I think it's pretty common knowledge by now that I made the decision to move back to Manchester for financial reasons. I want to own a flat in London before too long, and as things were, it was going to be a long time until I could afford the kind of deposit I need to get the kind of flat that I want to have - something bigger than a shoebox. If I'm not having to spend a lot of money on rent, council tax and a bunch of other things, I'll be able to save a lot more cash towards that deposit. Since everyone's working from home anyway, now seems like the sensible time to do it.
I have a heck of a lot of books that needed to be packed and that made me sad. I had a lot of dresses to pack which made me feel pretty depressed. I had to pack all of my cake-making things and that made me feel pretty bored. All of the packing was pretty difficult, whether it was because of the emotion of packing away certain things and the emotion of getting rid of certain things. Whether it was having to think about getting rid of something because I didn't want to keep the emotional baggage that came with it, or just putting other things that I love and that feel like a part of my home away for the next year.
The whole process of moving was always going to be sucky, but I seem to have been packing for months and then all of a sudden my parents were picking up the van in Manchester, driving down to London in it and the next morning we had a group of three moving men turn up to help get everything out of the building. Thankfully one of my friends also dived in to help on the logistics side of things, because the building I was moving out of was a bit of a crazy one.
One of the moving men was one of the guys who helped me to move into the flat three years ago. He came in, asked what was going and then just got stuck in. One of them was this young lad who was really sweet and quite timid, but a really good hard worker and the last one was more interested in talking than working and kept asking questions I wasn't really comfortable with. He was arrogant and he was clumsy and if I book in with them again to help me move into a new place when I get it, I'm going to ask that he isn't a part of the team. He did stupid things like packing fragile boxes which said 'DO NOT SQUASH' under other things, knocked things over by walking into them and dropped a few things as well. He was asking my mum if I was single, and if I was interested in men from other countries with this look on his face, and thankfully my mum knows me pretty well, so she told him I wasn't, even though it's not something which crosses my mind, but I wasn't interested in him, I wasn't interested in thinking about meeting anyone, and I was drugged up to my eyeballs with anti-depressants to try and cope with the stress of moving. He made me feel nothing but uncomfortable anyway.
I had been worrying that everything wouldn't fit into the van, but thankfully, we managed to get rid of a few furniture bits to a neighbour the night before which really helped, because they were things I would have wanted to get rid of anyway, and thankfully my dad is a world-class Tetris master, so he was able to pack everything in and only use about half of the space in the van which was good. It did make me think I could have spent less on a smaller van, but these things happen and it's always better to overestimate than underestimate. I was just really glad I didn't spring for the Luton because we really wouldn't have needed it.
I'm not going to say it all went smoothly. There was a touch of traffic on the way back and the M6 toll services seemed to be getting further and further away at just the point where we needed to pull in for petrol, then when we did pull in for petrol, Dad came back to the van with a coffee for himself and told us they had Teapigs, then Mum dropped her peppermint tea on the floor when we got just three steps out of the door because her mask flew off and it just threw her completely, but the garage was nice enough to replace it for her and the rest of the drive wasn't too bad. Even getting everything off the van and into the storage unit wasn't too traumatic, though I have no idea where anything is now, so a job for another day will be organising it all a bit more, but there we go. It happened, we got back in one piece and Teddy was over the moon to see us when I went to pick him up, so we can't really complain too much about that. I'm going to have to look at options for how to do the move back down south though because I'm not sure any of us are really up to that drive again.
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