Just a bundle of contradictions

One of my greatest objections, always, to doing a “proper diet”: I don’t want to be told what to eat, I want flexibility: I don’t want to do the hard work of following recipes and going shopping for all the stuff I don’t normally eat, I want to eat my old favourites, according to whim rather than plan.

Yet, what I’m most enjoying about my peculiar diet experience (halfway through day two, so obviously I’m well qualified to discuss my lengthy experience of it): being told what to eat and what to cook. Really. I feel mothered and a little bit bullied and most of all, completely relieved of the burden of decision making. Who knew I was such a wuss*?

Similarly, for the past, oh, three years or so, I’ve been complaining ever more vigorously every time I have to move home. (Having moved about 25 times in the 29 years I’ve been alive, you can see why I might be a little sick of the nomadic lifestyle.) The last move – a whole eight months ago – was particularly painful, for sundry practical and emotional reasons, and I made very loud noises conveying a firm intention to stay put for, like, ever.

And since we decided (inevitably) to move a couple of months ago, Beloved has had to put up with regular Scroobious Tantrums™, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, as I bemoan subjects including (but not limited to) the horrors of flathunting, the exhaustion factor, the expense, the difficulties of finding the right level of appropriate furnishing in a rented flat, the instability and insufferable temporariness of being tenants, the impossibility of buying, the appalling standard of rented housing in London, and the burden of impermanence created by knowing we do not want to live in the UK forever, but not knowing where we want to be instead, for how long, or when we want to go there.

Now we have found a flat. And all of a sudden the flip side of my nomadic upbringing kicks in and I absolutely cannot wait to move. Moving is something I can do. I know how – I probably have more experience at it than anybody else on the entire earth, ever*. I’m good at packing. Once decanted into the new abode, I love unpacking and arranging stuff. I love finding new furniture and things to make the place mine. And here’s yet another contradiction: as much as I love accumulating new stuff, I love getting rid of stuff even more.

So now, instead of listening to oft-repeated and annoying wails of distress, Beloved has to listen to the oft-repeated and annoying mantra: “It’s time to CHUCK SHIT OUT! Now we get to CHUCK SHIT OUT! Yay!”

It’s confusing being me.
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* Absolutely bloody everybody. Shhh.
** Exaggeration, too, I can do.