Feeling the fear meets the deadline!

Dear Blog,

I apologise for neglecting you for so long... once again I have been busy. So what have I been doing that makes me so selfish and neglectful? Many things as it happens to all my doubters out there! Yes I may be lazy but sometimes just sometimes life forces me to reject my natural instinct to be lazy and do things! Working to deadlines is something I am used to and I'll be honest with you I am a last minute person! I can't help it! I try to be organised but I really am incapable of starting something until it is absolutely crucial. I'm a crammer of the most annoying kind! When I was a student it wasn't uncommon for me to be up all night working on an essay before I handed it in because (even though I had had 3 weeks to do this) I had not managed to start until the day before. Now some I realise find this an impossible way to live but for me I have to feel the fear, hear the clock ticking, feel the immense panic of not making the deadline and have the feeling that I'm going to fail in order to actually start let alone complete whatever it is that needs to be produced. It's not something I like about myself but it is who I am.

Which brings me to the current situation. I handed in my notice on my flat due to the lack of sky TV - I know I just can't let this go but it has been most traumatic living with 4 channels! But being me I handed in my notice without another flat to go to. I had 6 weeks to find somewhere and after the first 2 weeks I had not even opened the paper to find a flat. 3 weeks before I was due to leave my flat I half heartedly mentioned that I was looking (I say looking but I was putting it off until the crucial point!) for a flat and someone knew someone who was renting somewhere. I went to see it and took it on... Don't get me wrong it is a lovely flat but the downside it is further away from work. This means I will have to get up earlier and that I will probably be later each day for work than I already am. So the last few days have been spent putting off packing. This involves telling everyone I know how stressful moving is, thinking that I need to go to the shop and get some cardboard boxes and telling myself that "hmmm bet they don't have any!" and not actually standing up to go and ask. What's the point? They won't have any! Then I get teary and tell everyone I hate moving and that I've got so much to do I couldn't possibly go to a barbeque or any other social event. The reality is that I probably could have gone if I had been more organised but having decided today "right Clare you need to get moving" I then decided stage one of the big move was a little 2 hour snooze! I need to conserve my energy right? Anyway just thinking about it made me tired. And so when I finally started I did so with a great deal of huffing and puffing, standing with my hands on my hips wondering where to start, walking into each room and wondering how I got so much stuff, making myself a cup of tea and looking round the flat as I did so wondering where to start followed by going to the shop next door and asking for the boxes. Now you are probably wondering was I right? Were there no boxes?

Well I explained I was moving and asked if they had any boxes. The old lady "Beryl" to regular readers (looked teary eyed as I mentioned I was moving and I could actually hear her tightening her purse strings with the realisation that her main customer who regularly spends a fortune in there would not be providing her nest egg anymore)asked her male friend (new man who hangs out in the shop although I am not sure who he is or if he is being paid) to go out the back to get some boxes as I was moving house. Now tell me this. If someone said to you they were moving house would you think they probably need quite big boxes? Or would you do what he did and come out carrying two boxes the size of shoe boxes? Well as I glanced down at the boxes I wondered if actually even a pair of my shoes would fit in the boxes and made a mental note that I would have to use these boxes to pack up my mobile phone and some q tips because that is all it would fit I heard myself saying "Thank you so much! Have you got any others?" To which the response was "none spare". She probably uses all her big boxes to store all her money! So I wandered away with the pathetic boxes and arrived home disheartened. I would have to have another cup of tea before I started as I would need to contemplate how I intended to pack a one bedroom flat into two shoe boxes. Actually this contemplation turned out to be quite fruitful as I decided I would pack what I could in any suitcases I had as the thought of walking up the road to another shop (not far but still!) involved too much energy.

And so I began. I packed my 30 odd pairs of not quite right mediocre jeans into suitcases because even though they are not quite right maybe one day my body will completely change shape and they will look great! You just never know! Now as I had officially started packing I was then getting phone calls from family members asking me how it was going and by this time I was in the groove and irriatedly told them (but this time telling the truth!) I was far too busy to chat and repeated that I hated moving and generally moaned until they said they better let me go to carry on!And suprisingly I have managed to complete my bedroom and my sitting room. This meant that I then had to put the flat back to the way it was before I moved in. This involved taking the repulsive plug in electric fire with it's very own fake log top and putting it back in front of the fire place whilst removing my candles and dried flowers in vases, removing my modern pictures and replacing them with various oil paintings of fruit and empty bottles on a silky looking cloth (which I always think it a bit weird because I never have fruit lying round on a silky table cloth at various heights with a bottle of wine next to it but even weirder is that this painter insisted on putting a pumpkin next to the apples and oranges!) and just generally returning the flat to the old fogey den it was once was. Now I have to live in it like this until next weekend which makes me realise that I will probably end up going to the doctor for anti-depressants.

I have now spoken to my mum to get the necessary sympathy and cooing about how her poor daughter is having to do all this moving and how she wishes she could be there. I then proceeded to tell her (despite earlier announcing I couldn't face packing and how awful an experience it is) that actually I don't have much stuff after all to which she replied "Basically you have make up, clothes and books and not alot else. But then you do have rather alot of stuff in my spare room!" This always immediately gets my back up! Not because I sound rather pathetic that all my worldly possessions are make up I use, books I've read and clothes that don't fit me but that she insists that I always have alot of stuff at her house! I refuse to believe this. Yes it is true I have some stuff there but isn't that what you are supposed to have at your parents house. Shouldn't they be lovingly looking at their child possessions stroking them and thinking how lovely that they are in my house cluttering up my spare room as it reminds me that my darling daughter has once touched these items and how special she is? No? Well that's what I like to believe anyway instead I fear that she dislikes the fact that her tiny 2nd bedroom is full of my stuff! Let's bear in mind that as soon as I left home to move to university my mum left her house and moved into a tiny flat perhaps just to make sure I didn't move back home! As I tried to ignore the fact that my mum was suggesting my stuff was not a joy to her I then told her that once again I was far too busy to continue our chat and got back to the important cooing and sympathy before getting off the phone to make another cup of tea!

Tomorrow I will be packing up my kitchen and my bathroom and I have the added stress of no boxes, no newspaper to pack the breakables in and no motivation! And if I'm honest the real reason for this is I'm not moving till Saturday... I don't feel the fear and therefore the fact that I'm forcing myself to be organised is so unnatural that I can almost guarantee tomorrow I'll feel very snoozy and will convince himself that I did so much today it would be wrong to do more tomorrow! There is just no real incentive to be organised.....