Author: Kate Wilson

Changing times

~ Kate Wilson ~ 3 Comments

Duna is on heat.
It is not the best timing but must be dealt with amongst all the thousands of other issues that are bubbling around in my life. I am trying to clear the house and yet all available time goes on helping to renovate an outdoor shed to make it ready to receive those things that I will leave in Cornwall. As with most jobs this one has expanded to fill what time is available so other things like packing boxes and painting my house and organising paperwork….have been squeezed into little corners in my days.
Today the electrics were switched on! And I have been sanding the floor. A kitchen area is slowly taking shape.  It is a palace and once the chairs and tables and boxes have moved in…..they should be very comfortable!

Meanwhile, it rains. The dogs are bored and wet and they can’t go into the new space because of paw marks. Duna has returned to basics – Feeding, Fighting and Fucking.  All her pent up energy is focused on these three activities. She has chosen Bonnie as her rival to growl at and attack whenever they are in a confined space together. Blue is her object of desire in spite of the difference in age

Imagine your 16 year old nephew trying it on with your partners grandmother and you have the picture. Blue is deaf and almost blind and has arthritis and to be honest was never interested in sex when she was young. But now she has an admirer who won’t leave her alone – it’s hard to know when to intervene – Blue sometimes stands in front of Duna waving her tail around invitingly. But when the inevitable happens she will snarl and snap.

I am waking every  single morning around 5am and ….ping….the worries start. I have never suffered from sleeplessness before. Now it is a familiar companion. Everything that can possibly go wrong is imagined in the worst possible light.  I won’t get the van log book back from DVLA in time to leave before Christmas. It will snow or rain torrents all the way through France. Duna will go crazy in the car when she sails from Plymouth to Roscoff this week.  The removal men will damage the piano – or the piano will damage the removal men. Next week I will die under the anaesthetic at the hospital or end up with some awful infection. The person renting my house will never leave. We won’t find anywhere to rent in Catalunya that takes three dogs. Why did I do X?  Why didn’t I do Y? 
It’s as if I think I can avoid all problems by anticipating them. But as the days go by it is obvious that the opposite is true. It is harder and harder to make good decisions in the face of tiredness. One part of me thinks this is an interesting experience but another is shouting louder and louder ‘surely there must be an easier way to do this?’  How difficult can it be to move to another EU country?

Then I take a step back and think of all the others who I know are going through stressful times at the moment. It feels like life is winding up the pressure – perhaps for some good reason that it beyond my understanding. I may feel like a mouse on a wheel and I do want to find a way to jump off and play a little but at the moment these things must be seen through and, if possible, I must enjoy the ride.

There are things to laugh at – Duna met another hormonal female on a walk and they danced around each other happily swapping smells

and things to sadly smile over. One comment from a ‘friend’ was…why are you doing all this, you don’t belong here any more!

Moving away causes ripples all around.  Strange times.
Any suggestions for anxiety relief gratefully received!

The Dark Moon

~ Kate Wilson ~ 6 Comments

I don’t like to do a post without a photo or a drawing but there really isn’t the time at the moment to do it.

Moving house is stressful and trying to do it from one country to another with dogs and a piano is even more so.

Added to which is the weirdness of spending almost every waking hour doing construction work on the place I want to leave my furniture – what is left of it after selling or giving away so much!

What I did today – or part of it!

*took van for MOT which could be the last one if I manage to get it registered in Spain when I get there
*trip round builders merchants looking for Allen Keys (to dismantle IKEA chairs which I can’t get out of the house whole) and a nail punch for the new wooden floor which is being laid
*pause in Newlyn to buy fruit and vegetables as we must stop eating so many cakes and biscuits and eating out all the time as we are too tired to cook
*phone calls to BT, chimney sweep, banks,window cleaners, letting agents etc blah blah blah
*make tea for the workers
*play with the three dogs trying to stop the very hormonal Duna (3)  humping poor bemused Blue (15) and growling at nervous confused Bonnie
*sell my old iMac
*research international removal companies
*research hiring vans for DIY removals
*frighten myself silly over the risks of moving your own piano
*fight off phone calls from various currency brokers who are responding to my enquiries about how to send money to Catalunya without paying huge charges
*make tea for the workers
*try to get bloodstains from chair cushions after Duna sat on them. (Reconsider the Catalan belief that dogs shouldn’t sit on chairs….perhaps they have a point?)
*drive to the village of Paul to buy several jars of marmalade. How many exactly will I need to get me through a whole year?  I wish I could find Seville oranges in Granollers.
*in the midst of a happy moment watching a friend hang the new door on our cabin I am told it must be stained NOW, TODAY!  So I made my third trip to the builders merchants in Penzance to buy woodstain.
*there is a beautiful sunset as I work quickly to get the stain on before we lose the light in the ‘new’ building. We are still only getting electricity from one extension lead that snakes down the field to the main house and the days are getting shorter.

I expect you are tired reading this. It’s good to write it down as I can see I am doing a lot although many days seem to pass without too much being visibly accomplished. But little by little I am sure things are falling into place. Only I need to trust.  And to enjoy the process.

Photos or pictures next time, I promise.

Clearing the house with the help of friends

~ Kate Wilson ~ 2 Comments

When you decide to move it is always an opportunity for clearing the house of things that you no longer need. But moving abroad makes this more of a necessity as either you must store things or pay to have them transported across Europe.

It is already the end of October and…..

I have got to get on with clearing the house

There is still so much to do and looking around the house in Cornwall all I see is this…

alt='clearing the house'
what am I going to do with all this stuff?

And this

alt='clearing the house but keeping the dog'
Bonnie you are coming with me, don’t worry!

Confusion is always better when Bonnie is sleeping in it!
I have a deadline and most of this stuff must go.  It feels chaotic as I  move things from one place to the next, trying to sort out what to take and what to leave.  There is nowhere to put anything!
I have lost all sense of time – can I do what I need to do in only one month?

Would it take 6 months?

Why have we spent almost all our time here renovating the stable when we should be packing and decorating?

And yet I know that I need somewhere to put all the things that must stay in Cornwall.  It’s just that I never imagined this would all take so long and be so exhausting both physically and emotionally.

It doesn’t help that my asthma has returned with a vengeance. I am allergic to Cornish mists and pollens and dust from concrete and plaster is making me worse.

Help arrives from a friend in Canada

What a bright moment it was in my day yesterday when I found an envelope in the post box addressed to the Compassionate and Gorgeous Kate Wilson. It was full of beautiful cards made by my blog friend Bodhi Chicklet and was a giveaway from her wonderful and funny blog.
Thank you so much Bodhi – you brought magic into my day.

It is so nice to get proper post – something that hardly ever happens these days and this was a reminder to me to send more personal cards to friends and family.

And to write nice things and to draw on  envelopes.

Not so easy as they say on the packet

~ Kate Wilson ~ 5 Comments

Perhaps it’s because we are amateurs but we discovered that Self Levelling Cement doesn’t!

You have to push it around a lot with a long thing like a rake which gets all clogged up in the process.

Tips for Spreading Self Levelling Cement

1. Add more water than they suggest
2. Never try to mix and spread more than two bags at a time
3. Buy the special whisk fitting for the drill.  It’s  worth the money although we did have a very cathartic fit of giggles as three of us tried to smash up the lumps and stir with long sticks like the three witches in Macbeth.  There is a 20 minute window before the stuff starts to set.

No pictures yet – we’ll see how it looks in the morning and perhaps I will take a photo…..

Meanwhile I am very pleased to have solved one of my long standing problems – at least in theory.      I am going to register my UK camper van in Spain and it will join the club of right hand drive vehicles which have Spanish number plates. First step is to get my registration document here changed to show it is no longer a panel van. Second step – or steps as I imagine it will involve a lengthy bureaucratic journey – is to get it approved in Catalunya.  Then at last we will both be able to drive it (UK insurance won’t cover a Spanish national driver) and most importantly I won’t have to travel back every year to get an MOT.

I will report back on progress but for the moment I am so pleased to have found a solution.

Update on the RHD van decision

Another thing which is not so easy as they say is dealing with car registration in Spain.

It is now 2015 and I never did register the van in Spain.  The following year we took a long journey up through France to Scotland and then back down to Cornwall.  Because I was never able to get my partner’s name on the insurance I did all the driving and ended up with tendinitis in my ankle from too much clutch control on the Scottish mountains.  I couldn’t drive back to Spain so we bought a LHD car in the UK and drove back together in that. Since then, the van has been garaged in Cornwall and we only use it over there.

I had such a lot of trouble getting the LHD Spanish car into my name once we got home that I would never recommend you try to bring over a UK car. The system here in Spain is much more complicated and bureaucratic and unless you enjoy the adrenalin rush of endless stress and uncertainty then I suggest you buy a car over here.

If you go down to the woods today

~ Kate Wilson ~ 8 Comments

As you may know I am in the middle of clearing out my home so that I can move more freely from Cornwall to Catalunya. The idea of carrying a lighter load in life appeals to me and I am in the right moment of life to let things go without too much trouble. I am selling and donating and giving and discarding and sorting and burning and deciding what I want to keep. It’s an interesting process and much more time-consuming that I expected. The house seems emptier but if I am honest it is also still far too full. Again and again I review decisions and whittle away at the edges of the mountain of stuff.

One of the hardest questions was  ‘what do you do with your old teddy bears?’

Looking around the house there are quite a lot of them and although I am happy to have a couple  of furry friends, I don’t really want to carry a sackload of them all the way to Catalunya.  I’m not a bear collector but someone I knew was and so I received more than my fair share of bears. I also had two or three from childhood and some others which were gifts along the way. Teddy bears don’t have the same popularity in Catalunya as they do in Britain so I have met some strange looks when I try to explain what they mean in my life.

The hardest ones to deal with are the childhood bears. They carry so many memories. They were animated into living beings and although they have sat ignored and neglected for years, when you think of getting rid of them it feels unthinkable. To be sent to a charity shop. To be stuffed in a bin bag?  Those sad faces!  Impossible!
When I told my sister I was thinking of getting rid of them she was horrified – Are you going mad?

So what to do? Should I keep them for ever because I can’t cope with the guilt of letting them go?

The drive to clear things is strong and I want to make space for the here and now so in spite of resistance I made a decision.  I would burn them. It seemed the only way to honour them and let them go and I thought of making it a proper ceremony. But – in case you are getting upset already – don’t worry, it didn’t happen. A friend rescued them and took them to live in a teddy bear museum.  They were welcomed there in spite of their aging growls, hairless tummys and wonky limbs. I suppose it was the best way.
Other bears with less personal shared history have been sold and several are awaiting their moment on ebay. I have to admit I don’t really like doing this – there is something demeaning for them in having to look their best to be sold

This is just one of the many challenges of house clearing!