The Daily Novel

Writing this plunged in gloom. Packing cases all around. The walls stripped of pictures. No longer a home but a shell. And there in the middle of the floor the large black leather sofa, a vived reminder of the high cost of moving. The tall thin man and the small squat man from our removers took it around to the flat in Savernake Road yesterday. With many backwards and forwards movements they got it around several landings up to the second floor. But they could not get it through the door to the flat.

With the tall man below bearing the weight and the small man in front devising the strategy they tried with many twists and turns to squeeze it through our new front door. But finally they had to admit failure. There was a slight possibility that they might have been able to get in if they had been able to open the door of the flat opposite. But there was no human response to our knocking on the door, just a mixture in irritable barking and low growling from the dog inside.

So down it had to go. And there it stands now. And I realise that I shall have to let it go. Despite all my efforts to adopt a Buddhist attitude of letting go of material things I don’t want to lose it. It is incredibly comfortable. and takes four adults. It has been the scene many times of of rollicking laughter at something on the television or a joke cracked by one the household. It has served as a spare bed for someone who didn’t want to go home after a party.

Now it stands empty and forlorn. And I have a problem. There is not even time to give it away. And I don’t want to give it away because it cost me an arm and a leg and it still has many years of life in it. So it will go in the van to Dorset tomorrow and I shall endeavour to sell it there.

But I should not complain. At least another calamity was averted, surely because of the intervention and that God whom I don’t believe in. I had told the thin man to take the picture above the mantlepiece in the upstairs sitting room to Savernake. I had made a mistake. My wife met him in the hallway and sent back upstairs to put it back. Which he did but it missed the picture hook and crashed down knocking the vase which had bought for some wedding anniversary into the hearth. Incredibly it bounced. The tall man held it up and spun it round to demonstrate to my wife that there was not a chip or a crack anywhere.

It is about 7 AM. The sun has just emerged above the roofs of the houses behind the house in Roderick Road, Gospel Oak, which tomorrow will no longer be our home. This is the last time I shall see it between the branches of the lime tree. This is the last blog I shall write from Roderick. This is the last time I shall turn, lost for words, and gaze at the garden, hoping for inspiration that will give me the final sentence. This is the final sentence from Roderick Road. My wife is now up urging me to do something useful, like disconnecting the computer ready for the removal men to shove it a box when they arrive in an hour’s time. I am reluctant to stop. I have lit another cigarette. I don’t want to accept it. But this really is the last sentence from Roderick Road. And I have to go and find the marking tape to ensure that the computer ends up in my study in Dorset not in the attic.