Final countdown

The movers come in 10 days. After that we have 5 days to re-home, dispose or squeeze into a suitcase everything that is left behind.

Cat #2 will be the first to go. He leaves us on Saturday, going to a good home, the home of a close friend. Catface stays with us till the bitter end, before she goes to the cattery where she will spend 6 weeks before catching her own flight to Sydney and then pulling through a final 10 days in quarantine before we get her back and beg her forgiveness.

Aside from the cats, we're feeling pretty calm about things. We've done this before with less money, less time and less experience. Also going from the second-world to the first-world, is so much easier than the reverse. We already have bank accounts, three weeks accommodation and visas for Australia. When we arrived in Malaysia three years ago, we had none of that.

Old pros with international moves, we've been sorting and culling junk for weeks, parting with things we didn't know we'd even acquired.

We've also been making a running list of the things that must make it into the suitcase. It's an odd list, but as we will beat our shipment to Oz by some weeks, there's some surprising things that you need:

• Bath towels
• A good knife
• Chopping board
• A pan
• Sheets
• Coffee press . . . 

Things that you can't live without, but to re-buy them for just a few weeks when you have your own on the way is infuriating. And expensive. So expensive. Even with a great company-paid moving package, international moves are expensive. The constant dining out  because you don't have a kitchen, the deposits, the essentials that can't make it into the suitcase, buying a new car and in our case the goddamn cat.