How very nice to have a positive experience that ended with all parties happy and generalised satisfactory accomplishment.
We helped the S&H and his bride to move on Saturday and we did it in the day and got back just after midnight.
There was a bit of a false start when the motorway route was closed but about a minute after I got the map out, the SatNav rerouted us, choosing the alternative route that I had chosen, which vindicated us both. As we arrived in reasonable time, we found their old house was just as you’d expect, like the corporation tip with boxes, many already filled and labelled, which was great, the kitchen was totally packed, which was even better, so we set to with a will. I packed the white van easily, twenty three years of transporting fragile porcelain and a stand to shows being twenty three years of practise house moving that I never knew I was getting.
The S&H was insistent that the fridge freezer was the last item on the van; no one mentioned to me until we were stuck in a half hour, no-move, traffic jam on the resurfacing dual carriageway that this was because the freezer was still full of food that was definitely frozen when we set off. Unusually for May the weather for those sitting on the road going nowhere, was baking hot. The sun beat down relentlessly like a burning ball of gas with an economy pack of burgers, frozen chicken portions, assorted veg and ice cream to melt. Within an hour and forty minutes the freezer was plugged back in and in ten minutes or so you could no longer fry an egg on it.
It was well into the afternoon by the time the freezer was reconnected, so we unloaded our car, piled into it and found a handy nearby restaurant and pub for lunch. Back at the house, which is tiny but almost new and costing an amount to rent that will make a mortgage look like a walk in the park, we finished unpacking the van, set up the sofa, which is a bed settee and every bit as heavy as you would wish for a piece of furniture, and got back in the van and the car for round two.
We unpacked the second van load and went to the same restaurant for a late tea at ten and then made up the dismantled bed so they had somewhere to sleep and left at about quarter past eleven. All the major furniture was in the right rooms, all the boxes were in the spare bedroom and the house was habitable.
On the way home, up the empty midnight motorway, the OT and I sang to the radio.
It has been such a pleasure to be involved with something positive and new, for people who are grateful, and do it in a day and know it will really help. My life for the last three years, both at home and at my mother’s has been nothing but angry people killing themselves with great determination and there is nothing I can do to stop them, or help them except take the flak. To be sure, when we got home the OT dropped me off and headed for the pub. Yes, at quarter past twelve at night; he had rung at nine to say he would be late and could they stay open.
No day is perfect.
But it was a pretty good one.
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Janelook at my huge muscles Laverick.com