To celebrate successfully moving house, we went on holiday.
Well, that’s not exactly true. We have moved - that part is correct. And if the measure of success was whether or not we could shift our belongings from one place to another, in whatever state and timeframe and over however many road bumps without completely losing our cool, then I suppose the house move was about 80% successful.
Regardless of the success rating, it is a true fact that we have moved house—a process I documented fully from the basement carpark I spent 3 hours in while I moonlighted (moonlit?) as an overseer-slash-quality-control for the packing company. It’s also true that we just went away for a few days. 2 days. OK it was actually only 1 day with two half days tacked on to either side, but when you haven’t left the big city for over 4 months, even an extended day of peace and quiet is a win.
This was a long-overdue break from the city and all its glorious air pollution, hustle, bustle, viruses and cacophonous hubbub. A four month stretch in the city is too long for us. It breaks our unwritten rule that in order to retain our sanity we must get away from the city every 100 days. This rule owes its origins to our early months in Myanmar when a business visa renewal required us to leave the country (not only the city) every 3 months. Even after the visa rule changed and we were legally allowed to stay longer in any one stint, we chose to leave with the same regularity so as not to go doolally. And on the rare occasion that we did find ourselves fast approaching the 100 day mark with no travel plans, it would be the thud of one of our marbles hitting the teak parquet floor that alerted us to our oversight and impending overstay.
Here in Mumbai the past few months have been more than a little hectic. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I’ve launched a book (roll up, roll up, buy it here), I have started a new job and we have moved house. Dylan chugs away like the reliable engine he is on his project, with barely a day off to regather and recuperate as it is, without us filling his free time with a house move. It’s no wonder that Jasper and I have been fighting off various illnesses. Not serious ones, but enough on my side that my audio recording has been postponed for the past three weeks on account of having a very scratchy voice.
One thing we weren’t expecting from our new home was the volume. I am not talking about the city outside kicking off its daily traffic tantrum and us hearing it from our breakfast table. I am talking about the inside of the apartment—things are LOUD. Don’t get me wrong, it is a lovely, cosy apartment which somehow already feels more like home than our previous one, despite the fact that we haven’t even put up any pictures or wall art, but there are a few areas where we would welcome some subtlety.
Take the water pressure for example. The kitchen tap could put out a large forest fire and angled wrong, I’m sure the shower could sweep Jasper off his feet. The gas hobs, too, could power a rocket. Not a toy rocket, an actual rocket, heading to the moon. I need to buy bigger pans—not for their internal capacity but for their base diameter and resulting ability to contain the flames which are otherwise lashing out across the stove top like one of those flailing, tube-armed air dancers at a used-car dealership. And don’t even get me started on the air conditioner in the living room which I genuinely believe could muffle gunfire. It can certainly drown out festival fireworks happening less than 200 metres away. This air con unit might be suffering from the same cough as Jasper and I. I just haven’t found the time to wait around at home for the aircon doctor’s housecall.
Loud utilities aside, however, we are mostly very happy with our new home. The only room which we really miss from the old place is the kitchen. It’s a biggie, I know. It’s the room that Jasper will point out on his tour saying ‘this is the kitchen where mummy cooks’. It’s the room that is most essential to the running of a healthy, happy household, and sadly, it’s the room that is the most mind-boggling in its design. Besides the very powerful tap and the alarming flames on the hob, the entire room is like something straight out of Wonderland. When our very own Alice (my sister Alice) arrives in ten days’ time, we will be able to verify if it’s just us, or if the effect of the too low bench, too deep sink, too high shelves, too protruding wall cupboards and a discombobulating assortment of cupboards which look identical but which include any number of different opening mechanisms (drawers, doors, push-to-open, pull-to-open, top opening, side opening), make her feel as mad as a hatter too.
There is something that looks exactly like a drawer, but it is not one. And then there is something that looks exactly like a cupboard, but it is, in fact, one very deep drawer, with three smaller drawers stacked like Russian dolls between it and the workbench. The space for the oven is 2cm too shallow due to an ill conceived plug location, so our oven protrudes. There is an enormous space for a huge storage unit where we could keep my year-long supply of Bisto gravy granules and Dylan’s hidden stash of kettle chips. Except for some reason they didn’t build that unit, so the gaping space is currently home to three, inadequate little IKEA drinks trolleys, overloaded with pickles and mustards. Living next door to IKEA, as we now do, has proven very handy in the course of our unpacking.
We do have plans to ‘fix’ the kitchen, but like I said, we’ve been a little busy.
This brings to me the real reason we went on holiday. I had a birthday. A big one, by all accounts, although I’m quite sure I don’t feel as though I have reached any particular milestone purely as a result of going to sleep one day and waking up the next. I did, however, take advantage of the authority this birthday commands to make some demands of my family, cleverly disguised as birthday wishes:
I wished to wake up near the beach
I wished to drink champagne for breakfast
I wished NOT to do any washing up on the day in question
I wished for Jasper and Dylan to spend the day celebrating with me
I really do admire people who have 40th birthday parties. I do. I used to be someone who would have envisaged having a 40th birthday party—with cocktails and dancing and 2am pouncing on us, just as we felt the festivities were getting started. But not any more. Even that second drink hits differently now. I don’t blame my advancing years for my newfound party-poopery. I blame a lack of training. Since early 2020, when I became pregnant with Jasper, I have barely had more than one drink in any given sitting, and when I did, I was reminded of how unwise that decision was at four or five or six o'clock the following morning, when Jasper decided it was time to get up. Now in late 2023, I see I am almost three and half years out of practice for late nights and Jasper’s wake-up calls aren’t getting any gentler.
A champagne breakfast, however, was a win-win—an inverted 40th birthday that suited the whole family. We got up early (of course), snuck in a swim before 7am, enjoyed an extra special floating champagne breakfast in our villa’s private plunge pool, played hard at the beach and in the playground, napped harder (Jasper and Dylan were down for 3 full hours while I baked my mad dog self in the midday sun), and cricketed our way to a peaceful sunset and early night. The floating breakfast survived numerous attempts by Jasper to turn it into a sunken breakfast, and the Moet cork made a most excellent pool toy in lieu of his beach ball which I had forgotten to pack.
You might be wondering where the villa and the private plunge pool is in our new apartment, but I have to disappoint you, and remind you that we went on holiday. We went to Goa, to the Taj Exotica Resort and, because of it being a so-called ‘big birthday’, we splurged. The villa was perfect. For me, this perfection came in the form of an indoor-outdoor space which allowed Dylan and I to sit outside in the evening enjoying the clear sky sprinkled with stars, fresh air and a tropical silence (mostly just the cicadas, birds, frogs and the odd hooning helicopter) while bats swooped overhead, bathed in the soft illumination of the full moon and Jasper slept inside. For Jasper, this perfection came the second he discovered he was allowed to swim nungo-bungo in the pool. And swim he did. Every 20 minutes or so during the day until he tired himself out so much he would announce “I want to sleep” and take himself off to the enormous bed and disappear somewhere under the covers for some downtime.
I couldn’t have designed a more perfect entry into my forties and my only regret is that we didn’t stay in that villa longer.
Comments