Moving In

By the time I arrived at the house at 10am as arranged, the truck had already been emptied by swarms of Chinamen and our Allied Pickford boxes were neatly stacked in the parking space next to our front door. The mood was one of expectation and I unlocked the door quickly so they could get on.

Given that packing up the house in Putney had taken the best part of five days, including tea-breaks, moving us in to Shouson Hill Road was a breeze. A team of six giggling Chinamen brought the boxes upstairs at a run and were directed to the right rooms by the foreman who scribbled “boys bedroom” or “TV room” on the cartons in Chinese characters after a quizzical look at me.

The unpackers were like bashful school boys, very anxious to please as they padded round in their socks, smiling all the while as they piled boxes onto their backs and carried them up to the next floor. The similarity with school boys didn’t end there, however. Once they had finished and left I discovered that the Chinamen hadn’t yet learnt to lift the loo seat or even aim straight and the only downer on the day was that the downstairs wc was left looking as if one of the children had shaken up a fizzy pop bottle and undone the lid before scarpering.

It is interesting now to realise what I got wrong in the packing back in London. Whilst I had suspected that my digital radio would not be able to find R4 all the way out here I had imagined it would find me something of interest to listen to. However, it stubbornly displays “station not available” on its screen and has merely earned itself a place at the back of a cupboard. Equally useless are the radio signal alarm clock and the wireless voice router, not that I ever knew what the latter was for, even in London. My sheepskin coat is looking rather superfluous as we flounder about in temperatures of 32 degrees and my husband has questioned the need for stout brogues although we are assured it can fall below 15 degrees in January.

On the other hand we could have bought six times as many pictures. The bland gardenia coloured walls of our boxy, modern house stretch endlessly before us, crying out for large paintings where dado rails, picture rails, architraves and cornicing once broke up the available space in a Victorian town house. Where we have dared to bang a nail into virgin plaster our pictures look more like postage stamps on a vast landscape and so as yet remain largely unhung, standing dejectedly against their intended walls.

Air temperature, air flow and humidity control in the house have become recent obsessions. It’s always too hot, particularly on the top floor and at night and yet having the air-conditioning blasting away full time is too loud and too chilly for us all. We wondered if reducing the humidity might help and purchased a job lot of dehumidifiers which take the excess moisture out of the air but neither move it around nor cool it down. At the end of the day it seemed to be just one more electrical gadget humming away and generating heat simply by being on. I was rather sceptical about needing them at all until I kept one running in our bedroom with the wardrobe doors open and came back to find 20 litres of water had gathered in the water receptacle in the course of just 10 hours. In the meantime however, we have decided to get a fan and will hope that by blowing the warm moist air around we will all feel a little more comfortable at night.

Little could I have anticipated my new-found interest in Tupperware. Galvanised by a friend who said that she had watched the breakfast muesli move in her bowl one morning on discovery of an outbreak of weevils in her store cupboard, I decided that prevention was better than cure and bought a Tupperware container for everything from biscuits and rice through to flour. Space in the kitchen, as everywhere in Hong Kong, is limited and we no longer enjoy the luxury of a walk-in larder. Hence the 170 bottle capacity, built-in Eurocave wine store has been commandeered as a sort of Tupperware fridge and serves its purpose beautifully. Wine aficionados would be appalled at our misuse of this precious asset but I think there are a few bottles of NZ Sauvignon Blanc somewhere near the bottom and we can have both white wine and weevil-free Weetabix whenever we want.