Moves are afoot

Moves are afoot for a family member to literally move house and this put me in mind of our most recent move (twenty-five years ago!) and something I wrote reflecting on it:

Moving house is always traumatic, which is why we don’t intend to do so for a couple of years! It’s exciting, yes, a little sad, yes, hilarious, yes, exhausting – beyond exhausting yes, yes, yes!
I don’t remember moving from the flat I grew up in to our next home… nor the move from Cambridge to the west country  and there was a good reason, I was with cousins in Germany at the time! I do remember moving from the north of England back to the west country. When we made this move we were in the fortunate position that we had my father’s small two-bedroom property to move into as he had died some time before.
Because I was starting a new job in January, and not finishing my old one until just before Christmas we decided to move as soon as I finished work. The only slight fly in the ointment was that the day we were due to move was 23rd December, my aunty, uncle and mother-in-law were coming to spend Christmas with us arriving on the 24th (luckily they were all in a small hotel just across the road) and my disabled sister was also spending the festive season with us – oh and we were having two friends and their two adult sons with us on Christmas day to share the festivities!!
The plan was for my husband to set off with the children and arrive at my dad’s place, I would wait to oversee the removal and then I would clean round the place and gather any things we had left behind, and then come down in a hire car. Husband sets off, stops for breakfast on the way and arrives with the children… no sooner had he parked then the furniture van arrives – the removals men must have driven at the speed of light!
Nothing could quite match that in terms of hectic, chaotic and muddle, but when we moved from my dad’s place to our home here it was a very short move, almost literally round the corner. We had a removals firm for the big stuff but we hired a van and with the help of our two friends we moved round the corner… it’s so hard when it’s close like that, no sooner have you loaded the van than you’re unloading it again. it developed into me being at the new house and helping unload and stow stuff away in the moving boxes, the two men doing most of the shifting, although I would run back round if I had time, and wife-friend cleaned dad’s place.
Now wife-friend is an amazing cleaner, whizz whizz whoosh and the place is spotless, so just as she was working her magic there was a knock at the door and there were the new owners, chivvying her (to put it politely) to hurry up. As this was at 10:30 and they weren’t due to move in until twelve it was a bit of a cheek. My friend smiled sweetly and said “Oh I don;’t know anything about that, I’m just the cleaning lady!”

My featured image is of St Nicholas church which we can see from our front doorstep – this photo however is taken up on the hill where the church is situated