This is the week of the flitting. Now that all is said and all is nearly done, and the papers signed and the removal van booked for Thursday, we are just about packed up and ready to head for Westhill, Aberdeen. A previous post explained what we were about and why. You can read it over here in the February 10 blog post.
You do these things with mixed feelings, maybe more so because in my first 15 years I was in 13 houses and the school count also hit double figures. Since leaving home I've lived in Scotstoun, High Blantyre, Stirling, Partick, Paisley, Aberdeen (2 houses) and Paisley again and about to be Aberdeen again. By my count that means I've lived in 21 houses and am moving to my 22nd. The reasons for my identity crisis, inferiority complex, manifest insecurity, reserved and retiring nature, competitive disposition and general readiness to adapt to chronic change as life's norm, are surely not unrelated to such habits of migration.
I now sit in a dismantled study, boxes of books towering both sides of me; bubble wrapped pictures stacked against the walls now bare; the computer still connected but only for a couple more days. Then this blog is going to experience a first – a lengthy hiatus interrupted only by those occasions when I can get access to the internet. So those who are regular callers, you need to be patient, understanding and supportive, and normal service will return. For now sporadic updates, harrowing cries de coeur, weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth alternating with whoops of delight, discovery or relief, will have to suffice to let you know I is still alive.
The worrying thing is, the boxes of books represent less than half my library – my College study has the same again and more, but they are staying put for a long while yet. Biblical stuff and some of the hefty theology / dogmatics, along with most of the poetry, biography and literature go up the road. Church history, theology, pastoral studies, philosophy, ethics, spirituality and other miscellanea are in the College study. The inevitable frustration will be wanting the books that always seem to be in the other place just when you want them. Mind you, these are my idiosyncratic worries – Sheila is much more to the point and wants to know where the pictures will be safe, where to put the kitchen stuff so it will be easily accessible at the other end, could I check I know how to plumb in the washing machine, and could I make sure the removers bring mobile wardrobes to transport clothes to the other end where they will still be wearable. Right enough – who needs the Church Dogmatics when you can't find the kettle, or the washing machine is spraying the walls, or the clothes are a fankled mess of tortured textile? Well… all I can say is if the washing machine does spray the walls, I want to know the whereabouts of my set of Barth to make sure it isn't remotely within range. And as for the kettle, no need for either/or choices, however much attracted to dialectics – find the blessed thing, make the coffee and settle down with CD IV.1 and enjoy the mountain scenery of theology on an alpine scale.
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