MikePadgett.com

The things you own end up owning you - Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Competition: where did we relocate to? Win a box of chocs

When you’re upping sticks, there’s something unsettling about selling off your furniture on eBay. On the one hand, your imperative is to travel light whilst on the other you still catch yourself hoping that agglomeration of wood, screws and glue goes to a good home. As if you can equate a cat with a gatefold table.

The four walls you call home are your bulwark against the big, bad world out there. And you can’t see it, but the fungal moulds of sentimentality are quietly propagating in the dark recesses of your cupboards, creeping onto your pristine marble-effect surfaces. In this way, spring cleaning at the end of a tenancy can be considered an exchange. The deposit returns to the tenants and the apartment returns to the block. Everything’s neat and tidy.

Nevertheless, if like Shirley Valentine you dream of living the dream of living abroad, the redefining of home can still be difficult, since such stories rarely unfold at leisure.

First the hazy prospect becomes sudden reality when one of a handful of job applications turns into a job offer.

Then piece by piece you dismantle your old life in readiness for the new. The concept of home transforms from comfort zone to millstone with the hauling of boxes and (unsold) furniture. And like the occasional bout of heavy drinking, you’re doing it again this time despite saying never again the last time.

Finally you physically move. You displace yourself from one point to another and at your destination you check if everything’s intact: your chairs, your computers, your relationship.

(S)he knows best

Relocation can be tough on relationships. If you know the drill, if you’ve done it all before, you should have learned that your relocation has the best chances of success if you play to your respective strengths.

In our case, I continued to go to work as normal. I handed in my notice at the last possible moment. This, I reasoned with some satisfaction, meant we would have enough income to tide us over the interim period. It was a brilliant excuse with which to excuse myself from the ugly early stages of the process.

In these stages she shows characteristic brilliance, whilst I flounder around with an embarassing lack of focus. In short, on this occasion as on others, I avoided any and every situation of planning, organising and packing. Avoidance is a male prerogative.

Instead I impressed her with an array of manly capabilities. If she could sort, organise and collate hundreds of individual objects and pack them carefully into labelled and sealed boxes, I could lift the boxes.

Later, like a young Freder unaccustomed to and exhausted by, the factory repetition of lift-haul-drop, I experienced feverish, eccentric visions of mad contraptions and devices that could do the brunt of the work in a fraction of the time, using vacuums, casters and belts. For even if I had the strength of a chihuahua, I could still lay claim to the imagination of Heath Robinson.

The whole storage

Not having frequented such a place before, I found myself fascinated by the storage warehouse in which we stashed our remaining goods and effects.

My expectations were somewhat skewed. I had envisioned vast boulevards humming with the traffic of a hundred forklifts and lined by towering skyscraper shelving stacks. A metropolis populated by tea chests, archive boxes and airtight bags all hopefully awaiting daylight in a much bigger world.

The reality was somewhat more prosaic, yet still intriguing. A tour de force in maximising profit per square metre, the ceiling was impressively low and the corridors superbly narrow. Take a haphazard sort of business and formalise it with processes, calculations and up-sell, the sort of thing the Americans are good at.

Every number corresponds to a unit and every unit is at least big enough to hold a car. Maybe some do.

Radio is piped in to lift the oppressive atmosphere. Everywhere the sound doesn’t reach is a quiet little corner occupied by a ferrety little Greek unloading mysterious items, taking care to avoid being watched too closely.

Blending in with the natives

I take an ugly satisfaction out of listening to the old buffer opposite. He’s a tourist: it’s in his outfit (for that generation still dresses for travel) and it’s in the neat pile of guidebooks on which he rests his shaky hands.

There are eight of us here, cramped together in an unusually overheated part of the Eurostar. It’s the last carriage on an endless St Pancras platform, but it’s the first carriage out of Britain.

Across the narrow aisle, the old Brit is tenacious in his engagement of the bemused, harrassed but always polite young man opposite, who is a native of our destination today and who, despite looking like a teenager complete with jeans sagging over his backside, speaks in the clipped, neat English of a Eurocrat.

Despite being able to see his pants, I sympathise with the youth who copes well with the persistent questioning. This is because I have something in common with him. We are not tourists in our intended destination.

I work hard to mould my impression of the irritating old bugger into someone who travels alone - for he is alone -to honour a tradition he shared with his beloved spouse, the great companion of his life, now passed. And he wants to travel without being a burden to his daughter, who has enough trouble squeezing three kids into a people carrier for the annual summer ordeal to Devon.

While this charming reinterpretation was being introduced, his questions have stopped. Now a series of statements has started in which, with a touch of the sycophantic, free conversation is being encouraged instead of closed questions.

Handpicked from a shelf full of stereotypes, the senior citizen’s statements include “they make good cheese there”, “I like the cafés in such and such a city”, and “the beer is excellent in your country”, each punctuated by a pause during which the young European citizen is expected to respond in the affirmative or the negative. He does respond, but the economy of his words does not suggest he wishes to be drawn into any particular subject. Except that the beer in his country is the best in the world, after which flat assertion there was only a prolonged silence.

I now felt that their difficult exchange had run its course. In the absolute certainty of his response about the quality of his nation’s beer, of which he didn’t look old enough to legally partake, the youth had drawn a line under this method of interaction. The old man was spent. There was simply nothing more to say.

“There are in fact over 600 beers brewed in that country,” came a quiet voice from the far side of the cabin. An Indian man had spoken and the Iranian fellow opposite him smiled widely enough to show a full set of gleaming white teeth. Everyone else present checked their internal encyclopaedia for whether these two could actually drink alcohol, heedless of the possibility that one might be knowledgeable about a subject without being directly involved in it.

“Is that so?” cried the old gent, his eyebrows lifting off like a pair of hairy jetplanes, for he knew, as we all did, that he had been rescued. The cavalry, it now seemed, had not just arrived, it had been there all along.

Thereafter, until the destination had been reached and the train drew to a halt, the flag was raised whenever the conversation flagged and the old man would chuckle again, “600 beers indeed”.

Tourists (or, eager to be legal)

Giving in to silly vanity, I found myself half hoping a tourist would stop us and ask for directions. There would be a moment, I gleefully imagined, when they recognised we could help them and that we spoke English with a familiar accent. Then I would get the opportunity to slip in that I live here and leave them with a nice hint of jealousy that they would have to head home in a day or two, while we could stay and enjoy as many coffees in these very chairs, at this very café, as the man upstairs would allow.

Indeed tourists have approached us in these early days. On each occasion, however, we’ve usually had about as much idea of where their destination was as they, for we ourselves are relatively unfamiliar with the town. We’re still getting to grips with our new home.

The important difference between being a tourist and being a resident, however, is that the former experience is generally quite superficial whereas in the latter one expects to be inculcated into the deep mysteries of the city, the nation and what it is to be from here.

And if “deep mysteries” seems like a rather highfalutin phrase, just wait until I start to discuss registration, national insurance and renting an apartment. There the mysteries shall begin.

Competition: where did we relocate to? Win a box of chocs