REMOVALS

The reason for Tuesday night's latest bout of insomnia was a simple one; I lay awake for more than two hours in the middle of the night worrying about furniture.

Or rather...

The removal and/or the disposal of it.

There isn't really much furniture left in my mother's flat, to be honest with you, but what there is, whether we decide to give it to charity, just give it away to anyone who wants it, offer it to theatrical societies as set dressing, or eventually chuck it on the tip, all of it will need shifting at some point.

And all of that, whether it's by a bloke with a van, a house clearance service, a more distinguished and reputable removals company, or just me in a rental, will need to be organised, presumably at short notice, and, when you're lying there just thinking about it at half-past one in the morning, there's very little you can do about it other than go into some small state of mild panic.

There really isn't all that much of it, I know that, but what there is of it is rather bulky if there's only me to shift it. A sofa, an electrically controlled reclining chair, a table or two, and a rather battered 1950s sideboard in the living room, as well as a double bed, another 1950s dressing table and a chest of drawers in the bedroom, and maybe also the fridge and the washing machine if the person buying the place decides that they don't want those.

There's also a small roll-top desk which, alongside the sideboard if at all possible, I'd quite like to have for myself, even though we don't really have the space for them at Blogfordshire Towers, but neither of them would be all that easy to get to my house, especially as they simply wouldn't fit in the car, so that would mean hiring a van and trying to track down a willing assistant to hold on to the other end as we manoeuvred the stuff down the corridors and outside, on to the van, and into my house at the other end of the journey.

This would mean a fairly hefty commitment for whoever it is and, quite frankly, there aren't a lot of people I could ask to give up such a large chunk of their own free time to fulfill such a task.

Not any more.

I have become somewhat bereft of that sort of chums… especially if I was to just ring them up out of the blue and turn the conversation in the direction of some kind of a favour...

All my own fault, of course... but there you go. You reap what you sow...

It was easy enough eighteen years ago when I moved in. In those days I lived amongst people and could borrow a "people mover" from "a mate" to shift my few bulky items. The rest of my own stuff fitted inside boxes that could be shoved into the back of my old Volvo and, when loaded up with my bits of old tat, it then rattled back and forth between the city and the sticks a few dozen times and voila!, there I was, all moved in with nothing but a huge pile of boxes and a pledge to never do that ever again to keep me busy.

But now it's rather different, not least because of the slightly unplanned nature of having to do the shifting, but also because I've lost touch with so many people and it's really not the done thing to ring up completely out of the blue and then ask "Oh, and by the way, can you do me a favour...? Only I need this furniture shifting..."

The other difficulty is, of course, that, of the few remaining people that I might be able to ask, well, we've all got older. The beloved has back problems, her father has knee problems, my sister (should she be in the area at the appropriate time) has heart problems, and I really wouldn't want to worry about inflicting any potential damage upon any of my acquaintances (or myself for that matter), now that we're all falling madly through our sixth decades and more.

And so, there remain problems of logistics to be solved, and difficulties to be resolved, perhaps all at very short notice… although I have since been reminded that, if I was to hire a "Man + Van" to get it shifted, there's no reason at all that he shouldn't be asked to move different things to different destinations in the course of a day…

But that sort of logic is the kind of thing that escapes the mind in the wee small hours and refuses to to coagulate as the thoughts, worries and doubts run rampant and my brain refuses to come up with anything sensible in order to aid my slumbers.

No wonder it's keeping me awake at nights...