Undressing my room

Last weekend I took down my Dragon Age II poster.

I peeled the Lady of Shalott from my wall, rolled up an idyllic pastoral scene of animal apiarists and mammalian millers, unfastened a tearful graveyard-loiterer in a dark corset (she was probably crying because of her misformed left breast) from her resting place above my desk. You should see the resulting clump of blutak. It's big enough to hold the damaged light fitting in place.

This weekend I packed away my books. I made a list as I went (Box I: Hamlet, Dracula, The Bell Jar, etc; Box II: An Introduction to Jungian Psychology, and so on). I found a poetry collection my great aunt gave me for my 21st birthday, with a letter attached to the cover, noting some of the poems she knew well - poems her mother read to her and my grandfather at bedtime, her father's favourites, hers. I found books that were gifts from an assortment of friends over the years, and scattered their names throughout my diligent catalogue.

And then I started to take apart a tall and slender kitset shelf for easier transportation, and realised someone had affixed the back most firmly with nails - making the whole process of carrying it out to the hallway (tripping over several empty boxes on the way), laying it flat, and then unscrewing all screws a complete waste of time. Indeed, I had to rescrew some screws so the shelf would maintain a degree of structural integrity.

Eventually my room will be naked, but for now it's just a mess. I have too much stuff. How did I come to have so much stuff? Where does this stuff come from? How is the world so filled with stuff? And why do I keep things like mini play FlyBuys cards and lace-edge heart-shaped eye patches? I don't need them.

I'm going in three weeks. Three weeks. Then I'll be leaving for the other side of the world to live for two years. Meh. Even italics can't make it seem real.

Maybe the packing does, but just a tad - I've packed and unpacked so many times in the last few years. I don't really think it'll properly sink through my thick skull until I'm standing in an inordinately long queue at the Raffles Hotel in Changai Airport waiting for an overpriced Singapore Sling.

Pre-enactment: that moment you realise you're moving overseas (courtesy sumabeachlifestyle)

I thought I'd use the end of some of these blog entries to build a list of things I want to do while in the UK, and in Europe.

So, here's a start for you:

• Visit the Orkneys and the Shetlands
• Get a bagel and a hunk of mozzarella from Sainsburys, grill the former on the latter, and consume
• Meet Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
• High-five a puffin
• Do a whisky tour (somehow I failed to do that in 2013)
• Visit Tintagall and pull a knife from a clod of earth
• Buy some new socks and underpants (I kind of just need to do that regardless of where I am in the world)
• Visit Keats' grave in Italy