The Missing Barometer

Week One: Sunday 1 - Saturday 7 October 2006

We arrived in Falmouth around eleven o'clock at night in a hired van full of our belongings; 'we' being my wife, our daughter and, of course, myself. It was a ten hour drive from our previous home/life in Lockerbie, Scotland, including no less than six stops to allow our daughter to banish her continually mounting, and literal, cabin fever.

After we drove through the streets attempting to locate the house that was to be our new home for a year, my thoughts turned to emptying the van as quickly as possible and getting some sleep in order to be as alert as possible for my new start first thing on Monday morning.

With our little one now fast asleep across the passenger seats, and our belongings being relatively meagre, I was upbeat about being in and having a mattress, at least, down within the hour.

The plans of mice and men!

The front door opened as I approached and our new landlady stumbled out, hands full of bags and with her ten-day-old baby boy strapped to her front. She appeared hot wired to Red Bull as she welcomed us, ushered us in and disappeared off to her hire van.

It wasn’t what we wanted or expected. If my heart was sinking, it crashed through the pit of my feet as I walked in and surveyed the scene. It appeared she only began to move out the second she saw our van approach. To make matters worse, her Spanish husband was lying sleeping against the living room wall; working off another boozy session in celebration at the birth of his son. Fair play, but timing’s not just everything in comedy.

How were we going to get anything in at all, never mind in an hour or so, when they hadn’t begun to move out yet? In true coping in a crisis style we managed it. My wife and I passed the landlady at the doorway of the house like ships in the night going through the Panama Canal as we shuttled between respective vans laden with our respective belongings.

Another problem was that what appeared to be meagre belongings when packed up in Scotland now appeared to be an articulated lorry full, coming from a magic lorry that never, ever empties no matter how long or fast you work to reach that goal! Relativity, eh!

However, by 2.00am the deed was done: we were in and they were out. By this time we had placed our daughter on a double mattress that was occupying the only available floor space; we crashed down beside her, more or less fully clothed, and got some much needed and well earned rest.

Relativity reared its less attractive side again as my mobile phone alarm woke me at what said 8.00am, but I was convinced I had only just shut my eyes!

Banging into boxes, walking into walls, and opening the wrong doors I washed and dressed desperately trying not to wake my nearest and dearest. I was as subtle and silent as a blind hippo on roller skates.

And so to our new life, my new start. Not a job. No, that would be too easy. Work has gone for a year and I am back at university, having sworn never to return after doing a post-graduate diploma twelve years ago.

So, no work, not much money, and almost no home – to call our own at least!

The rest of the week flew past. I skipped off to school everyday, getting to know my new classmates and teachers, and doing some work, while my wife stayed at home with our daughter and made sense of our boxes and belongings.

All the early indications are that it will be a pleasurable and quick year, for all three of us. The weekend came quicker than a belch after a fizzy drink and the week was full of positives. The students, the tutors, the college, Falmouth too, by now our home, all have a nice feel to them.

The only thing that broke the reverie was catching the news on the radio and dipping into the local paper. The former reminded me that there is a world out there struggling to come to terms with itself. The latter that Falmouth and Cornwall is not the utopia I was being lulled into believing it might be; it has its problems like anywhere else.

For my wife and I, the biggest indicator of how things will go is our daughter. She hasn’t shown any sign of missing anything from her ‘past’ life, and has been rushing about being the little miss we love and have come to know so well. The consensus, then, is that this has been the right move, at the right time, to the right place.

Amen to that!