The house sale was agreed. Now everything was real. No turning back. Game on.

Now the lists started. And the lists about lists. Medical aid, inoculations; homeschooling, what to sell, what to store, what  to pack,  what insurance….where was our starting destination? Our minds were swimming and the clock was now officially ticking. So much admin, time to crack on… out came the arch lever file, file dividers  ( I’m still a but old school) and the spreadsheets.

Walking through the house and going through our belongings and furniture we decided we had to be  ruthless. It was quite staggering how much we had accumulated over the past ten years  in Cape Town.  The liberating thing was that we weren’t entirely sure where this journey would take us. The official line was that we would return to  Cape Town, but if an opportunity were to arise, and certain  lifestyle prerequistes were ticked, we would not be  adverse to trying a new life somewhere else.  With this mindset it was time to declutter.  We tried our hand at a couple of car boot sales, but it was tough graft and the sales weren’t great.  The second car boot we did, our stand looked like Selfridges in the middle of a bank of £Pound shops. The stall next to us thought they could sell a  commemorative plate from the 1978 Plumstead Scout group – adorned with pictures of all the boys from that year. Really??! It made my dusty golf clubs look like 100 Carrat diamonds. No more car boots sales.

Being OCD has a lot of downsides, but it does have some upsides. To say I’m organised is an understatement …stupidly so. I’d make a great PA or wife. It’s disturbing how organised my wardrobe is. The one upside is that I generally know where stuff is, so when it came to pricing up our belongings that we intended to sell, I had meticulously filed away all the receipts and manuals pertaining to purchases. Ploughing through the receipts and seeing just how much had been spent on ‘stuff’ made me want to vomit.  Top prices paid for things that just sit idle, gathering dust, going out of fashion and depreciating by the second.   In order to save time by advertising and selling things ourselves we enlisted a specialist company to do it on our behalf, and for their troubles they took a decent cut. We made a list of what we were prepared to sell items for, but our price expectations were met with  raised eyebrows. It seemed our perceived market value of things was way off the mark much to our dismay. Hard lines, but we had to cut our losses and become minimalists.

In my next life I will become a Buddhist monk, and own nothing but a robe and a decent razor, or I might even be tempted to take that path somewhere in the ensuing months…I’m sure Becky and the kids can cope.