No matter where you live, you will almost certainly amass “stuff.” Doesn’t matter how fastidious you are with filing, sorting or arranging files and boxes, there will always be some things that you put away hoping to use in the future, only to find some time later that you’ve either forgotten where you put it, or no longer have a use for it – whatever it is!
We moved into our current house in 2004, sixteen years ago. We moved from a small, two up, two down, and here we were with oodles of room. Or so we thought.
It didn’t take long for the four of us to fill every room and the sheds! In fact one shed contained the unused boxes from our old house. Perhaps we thought that at some point in the future we would come to use whatever it was we’d carefully boxed up?
Fast forward to 2020 and here we are staring at those same boxes and wondering what is inside and then finding either, things we’d thought were lost for good, or things that we thought “why on earth did we keep that?!”
We’ve lost count of the amount of times we’ve visited the tip with a car load of “stuff.” In fact we’re so regular there that we are now on first name terms with the staff! “Hi Tony. What you got for us today?”
While some of the stuff has been rendered totally useless by the ravages of time, thankfully, we have been able to recycle a lot of our old possessions and donated many items to our local charity shop which supports the East Anglian Children’s Hospice (EACH) and as we’re both tax payers, they benefited by claiming tax relief on each purchase when sold. Tony filmed with them years ago when he helped to make a programme for ITV about four girls who had Harlequin Ichthyosis and the EACH hospice provided much needed respite for the families. You can find out about it by searching the internet. It was nominated for a BAFTA and it’s a programme Tony is immensely proud of.
PACKING UP OUR OLD MEMORIES
After days and days of sifting through our old bits and bobs, we decided that we would take some old memories with us and some of the family items like photos and personal things that had sentimental value that we wanted to keep in the family would all go into our eldest daughters loft for safe keeping.
This meant loading up the car, meeting up somewhere half way between Norfolk and Sussex (where our eldest lives) and transferring all the stuff. We had originally planned on going down to see them for a couple of days, but with lock down and the country being set into “tiers” this became problematic – we are in tier 2 as is Sussex and rules are no families can meet indoors. Whatever your views on how things have been handled, it would be churlish for us to get caught out, so we played it safe for everyone’s safety.
REDUNDANCY?
Tony had been furloughed since April and, as expected, and has happened with many companies, redundancies were looming and it wasn’t long before, rather than be invited back to work, two employees would face the agonising wait to discover who would go.
In the end, the company took the easy decision. Although at first they refused to look at voluntary redundancies, they went through the usual “points” system to gauge who would be in the firing line. However, they finally saw sense and I was able to take voluntary redundancy – I mean, I was going to hand my notice in come January anyway, so why make a younger employee with a young family redundant just before Christmas when I was already a willing volunteer?
OUR BOAT MUST HAVES?
Later in the month we were able to take a day out to nearby Lowestoft – England’s most easterly point. We would often bring the girls to the beach here, well, Jan did as I was more often than not away working. The beaches are lovely and there are rows of beach huts adorning the northern promenade just past the pier.
We were looking forward to our usual bag of chips from our favourite pier front chippie, but sadly, it was closed. Never mind. We sat down and chatted about what features we would like in our narrowboat. Did we want a dinette (and how do you pronounce that word???) Were we concerned about how many beds it had? You can have look and see what we decided were our top ten features in the vlog we posted HERE.
