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Cilla Black’s Blind Date came to mind this week. Three fine upstanding men with rippling muscles and pleading smiles have cavorted in front of me in turn, each ready and willing to exhibit their prowess on a given date. Moving twenty years of family life out of our four-storey house and storing it in containers for what I suspect could be four months or more is, it appears, a highly desirable proposition. ‘There’s a lot of money in storage’, one of my would-be removers confided. ‘We’re expanding all the time. Soon we’re going to offer super-containers. People have got so much stuff these days. They can’t bear to throw it away, but they don’t like it cluttering up their houses. We’ve got a lot to thank that Life Laundry programme for’.
So which escort through the major life trauma of moving would Cilla recommend that I take? Will it be the lanky young man with the soulful eyes of a basset hound who measured up astonishingly rapidly by imagining the cubic volume of my furniture, books and clothes as so washing machines? Or will it be the jolly ex-builder who promised to do me a special deal and told me a hair-raising story about a body found in a storage container in Brighton, ‘squashed into a widescreen TV carton – it was the smell what gave it away’? Or will it be the slickly-groomed minion of an international consortium of removal companies, who could offer fully computerised storage, accessibly 24/7, and who bad-mouthed the other two firms the instant he caught sight of their cards on my mantelpiece?
Bob the builder would make the best copy, but can I risk letting him and his mates loose on all my fragile glass and china? Smart Alec will I suspect be the most expensive. He left guessing at 12 containers and a three day move, whereas both the others estimated 8 and two days. But I suspect his slow progress along the bookshelves and methodical opening of cupboards was the most accurate approach to measuring. And as he said after sketching several potential disaster scenarios if I failed to ‘go with’ his company, ‘should you risk anything less than the best?’
Call me susceptible, but I think the contract will go to washing machine William. There was a steadiness in his doggy gaze, and his firm came recommended by the local fine art and antiques auctioneers. Moreover, he came when he said he would (Bob the Builder postponed twice) and his very reasonable estimate arrived smartly after his visit (Smart Alec’s is still no doubt touring the international consortiums’s computer system).
Interviewing removal companies is one thing. Facing the reality of moving is quite another. I am trying to sort things out so that I will not be paying for storing rubbish, but it’s a slow business. Turning out my desk is an emotionally traumatic journey into the past. Everything is there from. My full birth certificate, long hidden by my mother as it bore the name of the father she concealed from me until I was 21. Locks of the children’s baby-hair and treasured letters from them. The padded maroon velvet 50 that Susie made me when I achieved my half century. And my will, in a long brown envelope with hymn titles scribbled on the outside whenever I heard a favourite on Songs of Praise.
I scan through it for the first time in eight years, and realise it urgently needs to be remade. There is a long list of specific bequests, some now squirmingly embarrassing, some items already been given away or sold. I email my super shrewd lawyer, and next day his firm’s ‘Less of the eat, drink and be merry, madam; tomorrow you die’ leaflet arrives. It is full of sobering facts about who can inherit your worldly goods if you don’t ‘protect your wishes’ by ‘excluding those whom you do not wish to benefit’ (primarily, it seems, one Mr G. Brown, 11, Downing St, SW1). And arresting questions. ‘Do you want our family to have the heartache of not knowing what to do when you die?’ ‘Have you signed an Expression of Wish letter about your pension?’
‘Making a will concentrates the mind’, it concludes. Tell me about it. But it is also rather fun, if you have a touch of the control freak about you. Tears well up in my eyes as I go off in a long imagining of my funeral. Whoops. I’m beginning to remember how I came to make that maudlin list of bequests.
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