like girls who do radical things to their hair when they come out of relationships, i wanted to have a 'leaving london, leaving work, free as a bird to travel the world' haircut. i'm not sure if it expresses all of that precisely, but it certainly does dry much quicker.
i had a lovely time in a lovely farringdon pub with a load of my lovely london friends in the evening to celebrate my birthday. they are all beautiful people, and the fact that they all seemed to stay out beyond last tubes on a wednesday (ie. a school night!) is a testament to what good friends they are. i will miss this lot when we are on the road hugely, but i hope they will all be around when we get back, and open to many visits and stays from me! i'll bring the jaeger, they just need to provide a spare bed or sofa!
thursday and friday i mainly spent packing and panicking again, and leaving random agitated stroppy voicemails on my husband's phone about things that could definitely have waited until the evening when he got home from work ('i've found a waitrose carrier bag full of socks! do you want these kept or thrown or packed for travelling? and why are they neatly tied in a carrier bag?' etc.).
and then the dawn of saturday arrived, as did the removal men, and i became strangely calm. i'm not sure if it was just that i had worn myself out with worrying, but there was suddenly a much higher ratio of packing to panicking going on, and all seemed well in the world. and soon enough their van was full and they were sent trundling off out of sight with most of our worldly possessions cloaked in bubble wrap bouncing over the speed bumps in the back. the husband and i went to collect a second van, which we swiftly filled with the remaining dregs of our belongings and headed on down to dorset ourselves, to my mum's garage where we are storing everything whilst we are away.
for the first time all week, the move felt exciting and thrilling and not just a chore. it certainly hadn't been an easy few days, and a regular check up with my nurse on friday did show that my blood pressure levels had rocketed, but it did feel worth it. the green fields, heath land and countryside that we passed on the drive down was a pointed reminder of why we are putting ourselves through the stress of packing up our life and heading down south.
and of course, the very big thick silver lining is that we have at least 5 months before we have to unpack all of those boxes again!
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