PLASTIC BAG TREES by Day Valerie

Author:Day, Valerie [Day, Valerie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2007-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

Better to travel

Tattoo and Co took two days to pack up our belongings. But give them their due, they did seem to be quite good at it. 'You've done this before, haven't you?' I said, jokingly to Bull Neck.

He smiled back at me a tad wearily. 'Once or twice,' he said. Everything was packed to the nth degree. This was not a move to the next street, or even the next town, so no chucking last minute items into the back of the removal van. Every single thing, from my best Waterford crystal to a set of Ikea egg cups was

individually encased in layers of bubble wrap and packed into a sturdy cardboard box, which was then sealed with thick, plastic tape.

At the end of the first day, the men vanished on the dot of five o'clock, leaving a trail of dirty cups, a leaking bag of sugar and a fag end floating in the loo. With the house to ourselves, we sat down amongst the boxes and drew breath. It was cardboard world. Giles fetched Chinese and we ate it from a box top. And from somewhere beneath this mountain of beige and brown, the phone rang incessantly all evening. 'Where the bloody hell is it?' Giles fumed, every time we heard the muffled trill.

I was amazed at the amount of stuff to be packed. Weeks, nay months had been spent clearing out the loft, garage and garden shed. 'Don't even think about taking that,' said Giles, as I folded my old sheepskin jacket into a packing case.

I carried on folding the coat. 'Cyprus is cold in the winter.' 'Not that cold.'

He was right, the coat was very heavy, and anyway, it had

never seemed quite the same since the morning I'd passed by the local primary school and a small boy, in an impressive display of E-number induced fury, had chosen that precise moment to let fly with a carton of Sunny Delight. The sticky orange missile intended for his mother who was ignoring him as she stood gossiping with a group of women at the school gate, had missed and hit me instead, right on the front of my good sheepskin, and the coat was never the same again. 'Keanu!' the mother had yelled, her voice bellowing across the playground like the funnel of a cross channel ferry, 'I'll smack you in a minute!' The prospect of no longer having to run this gauntlet was a definite plus on the scale of the pros and cons of moving to Cyprus.

We seemed to have hundreds of books. Most were just scruffy old paperbacks, but they were much loved and multi-read and I was loathe to part with any of them. 'Be ruthless,' said Giles. 'You haven't looked at most of them for years.'

I tried, but it was hard. Did I really need my daughter's “A” level copy of Tess of the d'Urbervilles or all those old Maeve Binchy's? I had a serious clear out and was welcomed with open

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