TTFN

As the ‘oosbind and dawter watch Komodo dragons eat their way through a dying water buffalo it’s time for an update.
The cellar is full of unwanted kitchen equipment, plates, bowls, tureens, sieves, knives, forks, big spoons, little spoons and a forest of wooden spoons.
The chest of drawers at the bottom of the stairs has an array of electrical equipment that can rival Dixons, Curreys and Harrods 330 versions of a juicer.
The sitting room has a new revolving rack, a new lamp, several thousand new CD’s, three more bean bags, eighty three thousand books and Gawd knows how many cushions.
The kitchen has been blitzed, re-stocked with fourteen hundred spice bottles, seventeen thousand oil bottles and a pantechnican of teabags.
The bathroom is a slalem of bath salts, bath oils, bath bubbles and creams.
The spare room now has a hat-stand sporting coats, scarves, jackets, macintoshes, and a hundredweight of Gods Gift’s charity shirts.
My bedroom is stuffed to the gunwales with more shoes than Clarks and more clothes than Primarni.
The studio has 35 years worth of dairies, hoards of sheet music, 1 cello, 2 saxophones, 3 bodhrains, 4 xylophones, 5 sets of fairy lights, 6 guitars, 7 whistles, 8 piano octaves, 9 cases of percussion and 10 reasons to be cheerful which includes a banjo, congas, synthesiser and a double bass – all hidden under so much ivy, Virginia creeper and nettles that the brambles that have taken over would shame even the hardiest of barbed wire.

The three apples trees are so heavy with fruit that making it to the studio is risky. I have banged my head on the Bramleys, smacked my temple on the yellow Gravensteins and nearly poked my eye out with an overgrown cox.
If ever a home and garden needs the attention of a woman my little cottage does.
Tomorrow I meet with the man, in Battersea, who has the inventory. At precisely 4.30 I hand over the keys to the flat and that’s that.
Somehow I have caught up with myself. I cry when I can’t get anymore pillow cases in the airing cupboard. I cry when I can’t fit another shoe in my bedroom cupboard, I cry when I feel the cottage groaning from all the useless tat I’ve brought with me from Battersea. I cry at the drop of a hat, sock, flannel, and tea-towel. But it feels like they are tears of relief that its finally done and I am finally here.
I joined the local gym, made friends in the bread shop, chatted in the farm shop, found a new young pierced-tattooed-female-gardener, got a train timetable and sorted out when I can use my Bafta card at the Cineplex six miles away.
I’ve booked my car in for a new wing mirror which I smashed whilst blinded by my tears in Crystal Palace, I’ve broken the Dyson, overslept through the alarm, used up 38 boxes of tissues for my weeping eye. I’ve had acupuncture, osteopathy and I’m digging out the phone number of a masseuse I used ten years ago. I’ve made mung bean soup, and eaten out in two pubs that I’d forgotten existed.
Given that B and I have moved out lives into Jim’s, and given that we both had full pantry’s I wont need to shop for provisions for at least ten years.
I have got used to the darkness, counted the miles to Lewes, counted the minutes to Brighton and counted my blessings.
After tomorrow my new life begins.
‘What the caterpillar sees as the end of its world we call a butterfly’.
TTFN Battersea…….