Maybe this should be a blog, but I'll post it here first in the hope at least some of you might be sympathetic.

The story so far: Sedayne & Rapunzel fetched up in rented accommodation in Lytham St Annes back September on account of their house in the rural hinterlands of Durham remaining unsold at the time of Rapunzel starting her new job in Blackpool. Rather sensibly, they chose a basement flat comprising the cellars and former servants' quarters of a huge mock-Tudor sea-side semi, circa 1920, because it was a) cheap, b) big enough to contain all their crap without renting further storage and c) divine location-wise with views across the Ribble Estuary to Southport from the garden. Now, read on...

The Durham house is now sold, and contracts have been exchanged on the new house up in Fleetwood with completion tomorrow. Most of our stuff remains in boxes from last time, but in the 9 months we've lived in LSA we've managed to fill an entire big Ikea Leksvig bookcase with numerous & indispensable tomes picked up from hereabouts. Windmill Books in Lytham is especially good, as it's currently doing everything for £2 a throw (for a real treat, ask about the warehouse). There's some good bookshops in Preston too - I picked up a fine edition of Alfred Percival Graves's Celtic Psaltery, and the Opie's Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, amongst others; lots of others; in Southport we've bought some fine vintage Randolph Caldecotts, including The Fox Jumps Over the Parson's Gate, and any amount of vintage pamphlets, guide books, & King Penguins, including the exquisite Leaves of Southwell. As unrepentant beachcombers the same shelves are cluttered with diverse sea-bird bones, mermaid's purses, stones, shells, and other such flotsam gathered on our daily constitutionals. Every house should have a nature table; our house is a nature table.

And the CD collection has grown apace too, largely as a consequence of Action Records in Preston, which has furnished us with teetering piles of essential works by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Dr Strangely Strange, Daevid Allen, Robert Wyatt, Sun Ra, Man, Gong, Slapp Happy, Sigur Ros, Dolly Parton, David Bowie, Roxy Music, The Fall, Sex Pistols, Young Marble Giants etc. etc. We've also picked up loads of good vinyl too, including a hitherto unknown recording of Il Pastor Fido featuring Rene Zosso & a copy of Martin Denny's Exotica 3 for 50p from a charity shop in Fleetwood on our first day of house-hunting. You get the idea. We begin moving at the weekend; endless boxes stuffed with a lifetime's accumulated clutter & more musical instruments that one might reasonable shake a stick at, though there, to be fare, me & the mother-in-law are thinking about setting up an ebay shop, also dealing in sundry car-booty & such-like, but nothing of any consequence, and certainly none of the hundred or so Jew's Harps & Gew-Gaws that are the pride of my collection. Under a glass dome, there stands a stuffed Gentoo Penguin by the name of Hortense; one day, she will have a companion.

Somewhere up in Fleetwood a house presently stands empty, silent, and wholly uncluttered; little does it suspect the deluge about to descend upon it, nor yet the child-like jubilation of the new incumbents as boxes are unpacked and the clutter let loose, spilling all-anyhow, thus transforming this mere house into a veritable home for however long it is until we get bored with living there. Problem is, since leaving our respective family homes, neither Rapunzel or myself have lived anywhere for longer than 6 years, and, in the nigh-on 9 years we've been together, we've lived in six different places. Yet still we curate our wondrous museum; a museum of joy I call it, for without it, I fear, life would be rather empty somehow.