All our worldly goods … 10 years of accumulation
We put down a deposit on some storage space this week and are now setting about the task of doing an inventory of everything to move into it. It’s illuminating an horrifying in equal parts. I’ll get onto that shortly, but in the meantime it brought to mind the following, which I shall reveal in chapters as I get time to type …
Chapter 1
I moved in 10 years ago this Thursday (December 11 1998). T’was a Friday as I recall and it was the first place I’d ever bought, so you can imagine my excitement as I arrived at Foxtons (my estate agents or something called “realtors” according to my American wife) to pick up the keys and you can also imagine my dismay as they told me that “the person with the keys won’t be back for two hours”.
This was a real problem because I’d booked visits from the electricity board and phone company to come and change the pre-pay key meter into a proper one (this was previously a rental property) and to install a phone line, respectively.
I missed them of course, but finally got to the house at about 5pm. Actually to be honest I got to the wrong house at about 5pm because in my excitement I’d forgotten where I now lived and turned right one road too early.
The house whose front door I attempted to unlock was similar to my own in that it was a corner house and had a driveway, but was disappointingly run down, was missing an extension I was sure I’d bought and had a car I knew I didn’t own in the driveway. None of that stopped me from jiggling the key in the lock for 5 minutes and reaching for my phone to curse the Foxtons before it dawned on me that I didn’t live there.
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