A moving account 4: a life half-packed

Mood swings? Swearing? Crying? Dropping things? Breaking nails? Panicking? Not sleeping? But of course. I'm moving house.

Sometimes it all gets too much, and not just for me: the animals are feeling it too. Flossie is on springs all the time. Someone - well, ok, Lottie - threw up yesterday right beside a packed box which then went all soggy and had to be unpacked and replaced. Feliway and Rescue Remedy are in constant use.

I don't know where anything is - oh, of course, I do: in one of those unlabelled boxes  that are everywhere. I get up fancying toast for breakfast, having the rare treat of a crusty loaf in the house, and remember too late that the toaster has been packed.

I wake at three in the morning fretting about not having read the meters - then remember that I don't actually do that until the very last minute - but then lie awake for a couple of hours with my head buzzing incoherently, feeling sick with tiredness.

The surveyor's report contains the words 'damp' and 'beetle infestation' one too many times, and I forget that the words 'treatment' and 'guarantee' also feature.

Time is really running out, and I know that I'm not going to be ready.... and so on. Interminably.

That's when I go and have another look at the rather terrible photos that I took when I had that whistle-stop tour of the cottage, and I settle right down again, stop using words that would shock my grandmother, pause to take breath, and remind myself why this brief (as in extremely rushed) period of hellishness has to be got through, because:

Yes, because.

Because it will all be worth it in the end.

Monday.