Goodbye to all that

So the sun finally sets for me over Donich Lodge.  Today I am moving my permanent base to Castlebank to join J (although it is my intention to return one more time to give the house a final clean).  R is staying part time in Lochgoilhead to look after Lucky until the new people move in which should be in about a month.  It is incredibly kind of them to take Lucky because he is a genuine Highland Wildcat and he would be miserable in a town, even if he weren’t killed on the road.  I only hope he gets on with their cats ok – I think he will because he is actually very nice natured.

So the ladies were loaded into their boxes and off we set eastwards.  To cut a long story short, lets just say that they made their displeasure about this pretty evident by howling the whole way.  When we arrived at Castlebank, we quickly decanted them into J’s basement bathroom put a load of towels and sheets in there and left them with a litter tray, water and food.  We then taped the door closed to prevent the removal men going in there.  J objected to this quite vociferously because he felt that this would create a president for where the cats thought they were going to be living – we just ignored him.

Then Pickford’s turned up.  They were not best pleased when they discovered that they could not get their full sized lorry up our driveway.  I can’t say that I had a great deal of sympathy because I had described the driveway in great detail in the moving document which they hadn’t read.  They could also have looked at it on Google Earth.  So after much huffing over this, they decanted the furniture into the smaller van and moved it up the drive in three separate lots.  I have to say they did this with extreme rapidity and without breaking anything (well one chair but I will let them off that as it was one my father had repaired rather unskillfully thirty years ago), so I gave them a substantial tip and filled in their form with “very satisfied”.

But…  Once they had gone, we looked around in detail and all was not well.  They had basically almost entirely ignored the labelling system for the boxes (green had been supposed to be for basement, red for ground floor, blue for upstairs) and dropped all the boxes in random rooms.  Additionally, they had put a load of my smaller boxes into bigger boxes and dumped everything in the garage, meaning that not only did we have to carry everything to its correct location, but also get rid of their cardboard as well as our own.  Not a company I would use again.

After having moved as many boxes as we could into the approximate postions they should have been in in the first place, we enjoyed some very large fish suppers in the basement lounge (about the only half comfortable place in the house) and collapsed into bed.  I could not find any double sheets for mine and ended up wrapped in a duvet cover.