So plans are underway for our impending move to Shanghai. There are various good reasons for this, the main one being that I refuse to give birth in Harbin where hospital provision is somewhat basic and monolingual Chinese, and I won’t be allowed to fly after the end of April-ish, so to attend a hospital in Shanghai I need to be living there. Once the baby’s born in July
I will be free to travel, but the baby needs a passport before it’s allowed on a plane, and a visa before it’s officially allowed to live in China – a bit of a joke when you consider it’ll never have been anywhere else – and I’d like it to have had a few vaccinations before I take it on a Chinese flight. So we reckoned about 6 months in Shanghai was the minimum, and might be fun anyway.
We’re quite attached to the hotel which we always stay in when we go there, despite an entertainingly patchy room service which frequently results in breakfast turning up inconveniently late or early and almost always with the wrong cutlery (ever tried eating cornflakes with a knife and fork?). But six months in such a place would not only be horrifically expensive but would drive us (me) insane, not to mention the unfortunate other guests who had to live next door to our screaming newborn (!), so we’ve been forced to find what we have to keep remembering to call an ‘apartment’ to move into.
When I say ‘move’, it’s not so much a move as an ultra-decadent bid to have not one but two homes in China (as well as one in the UK, of course), due to the fact that a) Peter’s job – though do-able from Shanghai – is really based in Harbin and will require him to be here at least two days a week, b) we can’t quite bear to commit ourselves to either leaving our Harbin flat or to leaving Shanghai when the essential period is over, and c) unknown to us, a two-year lease had been signed on the Harbin flat - sorry, apartment. So we did the maths and worked out we could
just afford to keep two places going for six months, without having to resort to the elaborate subletting plan proposed by Boss but which, we were told in no uncertain terms by Kevin, our Harbin landlords Would Not Like.
That was the easy bit.
Now, anyone reading this who’s known me for a long time will have an idea of my record on house moves. For the rest of you, you could say it’s, well, What I Do. Some people throw themselves into their careers; some excel at sport; others collect stamps. I move house. I think at the last count it was 22 times, four of which occurred before the age of seven and the remainder after the age of 18. One friend always used to joke that she needed a separate address book just for me. The total could possibly be more, depending on what exactly you classify as a move. For example, if I moved from one part of a student hall of residence to another (about 6 times, I think), does that count? Or if I stayed with parents or friends while in transit from one home to another (at least twice)?
Whatever the case, you’d think by now I’d find the whole thing a breeze. Truthfully, I used to enjoy it. Revel, almost. But as time goes on, to my intense surprise I’m finding the experience increasingly stressful – something which I think has less to do with my age and more to do with the fact that I seem subconsciously to find it necessary to make each move more difficult for myself than the last. I feel as though I’m trapped in a giant computer game called House Move 3 or something, progressing to a higher and higher level each time.
I’ve moved into houses, flats, bungalows, lodgings and hotel rooms. I’ve moved out of basements into third floor flats and vice versa. I’ve squeezed the contents of an entire flat into a room the size of a cupboard. I’ve moved to new towns – and even a new country – with no idea where I was going to live, and I’ve turned up at a new home I’d just bought to find that due to a hugely complicated mix-up, my key wouldn’t work and I had to find a locksmith and persuade him that I did live there, honest.
I’ve transported my belongings by car, van, train, plane, ferry, fleet of taxis and on foot, trundling them to a new place a few streets away in a supermarket trolley. I’ve moved in blistering heat and torrential rain (the latter several times – although snow will, I
think, be a first). I’ve scarcely ever called upon the services of removers, relying generally on family, friends, grudging colleagues, a grumpy ‘man with a van’ driver who didn’t stop complaining because I hadn’t managed to drum up any other helpers and it ‘wasn’t part of his job to carry boxes’, and a friend who attempted to drive a van from York to Edinburgh without bothering to look at a map first, and took us via Redcar.
I’ve moved from Devon to Cornwall, Cornwall to Bristol, Bristol to London/Kent, Kent to York, York back to Kent again (and several repeats of this cycle while I was a student), then to France for a year, then back to York, then to the Shetland Islands for a brief spell, then from York to Edinburgh where I managed to stay put for a bit, then to Southampton (via Kent), then lived half in Southampton and half in Edinburgh before moving back to Edinburgh properly, and then finally to China. I must have covered more miles than Marco Polo.
I’ve done moves which involved getting things from four locations into one and vice versa. I hardly possess an item that hasn’t been in storage at some point, either containerised or in an obliging mother or friend’s loft for several years. I’ve carried collections of suitcases totalling considerably more than my own body weight on trains up and down the East Coast main line hundreds of times. I’ve organised a complicated logistical exercise which involved driving my things from Edinburgh to York by van and then transferring them to my mother’s car which took them on to Kent. I’ve travelled by train from north to south and back with plants, a large hi-fi system, and even a cat in a wicker basket.
I’ve moved in with total strangers, made friends, lost friends, gained and lost lovers and made enemies. My flatmates have been male, female, straight, gay, young (the youngest being a baby of 4 months) or not-so-young, rich, poor, tidy, untidy, employed, unemployed, lovely, tolerable, and unbearable. I’ve lived with English, Scots, Irish, Spaniards (lots and lots of Spaniards), Danes, New Zealanders, and even a one-legged Welsh-speaking Glaswegian called Davy Jones (seriously).
I’ve moved into a place where the previous occupant’s toenail clippings were still embedded in my bedroom carpet – and there was no hoover. I've lived with a girl who kept the toilet roll in a locked cupboard, and with a Tory lawyer with whom I bickered from Day One. There have been insomniacs, people who managed to sleep through deafening music at 3am, people on odd diets and followers of curious religions. I’ve argued ferociously over heating, bills, and whose turn it was to buy or clean things, and had a lovely Spanish flatmate who used to sell me a few of her cool customised clothes every time the phone bill came in, and I fell for it every time. I even lived by myself for a few years and loved it.
And in all of this I’ve only managed to lose one box of books, and have acquired various useful items, a couple of best friends, and a wealth of life experience quite possibly unparallelled among those I know, and for which I shall be eternally grateful. And now I’m married and I love that too. Better than anything.
But I truly thought I’d reached the highest level of House Move 3 with our move to China. We had to sort our extensive collection of possessions (and believe me, the whole thing gets SO much more complicated once another person’s things are thrown into the equation, particularly when that person is a worse hoarder than I am!) into what we would take with us, what we would ship out for later, what we’d leave behind for our tenant, what we’d throw out and what we’d put into storage. We had piles for each category around the flat, which wasn’t easy as we were short of space to begin with. Things got transferred from one pile to another and back again. My problems with getting someone to transport them to China I’ve documented previously. So let’s just say that it was extremely stressful, and once we’d found somewhere to live in Harbin and our things had arrived, the one thing I DID NOT want to do was move again until we had to go home.
You’ll have gathered that my pregnancy was, if not exactly unplanned, then certainly unexpected, and so I find myself now with no alternative but to uncover some sort of hidden bonus feature on House Move 3 where you can have two homes in China simultaneously, which sounds good but involves new challenges not previously encountered in the main game. These include:
One - Trying to find a suitable apartment in a city a thousand miles away a month or two before you want to move in, in a country where everything is done at the last minute and any properties you look round are always available NOW and the concept of holding it for you is an alien one.
Two - Compiling a list of our requirements to give to a Chinese speaker in the office (so that she could make a shortlist of apartments for us to see), carefully divided into ‘must-haves’ and ‘nice to haves’, only for her to ignore most of the items on the list and send us to lots of quite unsuitable places which maybe filled one or two of the criteria.
Three - Trying to negotiate a lease of unorthodox length (which has turned out to be 8 months in practice) when the landlords just want to make as much money out of westerners as they possibly can.
Four - Getting people in the office to take some initiative when it comes to paying deposits, signing contracts and so forth, when they’re terrified to do anything without explicit instructions from you in words of one syllable, lest they get it wrong somehow and thus lose face.
Five - Sorting all our stuff AGAIN into what to take and what to leave in Harbin, complicated by the fact that Peter will spend several days a week here, and by the fact that I’ll be forbidden from flying so won’t be able to come back for things myself, so I’ll have to be able to tell him the exact location of anything I want brought down.
AND by the fact that Chinese landlords don’t provide bedding or kitchen equipment in their apartments so that we had to buy everything from scratch when we moved in here, and will now have to either take half of all this stuff with us, or else buy everything (including kettle, vacuum cleaner, pillows, plates, pans, etc) all over again. Which of course means we’ll have two of everything when we come back. Three, if you count all the stuff back home. I’m trying to learn to breathe deeply and not raise my blood pressure too much!
I’m so looking forward to the release of House Move 4. That’s where you have to do everything I’ve described above - WITH A BABY.
