More Furniture

Today the furniture arrived from Norfolk.  This was basically most of the contents of the house in Norfolk where J grew up.  Compared to the stuff R and I brought from Donich Lodge, it is the correct period for the house (broadly at least – it varies from Regency to Edwardian).  We had all of this stuff (not only furniture but lots of china, glass and other antiques) in storage for six months and it was really great to get it back – none of it is extrinsically massively valuable on a piece by piece basis – but it is of great sentimental value to J, and to a lesser extent to me.

I must say that Hadley and Ottoway the local removals firm from Norfolk made a great deal better job of the whole removal than the national chain Pickford’s did – which tells you a great deal about national chains in general.  They managed to put everything in the room where it was intended to go – even all the boxes.  They were also a great deal better humoured and friendly than the other team had been and even enjoyed my coffee and sandwiches.

When they had gone we surveyed another enormous pile of “stuff”.  Having just about sort of started to get on top of the original mountain, we have been catapulted back to the foot hills.  But heigh ho, it is nice to see the stuff back.  I have also been reunited with a lot of my clothes and personal belongings – to give a little recap at this point – last year I had to have a couple of major operations on my foot, and right at the point when I was recovering from the first one, I had to go down to Norfolk several times in quick succession to help pack the house up.  So travelling by train, and hobbling badly on my injured foot, I couldn’t carry much stuff and got round this by just leaving my clothes behind each time.  By the time I had done this three or four times there were lots of clothes and other things like shoes and bags and toiletries  which all ended up getting packed in boxes.

Anyway, the ladies immediately took to the Victorian furniture.