“Where’s the charger?” My wife asks.
“What charger?” I say, for a moment I can’t think that we ever owned a charger.
“The charger that lives in the kitchen, where we charge batteries. Have you packed it?”
“I knew this would happen,” I say, “but I didn’t think it would be with the charger. I knew that eventually I’d pack something we needed.”
The last few weeks have been filled with episodes of packing up boxes, shifting boxes around, taking things to charity shops or to the recycling plant, and then, eventually, taking the occasional car load of stuff to the new house.
“I thought you weren’t going to do that,” my wife said, as I sweated under the weight of a box full of books as I crammed it into the car.
“Do what?”
“You said that because we were going to have a removals company, you weren’t going to do any moving yourself.”
“Yeah… but I’m going over there anyway. And it’s only a few boxes - and they’re out of the way then.”
“I think I put the charger in the drawer,” I say, “when the photos were being taken.” To add complication to the current situation we’re also trying to sell the house we’re in, but I can’t escape the feeling that we’ve left it a bit late.
“I can’t see it,” I say, looking in the drawer, “maybe it’s in that box…”
When the photographs were being taken we had to play an elaborate game of moving boxes from room to room in order to make the house look as though it wasn’t full of stacked up cardboard oblongs.
When the pictures were sent back to us the result was impressive.
“Our house does look nice,” I said.
“It’s a nice house!” Said my wife.
“I’d like it better if there weren’t boxes everywhere,” I said.
Part of the challenge of moving has been to get the eldest to pack up her room - I’ve been working on this for a year. “You should pack some of your room up,” I said, every time she came home for a university holiday.
“Why? What packing have you done?” She would ask, before claiming to have work to do. As a result no packing was done until what feels like the very last moment.
“I’ve got more stuff than I realised,” she said, “it just keeps coming out of the cupboard.”
“Really?” I said. “What a surprise.”
Slowly the house has begun to feel emptier, books have disappeared from shelves, then shelves have disappeared from floors and now… the charger has gone too.
“I can’t find it in the box,” I say, “I don’t know what I’ve done with it… perhaps it’s a mystery. It might have been abducted.”
“No,” my wife says from the kitchen, “it is in the drawer, under the grease proof paper.”
“Good heavens,” I say.
“Now,” she says, “where are the batteries?”
“I knew this would happen,” I say.
‘Saturday columns’ are short, sometimes (relatively) funny, basically true* stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life.
*Some names, locations and other details may have been changed to protect the guilty.