Stuff

Anyone who has moved has moved house knows the feeling “Do I really have so much stuff? ”, as box after box is piled into the van. To make matters worse, we like to pride ourselves on being discerning but when it is all unceremoniously heaved out of the house it somehow looks rather grubby and sad, like the teddy with one eye.

Now fortunately us hardy Congo types don’t need all the trappings of bourgeois homes. We live in stylish emptiness: minimalism is de rigueur. At least it has been.

The shippers told us that the container had landed and should be cleared in three weeks. Three weeks later the message was “next week, without doubt.” A week later, and it was “in three or four days.” Finally, tomorrow. Two days later the chilling message “they have looted the container”, which turned out to be French for they had loaded it onto a truck. And there it stuck. Every day a new story. A customs official had demanded another signature, another check. “Tomorrow, for sure,” and then “next week, without doubt.”

After a while it was less a question of getting the container, and more a question of trying to work out why nothing was happening. Maybe they really had looted it, and were trying to concoct an elaborate story around it? Maybe it was half way to Kinshasa from the port (a journey of about 350kms) and the truck broke down.

But we couldn’t help ourselves having little dreams of what it would be like to be normal – such as having a bed, wine glasses, a sound system.

Finally, it was there. A monstrous container, from which a veritable army of men carried a strange array of packages in all shapes, sizes and weights into the house. They dutifully ticked off the packing list, and left. We decided to do the unpacking ourselves.

That’s when the penny dropped. As we stripped off the bubble wrap and cardboard packing material, and tried to find places for everything it felt more and more absurd. Do we really need this?? And that????

But the feeling of being crushed by all these worldly possessions would be lifted by the odd discovery. The potato masher was one such moment. A beautiful painting, another; a forgotten book . . . And I could get my beloved sound system going.

That evening, in spite of all the mess, the joy of eating at a wooden table proved that minimalism has its limits. This combined with the prospect of sleeping in a proper bed felt positively hedonistic.

There was only one problem: we had forgotten to pack any wine glasses.