Moving - 2/3

Sunday.

We need to get to a certain state of packedness before Aunty M and family turn up in the morning to help shift all the boxes of unused junk in the cellar over to the new place, and we're not far off.

Last time we moved, it was country to country. Everything went from our fifth floor ex-council flat into a van, then on to a boat, then over the North Sea, then into an already furnished and fairly full single bedroomed place. I remember boxes, mostly. There were a lot of boxes. Lots of boxes and lots of nowhere to put them.

We somehow managed to stuff them all into the underground storage cage that comes free with your Swedish flat. If you took everyone's abandoned summer furniture and old college photos out of it, it would have the same warmth and charm as a battery farm for attack dogs. Heavy double bunker doors reinforce that 'Top Men' secret warehouse feel. It also has a lighting system on a timer that always cuts out just as you finally found what you were trying to dig out.

A joy to work with, basically. I started rolling my mental sleeves for the torture of dealing with this weeks ago.

F is happily playing with cousins A and L upstairs, and V and her sister are helping them. Uncles K, J and I get stuck into the boxes. (That last one is me, not a new Uncle I you've never seen before. Just to clarify.)

And it's fine. All perfectly fine. Three short car trips later, everything is stashed temporarily in what will be F's new room. Nothing broke, nothing fell on anyone. The lighting didn't even manage an inconvenient blackout. Great! Also: Unusual!

In what feels like no time, we're all eating celebratory pizza in the old flat. F tries very hard to join in. She's been getting on very well with her older cousin A, who has specified he is to be called Big Brother A now that he's got a little sister. But F has intimidated him into a certain level of caution after he's tried to take toys off her to show them how they work. I've been taught the same lesson, I know how he feels. She'll learn in her own time, thanks, and god help your eardrums if you try and get ahead of that schedule.

The removal men are coming around 0800 tomorrow. Despite this good day of work, we're still not ready. For the rest of the day, V and I work in exhausted shifts, one playing with F, one frantically stuffing alternate handfuls of old underwear and crockery into moving boxes.

By 2200, we're worn out, lying on the sofa and not packing anything any more. Our usual affectionate bickering is increasingly snappy. We both badly need sleep.

We're still not ready.