Downsizing your possessions to 40kgs (plus 10kg handluggage, which if we’re realistic is a large handbag) is brutal, it’s really hard, and has to be a slightly iterative process.  You end up moving things from A to B to C to A.5 back to C and then eventually ending in B = bin or C = storage container, with only the sacred or essential items in A being permitted to continue on the journey.  Some say it’s healthy and cleansing, and I’m sure it is, but it’s also quite painful because really, truly we all hang on to a lot of stuff due to the memories associated with it.  Even if more recent memories classify as not-so-good, once upon a time you were happy with your life choices and with the people you chose to share them with.  Putting such items in B has to be a bandaid approach, and as soon as a bag of B is full it is directly in the bin store, where it absolutely cannot possibly be recouped without either climbing into said bin store or waiting out on the street when the bin men are due to arrive and nipping in before them to grab your bag…..  Proud to say I did neither of those, and therefore my downsizing is permanent.

There are, of course, already things I feel I have inaccurately categorised, so far:

1) The purple slanket – I knew I wouldn’t need this in Tenerife, but England in April is surprisingly chilly.  I’m also concerned about what I’ll drape visiting hungover friends with to make them feel better in the next two months….  The slanket has stood us well over the last few years (you know who you are!) and I miss it.

2) Ulysses – I think the only time I’m actually going to read any more of this stupid book is if anyone else gets close to beating me to finishing the BBC Top 100 Books.  Until then this is probably the only book I’d sacrifice to keep a fire pit aflame in order to roast sausages before the clothes off my back.  Should have put in storage.

3) Two woollen scarves and an elf outfit – Somewhere in my how-to-be-a-grown-up life lessons I missed the one which explains how you deal with woollens which need to be handwashed.  Therefore I have spent the last two years hiding from certain items of clothing in my laundry basket which needed to be handwashed, because I couldn’t work out what to do with the wet, heavy, woollen items afterwards.  Eventually I plucked up the courage and handwashed them the day before I moved, ergo they were still too wet to go in the container and they’ve ended up coming with me.  Items I couldn’t need less right now, or in the Canaries, I can’t possibly imagine.

4) Cables – How do we accrue so many?  And why are we so scared to part with them just-in-case?  I have brought a drawer full with me in the move; my expectation is I won’t even open that drawer in the next two months, and therefore I will joyously throw them all away!  Cable drawer does also contain the many adaptors I have collated over the years, those I will be keeping, although I may return the one inscribed with my friends’ names which I can only have “borrowed” some time in 2009.  Note I pride myself that I returned the socks I borrowed in 2002 (in 2015).

5) Spirits – Of the alcoholic rather than haunting kind.  I don’t drink sambuca, I hate sambuca, and yet it’s traversed with me my two miles south.  It’s certainly not coming with me to the Canaries, and I don’t intend to open it before I leave unless something really bizarre happens during an evening drinking wine with my transitional housemates (and I don’t mean the cats!) – flatliner, anyone?!  I can’t even remember the day I thought to myself “I ought to buy some sambuca for my spirit cupboard” because, really, aside from vodka and gin, all you really need to make 99% of houseparty guests happy is wine (prosecco and champagne, obvs).  Do trust me on this.  I ran a social experiment before leaving my house and putting the bar globe in storage; all English people want to help a party go with a bang is champagne, vodka, gin, soda/sparkling/tonic water, and lashings of black coffee.

6) Kim  – I kind of miss her.