Life in a cardboard box

I moved to London on a cold winters day in early 2002 with my bright shining new Samsonite (wedding gift from aunt) containing the 20 kgs of life that the airline kindly permitted**. Now 20 kgs may seem a deceptively large number but when moving from parents home where every possible utensil and all design of linen is available, it is hard to decide what is essential to steal for the new home being set up. I decided that to make life slightly less complicated I would first pack my clothes and then depending on space/ weight available choose a few utensils.

Having heard all about the legendary London winter I ended up packing nice thick clothes, gloves, beanie hats, a variety of woolen socks and solid shoes. Needless to say my 20kgs filled up really quickly.

And I brought no utensils.

When we began packing up our things last week for the move my initial thought was that we didn’t have too much stuff. We'd been careful about collecting junk and consciously clearing out the unessential. Nothing a few cardboard boxes and suitcases couldn’t hold. I was so wrong.

In our 3.5 years in the rented flat we seem to have collected 20 large files of paper (bills, leaflets, notices, letters etc.) that could better be used as nest materials for some poor birds, numerous pieces of ‘decorative’ items – mirrors, wooden statuettes, assorted candles, paintings and etchings, 5 x 4ft stacks of books, a mile high pile of MAD and National Geographic’s and plenty of other things. When I say ‘we’ I mainly mean me – I have become a bit of a hoarder and till DNA proves otherwise I’m blaming it on my genes.

Most of this stuff is not what I need, just what I want. I am the Accumulator. Seemingly I need to be surrounded by these materialistic things – wood, paper, plastic and ink.

Moving day was an eye-opener. 24 small, fairly flimsy cardboard boxes and 6 medium-big strong cardboard boxes later we were three-fourths packed. A kitchen of stuff lovingly brought bit by bit from the Indian kitchens of my family and procured from supermarkets here, packed with care. Pressure cooker. Idli-maker. Belan and tawa. Woks and pans. Home ground masalas. Matching storage baskets. Cleaning materials. Plates and bowls. Crockery and wooden salad servers. Table mats. Table runners. Hand embroidered napkins and holders. Fondue set. Dals of different shapes and sizes. All the essentials to create the meals for our bellies.

Clothes got dumped into suitcases. The all important footwear took up more space that we thought possible. Knickknacks sorted into piles to take with us, give away or recycle. Packing was done in a wonderment of where all this stuff had been hiding all this time. We even resorted to bin bags at the end of it. Our movers arrived early and within an hour and a half had moved our rented lives into what we hope will be our very own home for the next few years. Up and down in the lift, several trips through the corridor and into assigned rooms. The new flat looked oddly empty even with all the boxes.

Our furniture arrived the next morning. Or rather its parts did. The assembly men efficiently assembled solid pieces in a few short hours. Hey presto, we suddenly own furniture – a bed, sofa’s, chairs, dining apparatus’. Now it looks less bare but not complete. Just a higgledy-piggledy mess of boxes and bin bags.

Now we must disassemble these boxes and find storage space for all our things. A shelf for linen, hangers for clothes, shoe rack for the millions.

Slow and steady. Breathe deep. Don’t let stress headache take over. My entire motto’s for the mo.

**This is my firm view: the people who decide how much luggage can be carried when you move abroad (anywhere but the USA) are all idiots. Period. Why is it that when you travel to the US you can have 2 pieces of baggage each weighing up to 32kgs but when moving anywhere else you can only carry 20kgs? Do people in other parts of the world need less? Idiots.