Packing hell and agony

These two last days, I've been to packing hell and back. See the messy state of my room there? Imagine a chaos ten times that magnitude and that's what I've been living in the last two days.

Richard (my next door Canadian neighbour) walked past my room and shook his head, saying, 'you've got too many objects for such a small person'. Well, I've concluded that I'm not small, but I do have too many things – I sat defeated on my chair about halfway through my packing yesterday and looked at everything around me sadly. You have no idea the agony I have to go through, and it's not so much the physical act of packing, but more of the fact that I had to make a milliongazillion decisions about every bloody thing that I owned which made me go a bit crazy.

And the clutter. It's amazing how much one can accumulate, and it's even worse when you're doing a job like journalism where every piece of information could be important and I keep everything from newspapers to magazines to press releases and lots and lots of junk. I went through three huge black bin liners and they were so heavy I had to drag them out from my room to the kitchen (where I heard the cleaners complaining loudly in some foreign language in the morning, which I assume has got to do with the rubbish). I even surprised myself at the amount of stuff I could actually store in my reasonably-sized L-shaped room.

And to be truthful, my packing nightmare has been a bit of a revelation – it has been a surprisingly reflective and self-discovering process... at the end of it all, I actually knew myself that little bit better. It was really hard deciding which category each thing belonged to; some things I didn't think were important actually were, and some things I thought were important, weren't really...

Some examples:

1. My silver-blue Wharfedale hifi – it's nice, really good, with speakers connected with fibre wires which makes the sound great. The top panel is even transparent and vertically opens very stylishly when I press the 'open' button. I bought it for a 100 quid in the first year and it's played many-a-tunes, from preparing me for nights out, to chilling me out or, cheering me up in times of distress. I couldn't live without music, and there're so many memories attached to it, but yet, it is quite a big hi-fi, and it would cost me lots to ship it back. After thinking about it for a whole hour, I finally decided to let it go. So I'm going to try and sell it at the car boot sale this sunday, and I hope I get an okay price for it.

2. A very plain pink long sleeved off-shoulder Topshop top – it's the sort of top that could also be like a jumper and I couldn't place it immediately in the send-home category (because honestly, no one ever wears long sleeved tops in a hot country), but I couldn't bring myself to sell it either. In the end, I decided to send it home, only because J said I looked nice in it before, and it's actually really comfy!

3. My orange rug, my moon-shaped lamp, my orange translucent door-curtain-like-things, the vase which contained the first flowers J ever bought for me, my leather jacket, my nice pink pilot jumper, and [most painfully] my black fluffy furry boots which I used to podium dance in at raves... are some of the things which I really hated to let go... but I have done in the end.

I did, however, keep a couple of jackets and my newest pair of Bertie boots, and my leather gloves... stuff that I'll probably use if I do travel.

In summary, this has been a trip down memory lane, although slightly premature (I have another three months before I leave) but I guess it's good that I'm getting things done early (what a change) and I can finally concentrate on getting started on my dissertation (yeah right).