The Move Out!

So...that was probably the most stressful thing I've ever done in my life - my newly developed eye twitch (something that's just come on in the last 5 days - clearly a result of the oscillating emotions) is twitching like it's on Acid. Brill.

My dad came up to London from Poole to help me move which was...ummm...helpful yet despairngly irritating too. As my dad gets older he is getting more and more impatient and more and more grumpy and more and more stressed and more and more highly strung - It's actually impossible to have a normal conversation with him when he has a task to do. God, getting out the house was like a military operation and I was only allowed an hour and a half to do it! Quel Horror!

Anyway, got there in the end - mostly. Packed up all my boxes - EURGH and then took one final look at my empty room. Then decided that although we're getting cleaners in I should probably run the hoover over the carpet before I left. I tried to run the hoover over my carpet but the fucking stupid cunting hoover spat even more shit over my carpet then it picked up so after about 10 mins of that game I gave up, took one final final look at my empty room and walked away from a wonderful chapter in my life (and a pretty messy carpet).

If the last year and a half has been a wonderful chapter then the 4 hours that immediately followed was a horrible sentence that I thought would never end. This is all I have the inclination to say as I don't wish to relive those hours: If my dad, who has never lived in London, either listened to me or listened to the Sat Nav or stopped changing the destination and route on the Sat Nav (I hate the stupid cow - yes, the Sat Nav is personified in my world - but even she must have been getting confused) or didn't just keep bemoaning the lack of a map then maybe, just maybe, the journey out of London would have gone more smoothly.

5 days to go!

So with only 5 days to go before I up and move country I seem to be oscillating every 10 minutes between pant wettingly excited and pant pooingly scared.

I've been given access to e-mails already by my new work so every day at my old work I'm gleefully checking my e-mails like the little swot that I am. I've also been given a schedule for my first week at my new job which thankfully looks like it will be a week full of induction, introductions and general learning of the ropes. It honestly feels like it's going to be my first day at school, taking the leap from primary school to secondary school but with all the teachers and current pupils sending you e-mails telling how excited they are that you're coming (I like to think everyone at my current work is really excited about me coming because I charmed them all in the 5 minutes I met them on my last trip rather then that there is a pile of work building up on my new desk and it's blocking the view out of the window for everyone). Anyway, the point is that all this excites me. Greatly.

Sitting in juxtaposition with this feeling is utter gut wrenching stomach whirling pain. I'm having to start saying goodbyes to friends now and God it hurts. I'm going to miss them all so much! But to get myself through it I'm already thinking about their visits and thinking about the people who can't wait to see me in Denmark. Locking myself in the bathroom and crying is also helping a little....

On another note, packing is just the most dull, soul destroying (apparently I'm feeling rather dramatic today) activity known to man. Eurgh. How am I going to take all that I need with just 20kg allowance? I think it is rather mean. Oh, sigh.

Unwanted and unused with no purpose

Today I’m feeling slightly sorry for the string-less tea bags left in the office kitchen’s tea bag box. Their purpose in life as of yet unfulfilled since they lost their strings in what could have been a simple rush-to-make-tea-yank-tea-bag-from-box accident. Left to gather loose tea leaves because since the invention of the “tea bag on a string” we’ve all become too lazy to stir. We’re all dippers now; taking copious amounts of pleasure from the ability to make tea less 1 piece of washing up AND to also use the string + gravity to swing the used tea bag into the open bin without making any mess. Poor unwanted string-less tea bags.

Pinch me...

....Actually if it means I'm going to wake up then don't.

I am so blissfully happy right now. I am allowed to be blissfully happy right now. I am going to enjoy every single second of being blissfully happy right now. Ok, that’s the last time I’m going to write blissfully happy before I jinx it.

I am now back from my trip to Copenhagen and you may deduce from the opening to this post that I had a fantastisk time. Wonderful company, wonderful food, wonderful drink and I managed to get a wonderful job to be started as soon as I get to DK. The whole trip was like a dream that I never want to wake up from. You know when you watch a film and the plot is just incredibly ridiculous and you sit there shouting at the TV “What? Oh come ON. That would NEVER EVER happen. Urgh, God this film is stupid.”? Well that’s what my week in Copenhagen was like. It does happen sometimes. It really, honestly truly does happen. And this time it happened to me.

I had a slight blip on my last night there when I couldn’t help but think that this was all just too good to be true and so surely it couldn’t actually BE true. But a little cry (partly brought on from being utterly overwhelmed by everything and partly brought on by stupidly letting my imagination live the moments when I’m going to be saying goodbye to everyone I love here), a strong, safe, lovely hug, and some words of wisdom soon sorted me out.
I will not feel guilty about good things happening to me. I am not going to ruin the good times by anticipating and worrying about the bad because that is just stupid. I am going to enjoy this and wrap myself up in every inch of it.

A weighty issue

A lot of people don’t understand my borderline obsession with books and reading. They wrongly assume that I think of each book as a trophy to sit on my bookshelf once finished, titles and authors proudly shouting of intellectual prowess, cultural variety and literary knowledge. If anyone took a good look at my bookcase they’d quickly realise that this isn’t the case! Showing off is not why my books are important to me. Each book contributed to my opinions, to who I am and who I aspire to be. Some books made me laugh, some made me cry, some were just beautiful but they all made me feel something. Each book is a part of me, living in a part of time that’s past. So asking me to leave them behind is like asking me pack up my memoires into boxes and put them into storage to be ignored and useless. I don’t want new versions of any of them. I want my originals, with huge gaps between turned down corners from when my greed for the pages outlasted my need for sleep; with phrases underlined in indigo ink so that I can pick out anything that gave me something to chew over; with stained edges from knocking around in the bottom of my bag with makeup, food and leaking felt tips because I couldn’t leave home without it in case I get a spare 2 minutes to delve inside it.

I’m not completely romanticising my move to Denmark. I know that there will be times when I long for home, my mum, my dad, my best friends. Times when I long for the job that I know inside out, the busy tube, The Thames, my old local, the comfort of the house that I grew up in and much more. It will be these times that I look to the familiar and unlike my piano, books are things that I CAN take to comfort me when I get lonely, to cheer me up when I’m homesick and to calm me when I’m frustrated.

Some people think it’s insane to weight my moving to Denmark suitcase with books. I know it’s necessary.

Possibly the best line in literature...

"Ryan's freckles were a join-the-dots enthusiast's wet dream."

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Image credit Hulton Collection

Copenhagen: The City of Sustenance

I think it’s hilarious that prostitutes are offering free sex to delegates attending the COP 15 summit as a protest against Copenhagen City Hall distributing leaflets dissuading visitors using prostitutes when prostitution is a perfectly legal activity in Denmark.

How hypocritical of a country whose marketing campaign for tourism was a video of a Danish woman who had had a one night stand with a foreigner whose name she does not know, gotten pregnant, had the baby and decided that the best way to find and tell this man he had a baby was through this video.

The anti prostitution plan has backfired superbly hasn't it Copenhagen? Awareness of Copenhagen's red Light district has probably increased ten fold. Hold on, unless this was their clever little plan all along...