A Nomad has few belongings

Moving home is such a headache.  All those objects you accumulate year after year - they have to be hauled out and moved to the new home.  For me this particular challenge was slightly more challenging than you would expect.  I didn't have a home to move my stuff into.  I figured I had a few options.

1) Try to sell as much stuff as possible and take everything not sold to the recycling depot.
2) Just take everything to the recycling depot.
3) Hire storage space somewhere for my belongings.

The problem with the first option is lack of time to do this.  I do not have a partner I can ask to sell my stuff while I am at work.  Well actually I sort of had a partner, but we agreed this weekend to just be friends - and I guess we were just friends all along.

The second option seemed feasible.  I am not really attached to all these belongings, with the exception of my books.  I have hundreds of books, and they certainly are not going to fit into my van.  I very rarely read a book twice so why keep hold of them?  I do like to have books on display.  Someone once said a room without a book is like a body without a soul.  Or something along those lines.  Well, I decided a dozen or so books in my van would be fine, It would be a case of one new book in, and one of the old ones out.

I dismissed the third option.  I hired storage space when I worked in Europe and indeed this is convenient.  I decided I could live without the books.   So everything except that which was not required in the van would be gone.

I asked around and found a few guys who were prepared to give up a Saturday or Sunday to help me haul my stuff out of the apartment.  I could use the van to transport the stuff to the recycling depot.

But I didn't think it possible to get this job done in one afternoon. I decided to hire a house clearance firm to take my stuff away.  I am sure they thought they were on to a winner, and indeed they were.  I paid them two hundred pounds to take all my stuff away - and some of this stuff they themselves will probably sell for additional profit.  And good luck to them for whatever profit they make - these men are hard workers and I really admire someone prepared to do a hard day's work.

But I wasn't going to give it all away.  I estimated that the kitchen floor space was about the same size as the vans floor space.  So the stuff I wanted to keep was placed in the kitchen. The kitchen was soon full.  I just had to be ruthless, and just keep things that I had to have - clothes, laptops, tools, important documents etc.

The sheer number of documents I had accumulated was phenomenal.  I was up at three in the morning going through them all, shredding all but that which I definitely needed to keep: exam certificates, tax and identity documents.  I finished the filtering process at 8.00 - so it took me five hours going through all this.  It was very strange, going though all those documents and the memories that came back left me somewhat emotional.

After the guys finished their hauling I got into the van and drove to a camp site in Chichester.  And it is here on the camp site that I write this blog.

So it's all done.  My being is separated from my belongings.  I am one step closer to the honour of wearing the badge of the real nomad.

Peace to all.