We arrived here mid-afternoon after a broken night, a harried departure and a smooth journey. En route, in our separate cars, we heard firstly that completion on our old property had gone through, and an hour later, completion on our new one: we would arrive as the legal incumbents of Highfield, ready to embrace this new life in Cornwall.
Our furniture had arrived. And gone away again. There was no way the lorry could gain access to the property. This was our fault: we had given assurances that there were no access problems. Standing in the garden it was obvious that the lorry would never have made it. Somehow, sitting in our old house, having seen this new house just twice, it had all seemed so very accessible.
What was not our fault however, was that the guys couldn’t even provide us with our bed. Because they had miscalculated the size of the load, they had stayed late the night before: juggling items around in the lorry before finally admitting defeat. We agreed that some non-essential items could come down separately next week when the company has another move to Cornwall booked, and we thought no more about it. But in all that juggling, despite having been one of the last things to be loaded, the bed had found its way into the heart of the lorry and now it couldn’t be reached. The guys did a couple of runs using a transit – unloading from a local village car park – and delivered us a few random, non-essential packing cases and a great deal of random, non-essential garage and garden stuff, before heading off for the evening and promising to return early in the morning with a larger vehicle and a larger team.
By this evening we will have everything here apart from what couldn’t fit on the lorry in the first place. And by this evening the residents of the local village will have witnessed the contents of our house being decanted from the back of one lorry into a smaller one. We have yet to visit this village. I suspect everyone will know who we are very quickly, and many will know what the inside of our house looks like. We may already have acquired a reputation! I had brought food for us for this first evening but Bernie wanted something lighter, and a chair to sit on, and we opted to eat out. We chose a village in the opposite direction…
A Corner of Cornwall 