An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 42.

Thursday morning and our things arrive from Canada. Being reunited with our hip Montreal stuff on a tenement-lined Glasgow street feels, in a small way, like worlds colliding.

It was also funny to have such personable Glaswegian removal men help with the unloading when our entire exposure to the shipping system to date had been through online interfaces backed by anonymous ad remote HQs. Human beings are definitely easier and friendlier to deal with. This is something I like about Britain: it’s not yet completely succumbed to the commercial impersonal.

As minimalists, it was a tad alarming to find quite how much stuff is now under our jurisdiction: things from Montreal, things reclaimed from my parents’ house in Dudley, things belonging to our rented flat. The Montreal shipment is not much by most people’s standards–nine boxes of books and clothes, three small items of furniture–but it still felt like a lot as we schlepped them up the stairs and parked them in the formerly spartan living room.

Some minimalists suggest “box parties,” at which you seal your possessions into boxes, only retrieving items you need when you need them. After six months, anything not retrieved from the boxes can be denoted “non-essential” and, if you feel so inclined, jettisoned. I’ve always found such techniques a bit silly (just be a critical thinker, recognise wheat and chaff), but we’ve had a de-facto box party while our stuff was in transit, and it worked well. We’ve already got rid of some of what we shipped.

Good to be reunited with my tweed jacket though, and the nice shoes Samara bought for my last birthday.

Pleasingly, the first item to emerge from the first box we opened was the pilot issue of New Escapologist. Look at it! All amateurish and wild-eyed, the apocryphal The in the masthead.

If anyone would like to buy it, you could email me with an offer. There were only ten of these ever printed (probably only five left in existence). It has content that didn’t make it into the definitive Issue One, but you’d mainly want it for scarcity value or completism or to giggle at our total lack of finesse circa 2007.

Over five hours, we worked hard to unpack and order our things before catching the tube to Glasgow’s south side where I read selections from my teenage diaries to a packed room of receptive people.

I had the time of my life sharing the torrid and rather pathetic things my teenage self committed to posterity, and the gently surreal entries from 1992 (when I was 10). The other readers were amazing, and something about the cozy environment of the show allowed me to relax and enjoy their readings properly instead of fretting over my own pending performance. A wonderful night. Another installment coming in September.

It occurs to me that diary-writing has always been important to me, albeit an off-and-on practice. There’s this diary for instance, my teenage diaries and the various public readings I’ve done from them, this diary, and the “City Slicker’s Nature Diary” I’ve been thinking of writing as my next book. I should really go back to writing a private one, if only for the sake of the general public.

The weeks ahead: I’ve accepted a one-month work contract at a university library. It’s well-paid and the work looks straightforward enough, but the commute’s a monster by my standards (a tube, a train and a walk: 1.5 hours each way). Doubtless I’ll have Tiresias-style tales of commuting woe for the next installment of this diary!

★ Buy the latest issue of New Escapologist at the shop or pre-order the book.