The Exodus (Part 4)

“Here it comes,” shouted Mike down the stairs, as he viewed the removals lorry pulling up outside his house, from his vantage point of his bedroom window.

They had been up north for four weeks since leaving the Isle of Wight the last time, and in that period they had been extremely busy. They had crammed in four weddings, three joint leaving do’s, two gigs, numerous leaving drinks with numerous different people, a recording studio session, and the packing of their entire possessions into boxes.

The friends, acquaintances and hangers on that they had said goodbye to reached into the hundreds and the response from them all was overwhelming. Mike and Claire had not appreciated how much people loved them, and how many lives they had touched along the way, and now that it was coming to an end there were a number of emotional moments. However, they had observed that the other people were commonly more emotional and upset than they were, and this was put down to a theory of Mike’s, that the good gentleman will not mind being stated in this journal as he is a subscribing member.

‘Life is about moving. One must move from one place to another, one must meet different people, one must busy themselves with different activities, one must in general experience new stimuli in order to grow and develop and truly live a full life. Each time you try something different it will always feel uncomfortable at first because humans inherently feel comfortable with what they know. This is the defence mechanism that we are born with and the wall that must be overcome in order for people to live the fullest of lives.

When a person tries something different their focus is on the destination, their energy is concentrated on achieving something good, and this generates an amount of excitement and enthusiasm. When they say goodbye to someone from their existing life, that person holds a certain amount of envy because someone else is being brave and making a change, but also the sadness comes from that person concentrating on the emptiness that will be caused by someone leaving their life, as opposed to the excitement being felt by the leaver.’

Anyway… let us continue with the main plot.

The main nub of this initial prose is to put across to the reader that Mike and Claire were extremely busy in the month between leaving the Isle of Wight and then having to return to the Isle of Wight.

Mike finished work a week before they left, and so Claire was charged with completing most of the early packing, which of course the honourable lady carried out with minimal fuss and efficient delivery. They then both concentrated on the completion of the task in the last week together. To paint a picture that would provide the witness with a sense of scale of the packing mentioned, it could be said that they had enough boxes to build a replica ‘Wall’ that Pink Floyd used in their presentation of ‘The Wall’ when performed live in London when the album was released. They could have built a copy of the Berlin Wall if East Berlin and West Berlin were the size of two Penalty Areas. I think you will have the picture now, needless to say that they filled a big lorry with their contents.

And it is with the lorry appearing that we re-join our intrepid travellers. It was around 3 o’clock when Mike had shouted downstairs, and by six o’clock the removals men, of which there were two, had closed the lorry for the day and made their beds within it. They then spent the night parked outside Mike and Claire’s house, sleeping in relative luxury in some built in beds in the cab.

Mike and Claire’s evening was somewhat different to this. Up until eight o’clock everything was fine, and then Sophie, their daughter, chose to violently vomit all over herself, her toys and her blanket. It would have been just one of those things if the washing machine hadn’t been packed by then, and then throughout the night Mike and Claire were on an all-night vigil as Sophie could not settle and then had a seizure at four o’clock in the morning. They all slept on the living room floor as all of the beds had been packed, and a scene less like Trainspotting had never been seen before.

When the removals men knocked on the door at eight o’clock the next morning, Mike and Claire had slept for roughly two hours each. They then had to muster enough energy to continue to pack the rest of their belongings into the lorry, and also once the lorry had departed, they then had to clean the house from top to bottom in order to leave it in a desirable state for their successors into 439 Manchester Rd. This would have been achieved with less effort if Claire had then not caught the bug that Sophie had, and was then also laid out on some bags in the now empty lounge, in a scene compared to the fateful end of Lord Admiral Nelson.

Through grit and determination, and the help of one Mother-in-Law, they managed to vacate the property by four o’clock and make the long drive down to Southampton, made longer by the lack of sleep and sickness that followed them like the Grim Reaper. As Mike laid his head upon the pillow that evening he reflected on the past 48 hours, and considered that all in all it had been an incredible trial, but one that they had ridden through and now they were surely on the downhill finale.

The foursome had become a five, with a tribal elder joining their party, as they sat on the ferry the next morning. The tribal elder with all of their wisdom and generosity had supplied Mike with a bacon sandwich which he was now tucking into, in this hour of respite before the next onslaught began. For once they were off the boat he knew that they would then have to empty the contents of the lorry, which took them about eight hours to load in the first place.

After collecting the keys from the estate agent and signing the necessary papers, and more importantly paying the first six month’s rent, they then hot footed round to their new abode to remind themselves of exactly what they had done. They weren’t disappointed. The house seemed bigger than they remembered and the sea views were better than they remembered, and this encouraged them to get settled in as quickly as possible so that they could enjoy living there as soon as possible.

All of the boxes and furniture were off loaded in five hours, which was slightly quicker than the time it had taken to get them on in the first place, but the reason for this was the state that they left each of the rooms in. This of course was not the removal men’s fault, but there were boxes piled high everywhere you could see, and the eventual clearing of these boxes took the next week to finally get through.

The exodus from the North was complete. The Isle of Wight was now their home, and a list of endless opportunity waits to be seized. This is being written from an attic room whilst gazing through the window at the English Channel, and watching boats travel to and fro in the background. This is the dream that I’m now living, and it’s now up to us to take as much of it as we want.