Friday 7 October 2011

We Gotta Get Out of this Place

This weekend the Lundie family are due to embark on “Operation Bin It, Sell It or Pack It”. It is not an exercise I relish, in fact I suspect I have been in deep denial for some time now. However, despite my protestations, time is racing on and the calendar tells us that we have only nine precious weeks remaining on this island. And our furniture only has three!!!!
And so the hysteria begins....Already my head is starting to fill with lists and the pressure is starting to show on the family relationships. Our usual post-work marital exchange of “how are you?” or “how was your day?” has been replaced with a salvo of questions such as “did you go and see...?” “have you sorted out...?” and “why haven’t you arranged...?". Oh the joys of matrimony!
Every day I enter my house a moment of dread envelops me as I survey the reams of rubbish and mountains of tat that we have unwittingly accumulated over the past 57 months. Most daunting of all is the childrens’ bedrooms, a veritable cornucopia of tatty old bears, back-broken books, dismantled cars and foot-piercing Lego. Most shameful of all is the shocking amount of toys whose origins cannot be denied as any other than the ‘gifts’ accompanying McDonald’s Happy Meals – an embarrassing testament to my failure as a nurturing mother.
The children have already been briefed that a severe and relenteless cull of their toyboxes is due to take place, however I suspect that most of the removal of unnecessary toys will have to be done in stealth. Children not only have a remarkable talent for suddenly developing a hitherto unprecedented attachment to abandoned toy, they also have specific super-hero powers akin to x-ray vision which allows them the ability to identify the mere half-silhouette of one of their forgotten, but suddenly unforesakeable, possessions, even when double-wrapped in the dreaded bin-bag.
Therefore, I suspect that hubby and I will have to adopt SAS-style tactics, sweeping in the bedrooms under the cover of darkness eliminating the enemies whilst our  cherubs sleep on in blissful ignorance. Any later query about the whereabouts of any missing toys will then be met with the stony-faced “Cannot Confirm or Deny Policy”. It’s for their own good, you know. Honest....
Once the obvious crap has been disposed of and we are left with items which will either sail away across the Med in a big metal box, or will find themselves posted contantly on BFCBay until we’ve been beaten down to a price short of paying the purchaser to take it away, it will be time to embark on the March-Out clean. At this point I start to hyperventilate as I look around a quarter that has been occupied for nearly five years by two filth-terrorists in the guise of my own offspring. Some folks dream of a home with a self-defrosting freezer or a self-cleaning oven, I would have been content with self-flushing toilets. I won’t go into detail on the horrors of the smallest rooms in the house, but many years of abuse by little people, combined with some severely hard water and limescale issues have left the porcelain receptacles in a state less than satisfactory. I am currently Googling the best solutions, some have suggested denture tablets, others flat coca-cola, but I suspect nothing short of a courtesy call to our local Bomb-disposal squad will do the job. And even then, for their own sakes, I might suggest they send in the Remote robot device. It ain’t gonna be pretty!
So that’s where I am right now. I haven’t even touched on the other issues we have to contend with, the Bureacracy Barrier, the re-entry into Civvie Life etc, but that’s for another blog where I will, no doubt share the triumphs and horrors of going back to the UK, whether you asked for them or not!!

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