One Set of Keys

It’s frightening just how many keys you accumulate when you own a house. Take a quick look around; empty your pockets. House, back door, sheds, car, work, electricity meters, bike, windows, safe, mum’s, next door neighbours’, the set you somehow still have from a house you owned 5 years ago, the one which opens you have no idea what. But better not throw away just in case.

I’ve got one set of keys today. It’s a little bit freaky. It’s a hell of a lot lighter in the pocket department. Gone are the old house keys – gone is the house for that matter – plus work, plus car. Now, from our bed, I can see the kids’ bedrooms, the kitchen, bathroom and the steering wheel. It’s quite hard to believe that our nebulous ideas for a couple of years and firmer plan for the last six months have now materialised after much hard work, stress and sheer lugging, mainly by Joe. We have sold our home and practically everything in it, and now our home is one that roams. A 29 foot American motorhome towing a petit French car. How very cosmopolitan. Just as well probably, as we intend to roam this home pretty far and wide over the next few years. Despite disposing of almost every possession, so it seemed, we’re still stuffed to the gills. It’s cosy, to say the least, in these four sort-of walls. Even though the RV feels about the size of an articulated lorry. Three kids aged 12, 10 and 8 demand a LOT of stuff. And somehow the limit of 10 toys each seems to have been blown by a mixture of subterfuge, smuggling and plain old pleading. But our ship-sized container and indeed six-bedroom house were empty on time, though of course it went right down to the wire.

Just as the whole process of selling had been an exhilirating frustrating rollercoaster ride, so was the actual moving. Since the sale was agreed in April we have had incredibly fast, adrenaline filled sections where we thought we had to be out within days, only to get stuck at the top of some precarious precipice – hanging. Delays, distractions and downright dodginess down the chain plagued us. Moving day didn’t see us so much ride triumphantly into the sunset, but stomp off huffily, still uncertain. Despite our buyers placing their removals van and their own car right in front of our front door from 8.30am (leaving us nowhere to park to load our remaining stuff into our car), we left at 11.30am with our solicitor telling us “it’s all a bit of a mess, really”. In the stereotypically STUPID English and Welsh system of house sales, even as we locked the door for the last time and handed over those cumbersome keys to the estate agent, there was still no guarantee that completion would actually occur, that we would really get some money. One dodgy buyer further down the chain had not provided some document or other, so we were told that the sale probably wouldn’t go through that day. What do you do? Try and contact all the people you sold beds to, to buy them back for a night, possibly more? Unpack all your bedding? Sleep once more in a totally empty house? Wee in the nicely bleached toilets?! Eat out again – so as not to muck up the oven? Not that we had any food any more. Or plates. Or fridge. No, we resolutely dithered for a couple of hours in a cafe, desperate to go and desperate to have sold, then headed off to the other side of the country where our van, our new home, was patiently waiting.