Moving on

We are due to move tomorrow. My husband, however, has adopted a policy position on the move and decided we do not need to pack anything. Cardboard boxes, tea-chests and plastic crates are just so last year that we have refused to use any of them. What he is going to do is drive a white transit van up to the back door and throw things in it. This does not necessarily strike me as the best idea but my husband says it will work. I must say I cannot face doing it on my own having gone through the upheaval of moving when we came up from London, so I have decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and do it his way. His plan - I say "plan" I do not know the word for the opposite of "plan". I need a word to wrap up in nine letters or less, the idea of sitting at your desk working hard to meet your professional deadlines while you drink tea, eat digestive biscuits and utterly ignore the really big hairy mammoth gallomphing towards you straight out of your personal life.

The plan then, (for want of another word,) is to manhandle the contents of the cottage out into the van on a room by room basis, drive it two miles down the lane to the rented house and then unpack the contents and install them on a room by room basis into the rented house, recreating our life exactly as it was before. Perhaps, he was a museum curator in a different incarnation. In fact, he could probably submit it for the Turner prize. He could call it something like: "Our life - a mess in two places." If I videoed it while he was doing it, he would probably win. I want to know before we start this ad hoc "moving is such a lark tra-la" process, whether he is going to mark everything up with blue chalk so each apple core and mouldy coffee cup will be carefully put back in their original spot.

I blame myself. I think I am coming to the conclusion that what I have always regarded as a certain easy-going quality is in reality, a deep passivity. Part of me thinks "You have to be joking" and wants to stand and giggle while it all goes on. But the other half of me increasingly wants to jump up and down in rage and shout "We move tomorrow. Move! Do you know what that means? We need to be sorting things out, putting them in piles, throwing them away. Good grief." That is the point at which I take a deep breath. I honestly do not mind the chaos and relentlessness of it all most of the time. Just occasionally I wonder what it would be like to live a Von Trapp sort of life (before Maria arrived). I bet he could always find his car keys for instance. I think I am partly feeling this way because I was told off by a friend in London for being so meekly acquiescent to the chaos of our life. "Doesn't everyone live in chaos though?" I pleaded with her. "No," she told me as she bundled me efficiently along a North London canal path from her high powered office to a pastel coloured haven that looked like a toy-shop but actually sold coffee and iced cupcakes. "I don't live that way. Most people don't. You shouldn't." I know she is right. I just don't know what to do about it. I do know that all my closest friends keep telling me to get a grip on my life. I can refuse to eat the cupcakes they put in front of me, I can put my fingers in my ears and hum while they talk, I can take refuge in feelings of hurt and self-pity, but deep down I know they can't all be wrong.

Of mice and mess

In two weeks time we are due to move into an unfurnished, rented house in the village to allow the builders to start work on knocking through the cottages to create that dream home I was promised. I suspect our stone-built rented house is cold. When I asked the estate agent whether it was a cold house, he looked at me in that blank way people up here do when I talk about the cold. "It has radiators," he pointed to two very small radiators hung on an immense magnolia wall. "Yes, but I might like to leave the radiator at some point over the next five months. Will I be cold when I do that?" I am so cold, so much of the time, I am contemplating sewing myself into my thermal underwear like someone from the depression.

The move means packing up this house in all its playmobil glory. Who invented playmobil by the way? Who had the bright idea to invent a children's toy that comes in 3,473 bits? We also have to clear out next door which we have used as an enormous storage cupboard since we moved here. "Hello, I come from London. I like to live in one house and buy the house next door to keep my clart in." I cannot think why there is a rural housing crisis or for that matter why second-home owners are despised by locals up and down the country. As you can imagine, I work very hard to avoid any admission that we are renting out our London house so that we can go back there if we decide it is just too cold to live here anymore. The only good thing about moving is that we will escape the mice who are overrunning the cottage at the moment. I figured if we left enough playmobil behind, when we move back in five months time, they might have built the Viking longboat.

Because we have decided that we do not have time to sort out next door, we are renting an enormous metal container to put in the barn at the back of the cottage. "Hello, we come from London. I like to buy houses and I have so many things I need a metal container to put them all in." We really need that container; you know those Channel 4-type programmes which feature busy-body women with sharp noses who declutter your house. I do not watch them. I am incapable of decluttering anything since I threw out a clear plastic pencil case belonging to my eldest child when he was two. His nanny had bought him it but I bought him a bigger, better one and thought "He will not need that pencil case, so I will throw it out." An hour and a half I spent sorting through the rubbish to find it, watched by a tear-stained child and his smug looking child-care professional.

Needless to say, I have not started packing. I am hoping instead that Walt Disney will appear in the kitchen one day and start drawing arms and legs on my pots, pans and general deitrus which could then pack themselves while they whistle an Elton John hit. I am in far too much chaos to start packing. A neighbour dropped by for a cup of tea (one of those second home owners, we locals despise)."I so admire you," she said gazing at me, as I moved a dirty saucepan to reach the kettle. I looked round my kitchen at the enormous Gilbert and George-style painting of the children we all did together, the wilted yellow roses on the table, their heads just visible above the breakfast ceral packets. I picked the baby up from the wooden floor where she was eating her brother's buttered toast crusts. "Do you?" I said, touched. "When I was a young mother," she carried on, reaching out to take the grubby baby from my arms, "I was always cross with the kids for making a mess, I was always picking up after them, cleaning and keeping house. You just don't bother. I do admire that." I decided not to offer her a chocolate biscuit.