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I managed a rare sleep in until 9.30am, but I needed that energy boost as we were starting the arduous task of packing today. It was, I realised, our last Sunday living in Shepherd’s Bush. I think I have done 736 Sundays since I moved here. That’s a lot of Sunday Times Culture sections. Just as with my rapidly approaching birthday I have not had the chance to process that yet. Shepherd’s Bush has a strict no over 50s policy, so it’s been kind of them to give me two says leeway.
I packed away the snooker balls and unscrewed my snooker bats, so I guess I have played my last game of self-playing snooker in this particular arena. But there should be room for the old green board in my office in the new house, so come September I am hoping the podcast will be back on a weekly basis.
We did about six hours of packing and managed to sort out most of the basement and Phoebe’s toys and clothes. A lot of rubbish got put out for the bin men. My wife and I wish we had been organised enough to keep everything in the correct place whilst we actually lived here. I picked up all the leaves and rubbish that had accumulated at the front of the house and tried to pull up the weeds that had limpeted themselves into the cracks in the pavement. It’s nice that the people who live here next will benefit from this. Why did I never do it in the last 14 years?
We resolved to do better in the new house. We probably will fail with that resolution. But it’s nice to pretend.
I certainly have a lot more stuff (and human beings) than I had when
I moved into this house back in 2003 (though luckily for the removal men this time, that breeze block of a TV has already bitten the dust. Fourteen fucking years. Fuck me.
Given it took us all day to basically pack the stuff of someone who has only lived here for two years, it’s worrying to think how long the rest might take.
We popped down to Wagamamas for a family dinner to reward our hard work. We will certainly miss the convenience of all this on our doorstep when we’re living in a village with one shop, a pub and a tea room. But I won’t miss the crowds that we had to fight through to get there.
Phoebe and me have a new game in which I say, “Phoebe?” and then when she looks at me, I blow a raspberry. She then says “Daddy?” and does the same. It amuses us equally. I am going to miss her when she grows up.
Amazing success with the latest four signed limited edition emergency questions books on eBay - all going for over £100 each. Hope that makes you feel good if you were one of the people who got one for considerably less on the kickstarter. It might be worth laying that down in a vault and never reading it!. That money from those four books will pay for about a third an episode of RHLSTP to be filmed, which is awesome!
