We’ve been back in the UK nearly 10 days now. We’d rented out our flat for the last couple of legs of our travels and we’d packed away most of our personal stuff in the shed (see before and after pics, top and bottom respectively). It’s amazing how much you can get by without and how long it takes you to unpack it all when you get back home. It’s also amazing how quickly plans to do away with all the unwanted stuff turns into cluttering up again.

I think between the two of us we managed to get rid of seven bin liners of stuff (Jane managed a bag of shoes on her own, but that’s another story). If we were slightly more ruthless we could have managed the same again but when it comes to hoarding I’m borderline pathological. I tend to have a big cull every few years (when I went to Uni, when I moved onto the boat, when I sold the boat) but I’ve still got a suitcase full of tickets, flyers and photos and random memorabilia that I haven’t been through in years.

Anyway, given our situation you’d think that we’d have time to sort all this out, right? Wrong.
If you’ve been fortunate enough to have been made redundant without too much pressure to find a job immediately you’ll know how easy it is to fill your days with distraction tasks. Doubly so when the Olympics are on. Today for instance we have

• read Saturday’s paper (in bed)
• ate breakfast (in bed)
• watched re-runs of Friends (in bed)
• caught up on the Olympics (5 medals for team GB so far)
• checked the Guardian and Total Jobs for new adds
• gone to TK Maxx to buy a present for a friend
• updated Twitter
• tried to get Vodafone Sat Nav to work on my Blackberry (no luck)
• checked a bunch of news and music sites.
• bought and flicked through a copy of Total Film (research for a job).
• bought the latest driving theory test book from Borders.
• reviewed some of my trip photos.
• commented on someone elses Flickr photos
• caught up on two months of American Voices on The Onion.
• made a cup of tea.

and written this blog entry…

We got married on July 30th. We got made redundant on March 11th. The two events aren’t directly related but the latter did allow us to give more thought to the former.

We didn’t use the time to over engineer the organization. If anything it just confirmed our belief that important things don’t need to be difficult (apart from the rings, but that’s another story).

We’d been out of the UK for most of the time since March so it was great that so many of our friends could join us in Italy for a few days either side of the wedding.

Now we’re back in the UK looking for work but secretly still pretending we’re retired. Oh, and there wasn’t a punch up at the wedding, though there was this.