Official News page 2

OF MOVES, UTILITIES, AND A WARDROBE

by Alan Lenton

I’m told that moving home is one of the most stressful things you can do in life. I never understood why until now. Let me explain. I come from an armed services family that moved every few years when I was a child. After I went to University I moved around quite a lot - Leicester, Liverpool, Leeds, Hackney, Islington, Southall, Hounslow, Brentford, Fulham, Chiswick and Isleworth (the last eight are all different parts of London). Moving consisted of loading all my books into boxes, hiring a self drive Ford Transit, filling it with the boxes, shelves, my bed and one or two other accumulated possessions, and offloading everything at the new place. Easy! Hard work, but nothing stressful.

The problem is that not only are there now two of us to move, but I’ve lived in Isleworth longer than anywhere else in my life. I hadn’t thought through the implications. Not just that two people equals more than twice as much possessions, but that each person’s quantity of possessions is an exponential function of the length of time they have been in one place.

And then there are the utilities... When I first started moving, there was only water and electricity. By the time I got to Liverpool, gas for the central heating had been added. Then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher changed the local tax rules, and local taxes became the responsibility of the occupant, not the landlord. Moving to London meant that for the first time I needed a phone - friends in London were so spread out it was wise to check they were in before visiting. While I was in Southall I got my first modem (a Compunet CBM64 modem - 1200/75 viewdata affair) - add an ISP to the utilities. Finally, there came Broadband/ADSL and mobile phones. Fortunately, they haven’t yet developed fiber to the brain. And this doesn’t include notifying any of the myriad methods by which the powers-that-be keep an eye on you - bank account, tax, insurance, car registration, etc. - not to mention friends (real ones, that is, not online ‘friends’)

Surveying the shambles of a half packed old apartment after a few days, it became clear that:

1. Something more than a transit van was going to be needed.
2. A new bed was needed; the current one was dying of old age.
3. New book shelves were in order.
4. Unlike the old place, the new apartment didn’t have a clothes closet built in. Ergo a new wardrobe was going to have to be purchased.
5. Most of the utilities have no proper facilities to handle people moving, in spite of this being a not uncommon feature of modern society.

To handle the first item, Barb, who had been wrestling with the utilities, started phoning round removals companies, only to discover most of them weren’t interested in moving people who had more than a few small boxes of books. We have a lot of books - probably about 1,500, although the move only involved the 500 or so that weren’t in storage. Eventually she found a small family firm in Chiswick, the site of our new apartment, which was happy to do business with us. In the event two brawny guys turned up with a medium sized truck and in less than three hours had moved all the books, furniture (including the new bed), and knick-knacks from the existing second floor apartment, to our new first floor apartment. Note for US readers. English floor numbering is different from that of the US. What you call the first floor is what we call the Ground Floor. Our first floor is your second floor, and so on - just add one to the English floor numbers to get the US floor number. My theory is that English floor numbering was invented by an early programmer - possibly Ada Lovelace - since programmers habitually start their numbering at zero.

That should have been the end of it, but there were still four more issues to resolve. The bed was easy - we already had the bits for a new bed, and it took a mere 45 minutes to assemble. That night we had our first comfortable sleep for ages. Shelves were not too much of a problem. IKEA do an excellent, and cheap range called ‘Billy’. Who Billy was I have no idea, but I rate his shelves highly.

The wardrobe though was a completely different matter...

The first problem to resolve when buying a wardrobe is, ‘Do you want to be able to get to use it to get to Narnia?’ This is a thorny question that occasioned much debate in the household. Eventually we decided on a non-magical wardrobe, given the exorbitant price of such items. Sad, because I haven’t been to Narnia for years. Now where did I pack my copy of ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’?

Since we were already going to IKEA it seemed to the logical place to look. Ignoring dire warning from friends who over the years had obtained difficult to build and wobbly wardrobes from the said establishment, we opted, with some trepidation for an IKEA PAX wardrobe - the two unit version. IKEA furniture, for those who’ve never met it before, comes flat packed and you assemble it yourself. We felt confident that as a couple whose professions were that of computer programmer and project manager, we could tame the visual representation of the building algorithm in the enclosed IKEA manual.

We could indeed, but we’d overlooked one vital fact. IKEA are a Swedish firm, and Swedes have more than two arms. Thus, the wardrobe required you to have a minimum of four - six is optimal - arms to be able to assemble the beast. (See here for an early portrait of a Swedish IKEA wardrobe builder.)

This called for serious action, so we summoned Astrid (our daughter), the family IKEA wardrobe expert, from her riverside abode in sunny Bermondsey. Astrid is a talented lady, and the only person I know with the legendary +4 IKEA wardrobe building skill. With a wave of her Phillips Pozidrive screwdriver, the wardrobe began to be assembled before our very eyes. Within an hour and a half, with a few stops for nicotine-based mana replenishment, we had a resplendent IKEA PAX wardrobe (non-Narnia version) standing in our bedroom. And it didn’t wobble, well maybe just slightly, until Barb loaded it with her clothes, after which it was too busy groaning to wobble. After a suitable pause to admire Astrid’s handiwork we all retired to ‘The Cabin’, where it was ‘Tuesday Ribs Night’, and had the best ribs I’ve had since I was last in the US.

Which, apart from finishing the unpacking, and painting the remaining two walls of the living room, just left the vexing issue of the utilities... Electricity, gas, and water are all sorted. The internet wasn’t connected until several days after the move - and the bureaucracy involved in that is a story in itself - but we do have fiber to the cabinet. I still have to do the internal network wiring, but at the moment at least we have wireless access to the router.

The local tax situation is, how shall I put it, interesting. The local council, in its infinite wisdom, has decreed that our new apartment is our second home, and is charging us for both the old and the new flat. They have, however, generously offered a 15% second home allowance on the new apartment... This is going to take some sorting out.

Otherwise, everything is OK, apart of course from sundry twisted knees, strained tendons, knocks, bruises and cuts!

Alan Lenton
26 February 2012

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page