Moved

We are finally out of the house. Lock, stock and barrel apart from the pine wardrobe which my mother wants because she is artistic enough to make it look less yellow and industrious enough to put nice new handles on it. And minus the Aga which is still in the former kitchen waiting to be collected by its new owner. I am trying not to think that it is looking reproachful, that it is remembering all the great meals we have cooked together, all the Christmas turkeys, all the times I have snuggled up to it as the only source of warmth in the house. Of course it can’t be aware that my daughter baked her first tray of biscuits in one of its capacious ovens or tell our shameful secret that she called them cookies because she had watched too much American television. And it isn’t reminding me of the uncountable mornings when thanks to it alone everyone had dry clothes to wear.
A farmer and his wife came on Monday and agreed to buy it as soon as they set eyes on its cheery redness and shiny lids. They are as nice as the Hoggetts in Dick King-Smith’s Babe and they are going to put it into the house they are building for their retirement. It is a good home.

Clearing the house was a horrible slog. For days and days as the container and the skip and the local charity shops and the recycling bins filled up, the house didn’t seem to be getting any emptier. But after a final push on Monday night of wantonly skipping what remained (I rescued the video camera the next morning) and indiscriminately ramming bags with jumbled miscellany, the endless job was done. The house is now naked. There are no carpets and already the plaster has been removed from the walls. With all the stone showing it feels like walking round a ruin, cool and calm. It is such a relief.

We all had things we were particularly pleased to dispose of. I jumped on the mug tree repeatedly before putting it on the skip and would have reversed over it several times in my car if it hadn’t succumbed to my welly. Peeling the damp stripey yellow wallpaper from the sitting room walls was a treat too. I am going to ask the builders if I can take a crow bar to the useless noisy pump which grumbled at all hours about inadequately draining our smelly shower for eleven years.

For most of these eleven years I have vastly preferred being in other people’s houses to being in my own. Now that we have moved into our temporary accommodation in a holiday cottage at the other end of the village I am actually living in somebody else’s house full time and I love it. Having rationalised so much of our junk I feel that I am living a well-ordered life for the first time ever. And I am no longer overwhelmed by the laundry mountain because I had to do it all before we moved out. I only emptied the festering contents of the bottom ten inches of the laundry basket into the skip. There has been a tidy person inside me trying to get out for years. Now she has come out. When we move back into our new improved old house nothing will be the same. It will feel like someone else’s house too. The trick will be to keep it feeling that way.

Our new bedroom will be in what was the kitchen. I’m hoping it won’t be haunted by the banging of oven doors or unexplained cooking smells.