MAN + VAN

I’d arranged for them to arrive at 4.30 on a Monday evening and, through the good graces of the traffic gods, I arrived a few minutes earlier and slipped a few items into the back of my own car and, as I was checking the mailbox for more junk mail to return, ended up chatting to one of mum’s former neighbours – or is that someone for whom my mother was a former neighbour? – about how the last six months had been (Already? Doesn’t time fly…?) when one of the vans pulled up and we went indoors to assess the scale of the job in hand.

This was hopefully almost the very last chapter, bar a quick whizz round with the vacuum cleaner and a final bin bag or two, of the seemingly endless saga of clearing my mum’s former home so that the mysterious somebody who I think may have bought it (things have gone very quiet on the conveyancing front) can move in whenever he likes without me having to hop around like a blue eyed fruit fly.

Basically, the massive sofa, the bed, and the much-unloved dressing table had to go to whatever the furniture equivalent of Valhalla might be, and two rickety old bits of furniture needed transporting to my humble and cluttered abode out in the wilds and through the delights of the rush hour traffic.

Well, the first “Man + Van” made a start, using venerable cushions to prop open the doors as he shifted the various parts of that battered old bed out, and pretty soon, his colleague, the second “Man + Van” joined him (so now they were “Men + Vans” if that doesn’t sound too much like a dodgy movie…) and I watched as they smashed the legs off the old dressing table “To give them more space in the van” and wrestled that big old sofa through doors that it was far too large to fit through.

This was by far the trickiest part of the procedure and after they had both fought and battled with the old relic, so determined was it not to go without putting up a fight, that, once they had finally got it outside and into the daylight, I gave them permission to take it away and shoot it.

After this, our more treasured pieces were far more carefully manoeuvred onto the second van and, I gave them our address, pondering to myself about whether between us my mother and I had bought quite the most awkward houses in the world to manoeuvre furniture in and out of.

Still, after a brief moment for me to check over the old place and take a few snapshots of it in all its forlorn emptiness, lock up, and run back and forth along the corridor to triple-check that I’d actually locked up, I was soon in the car and running the race to get to the house before they did, a task not made any easier because, just after I’d overtaken them and committed to one route, I noticed in my rear-view mirror that their Sat-Nav seemed to have persuaded them to use the other route.

Strangely, I’ve often wondered which route is the quickest, so it was with some surprise that, after various convoluted adventures through the evening madness in that “dual storyline” manner so popular in the movies, we arrived simultaneously at the mini roundabout at the top of the high street, and I was able to follow them back to where I live, just as the Beloved made it home from her own alternative route through the journey homewards.

Pretty soon after that we had, by some stroke of reasonable fortune, actually found spaces to pull in to, and, with a little effort to lug them up the steps and along half of the row of houses, two pieces of my mum’s old furniture were safely moved into the bursting chaos of my own little house.

“I can see you’ve got a lot of stuff to sort through…” said one of the affable but fairly knackered-looking Van Men as I handed over the cash, “Did that all come from your mum’s place…?”

“Oh yeah, sure…” I lied, once again feeling that slightly uneasy feeling I get whenever anyone comes into the house and sees how we choose to live, and, with a few swift directions to help them find their way back to where they’d left the first van, they went on their merry way with another job well done.

And so, dear reader, the saga of having to get the place cleared is all but over, and it’s a bit of a weight off my mind, to be honest with you, to finally know that that little job is finally behind me. They were a pretty decent pair of chaps, by the way, and I’d be prepared to let you have their number anytime if you needed such a service.

There are still one or two hurdles to hop over, not least the tricky matter that the sale could still fall through, and the only reason I’d been leaving stuff there was because sometimes people can’t visualise space unless there’s stuff in the room when they view a place, but sometimes in life you just have to bite a bullet and get things done, even if you have to put that bullet into a wayward sofa afterwards…