Yankee Ingenuity

Before I begin, I apologize to those of you who had difficulty accessing the blog yesterday. I am without my two trusty IT  consultants/children, and have had to rely on my own sorely lacking technological skills...or lack thereof. On with the post!

We arrived in our newly adopted town loaded down with nine suitcases. Filled with clothing.  Every single item of clothing we each owned. And shoes. Lots of shoes. We were prepared for both scaling lofty peaks and the odd black-tie dinner party.  We could now golf in comfort as well as flip-flop down a sandy beach. Unfortunately, we had not a pot, a towel, a chair of any sort or a bed. No worries! Our trusty container of all of our worldly goods was due to arrive in a mere three weeks! We could do anything for three weeks! Right?

We had temporary digs arranged whilst sorting out our more permanent home. We had one week to secure the items needed to make a our home comfortable until our furnishing arrived. Storage is a huge issue here, as it is rarely exists, and the idea of spending our precious pounds on items we would have in a matter of weeks seemed silly. This was going to exceed the bounds of a PhD education,  a lifetime of HGTV marathons and require good old Yankee ingenuity.

In the US, one can walk into any number of vast, expansive big-box stores and walk out with cat litter, a refrigerator,  firearms and Milk Duds...all from the same shopping trip and with marked savings from their competitor. In the UK,  such gigundo monuments to capitalism exist, but only in the larger cities. So instead of meandering through 1066 country imagining ourselves at a medieval banquet, or listening to Big Ben chime the hour, or enjoying a quaff in an ancient pub, we went to ASDA and Argos. They are the British equivalents to  Wal-Mart and Keys or Sam Solomon. We had found shopping NIRVANA!

Air mattress seemed to be the logical substitution for regular beds. We could store them  to use when university child wanted to bring friends home to visit. We were genius!Or so we thought. Sleeping on an air mattress after the age of five proves to be both a challenge and the modern version of  medieval torture. We did splurge on the deluxe models...I do, however,  believe shipping pallets covered in a thin, scratchy  wool blanket would have been infinitely more comfortable. And easier to board. Our mattresses became more like glorified rafts and staying on them as easy as navigating the North Sea in a  rubber kayak. In a storm. Let's just say getting up during  the night, as one does after a certain age, was an adventure I would just as soon forget.

For chairs, we decided to get cushioned lounge chairs that could go out in the garden once our "real" chairs arrived. Again, we thought we were so very, very smart.  We picked out a lovely trio of sun loungers topped with bright orange and bottle-green striped cushions. It was the end of the season.  And for the first four or five minutes we watched our newly acquired TV in absolute  blissful comfort. As one much more astute than we might have already deduced, however, these types of chairs are not intended for long bouts of sitting. They have relatively thin cushions supported by a spring system constructed of wire not unlike dental floss.  My only consolation is that the chairs were only a few pounds. For three of them. Probably should have been a clue.

The other needed items were much easier to procure and use. We bought a wok and a few multi-purpose bowls, towels, laundry supplies and other various sundries from our local DIY store. And finally after 21 days, the clouds parted, the angels sang, and all was well in my little world - our shipping container arrived. We had done it! We had survived our middle-class, suburban, camping adventure/Hell! It was like Christmas! Real beds with real mattresses and pots and pans and wine glasses and chairs!

I am glad we had the experience we did. I can honestly say I truly appreciate what we have. I can also honestly say that this years bonfire may have some strangely familiar items on it...perhaps a stripey sun lounger and a bed raft or two? Just sayin'.