Nick Abroad

Well, everybody is talking about the World Cup. Or Cologne. Or politics. All I can think about, however, is packing.

This week is The Move. Oh, I know I’ve already moved. Technically. But my move to date has been to moving what running water is to rock carving – more of an accident than a mission. Now I’m renting the Melbourne apartment out and a couple of decades of accumulated trash & treasure is going to Sydney, to storage, or to landfill.

Or to eBay. For a couple of years I’ve been intending to sell hoarded stuff, of which I possess no small quantity, on the mega-phenomenon that is eBay. Having a life, however, meant I never got around to it. Well, this very night I made my first sale on eBay – ten old dining chairs, for the princely sum of $67. I’m in the money.

I might add, it’s not for the faint hearted. After a week during which eBay assured me I had some 20 people ‘watching’, an hour out from the fall of the hammer my ‘treasures’ were sitting bid-less, my 99 cent reserve price screaming out of the page. Then came the first bid, then another. Within a few minutes we were up to, errr, $5.50. Wasn’t quite ready to put the champagne on ice, but lo and behold, in the last minute or two a brutal bidding war broke out and I became a rich man. Success!

So the chairs were saved from the next Hard Rubbish Collection, and I had the satisfaction of having tried something new, success all round. And I can buy a DVD or something with my loot.

If anyone is in need of a couple more chairs and a couch, I happen to know where you can find them. Bid sits at 99 cents.

As for the packing, that has met with less success. No sooner had a couple of boxes been filled than a cupboard was opened to reveal it’s treasures, and a few more boxes soon followed. Upside of having lots of storage space in an apartment is that you can hide your crap, downside is that one day you’re still going to have to deal with it. That’d be now.

So, I realise I’m going to have to come back down again at the end of the week to beat the removalists. So be it. Just let it be that I have enough time to make sure that things go where they should go, and I don’t end up with a set of golf clubs in Sydney and my passport in a storage cage somewhere in Melbourne’s suburbs.