Comic Cuts - 6 August 2010

I was planning to relate the tale of our move but time has raced away from me again so I shall skip through the boring details. As long-time readers will know we learned in May that we would have to move out of our home of 15 years. The reason was the possible leap in Capital Gains Tax the new government was planning to introduce; our landlord decided to sell the house and we were given two months notice.

Much packing later...

We planned to move over two weekends due to the sheer volume of stuff that I surround myself with. I'm not complaining—I love my stuff and have made a living from it for twenty years—but there's a lot of it and it's bloody heavy. As well as a hire van we were also using a friend's van and a friend's car, meaning we could shift a few tons of goods over a single weekend. I have to admit that the huge number of boxes that appeared out of the attic on Sunday was a bit of a shock as I had no idea we had so much stashed away up in the roof.

We managed to move far more over the first weekend than I thought we would but that still left a hell of a lot to move on weekend number two. But we managed it, with an awful lot of help from friends and family. On Sunday 25th we officially moved in, although to be honest all we did that Sunday was clear enough space to sleep and hit the sack.

Monday we discovered that we didn't have a working phone. We did, however, get a chance to explore a little. We've moved from a large detatched house on a main road with lots of room but little character in Colchester to a smaller, three-bed, semi-detatched house in Wivenhoe, about six miles away. In the 19th century, village life was based around the River Colne, which meanders through this part of Essex out to the North Sea, only a few miles away. It was a port and the main industries were fishing, ship building (yachts, mostly, I believe) and smuggling. Nowadays it's home to the University of Essex, although still has a lot of that old sleepy village atmosphere. We're five minutes walk from what used to be the docks on the river and have wandered down a couple of times to the pub that sits right by the river. And explored a couple of the other pubs in the area, one of which does great food, cheap. There's an entry at Wikipedia if you want to find out more.

From my point of view we've got everything we need within a couple of minutes walk: a book shop, a library, two post offices, a Co-Op, six pubs, two fish 'n' chip shops, a train station, a good bus service to Colchester—we're closer to where Mel works—and, yes, finally, a telephone and access to the internet.

The downside is that I've had to get back to work and the mountain of boxes in the lounge is still a mountain. But I'm hoping that it will become foothills of boxes before too long and eventually return to being an unbroken, if rather dull and flat, landscape of carpet once again. We shall see.