Apologies for my absence; I have been moving house. This isn’t supposed to be an introspective blog, but I have been racking my brains for the last few days in an attempt to make what I want to write somehow relevant to the world of politics and thus far I have failed to construct even a tenuous link, and time is dragging on. One may well come to me in the course of the next few hundred words, but right now, like David Blunkett in the Red Bull Air Race, we are flying blind (one nil).
Want I want to write is this. Do not ever move house. Don’t bother, at least not without paying other people to do it all for you. It isn’t worth it. Nowhere is horrible enough to warrant that amount of work. I love my new flat and I was bored with the old one. But I’m bored with many things – the weather, some of my trainers, 24 hour news, CDs, this Labour government (YES, two nil to me, haven’t even used the shoehorn) – it doesn’t mean they must all be replaced (apart from… I suspect you’ve guessed). Relatively speaking all of these things could (and will) be replaced with ease, unlike the walls and roof around you. First there is the daunting and slightly bizarre task of moving every single thing you own into a much smaller space than they already occupied, often within the same room, only to find that they don’t fit. Distraction from this rather obvious problem is provided by the realisation that you haven’t thrown anything away for several years. Why did I have receipts from a French petrol station dated 2006? What possible eventuality could require me to dig that up? Second you have the battle of bookcase vs. staircase (if you must move house, only live in bungalows) in which there are no real winners, followed by the moment when you realise that the van you thought was bigger than your entire block actually only swallows half your DVD collection.
The fact that you not only have to pack but then unpack, in our case up extra stairs (we learnt nothing), having circled the block for twenty minutes because for some reason there are no eighteen feet long parking spaces on the main road outside our flat, is superseded in the hell stakes almost immediately when you return to the war zone of the old flat. It’s still full of your stuff of course, because you gave up trying to identify homes for things after the ninth hour of packing. Having thrown it all away you start to clean. Conveying the full horror of this requires a weekly column all of its own, along with the admission that we hadn’t really cleaned anything to any recognisable standard for roughly two years. So, whilst bent double over the toilet scraping nuclear grade, unidentifiable substances from the rim with an old cut throat razorblade, I made a mental note to get a cleaner for the new flat.
On the politics front not much has changed. The Tories have won another by-election, the Guardian have been upholding their moral standards by interviewing Damien McBride, Stephen Pound MP has been living up to his reputation as a sanctimonious twat, and MPs are on holiday. More ahead later this hour, I promise.
