You have no concept of how much stuff is in your life until you have had to pack the whole lot into cardboard boxes in 12 hours. Which is what we did on Friday.

OK, so we cheated a little bit. The day started with the shipping company coming to take the 180 cubic feet of our things that we can ship by air freight. Fortunately, these guys packed as well, so all we had to do was point them at the relevant shelves and cupboards and they did the rest – scarily fast as well. N took great pleasure in pointing out the number of boxes that were required just to pack up the kitchen. But what’s the point of coming to California to take a cookery course if you don’t bring your tools??

So after about 2 and a half hours, the shipping was all packed up. The rest of the day was packing up boxes for storage. We must have thrown away about 15 sacks of rubbish over the course of the day, and I took 4 trips to the charity shop around the corner as well – and we still ended up with a ridiculous amount of stuff!

But we did get it all done in one day – from a completely full flat to a completely empty (and completely clean) flat by about 9:30pm. Impressive. But by that point we were too tired to care…

So, it starts here.

This is our last week in the UK.

Passports – check.

Visas – check.

Tickets – check (i hope)

So its just the packing to be done now – the simple process of parcelling a 2 bedroom flat into 4 heaps:

1) Ship to the US

2) Store for a year

3) Pack in a case to go on the flight

4) Get it out of the house – Oxfam, my sister, anyone else who will take things from us.

Oh, how simple it all sounds when you list it like that. My contribution to this so far has been primarily the placing of small sticky dots on various items, colour-coded to correspond to the groups above. On the other hand, I may be confusing ‘contribution’ with ‘displacement activity’.