Now it’s a race against time. We have the rest of this evening, all day Saturday and Sunday but my lower back is not dealing with it all very well with all the lifting and all the standing, pain is constant – gravity is a sod and even Olivia’s young back is suffering. It was swim and shower day today and we left a little earlier so I could walk up there a little slower. Once in the water, all that lower back pain starts not to totally disappear but is certainly eased. I’m swimming pretty hard non-stop for 50 minutes to make that mile but I can feel my body relieved rather than strained. Just getting off my feet and floating is wonderful, all the swimming strokes and breathing are practised and I’ve trained myself to be able to complete my goal of 64 lengths, perhaps lifting heavy boxes gets easier too? A girl in the pool today told me, “You swim the front crawl very well”. “Thank you,” I said in response. But the relief doesn’t last too long, as soon as you get vertical, my head has great expectations, my body can’t keep up.

The boxes are piled up high and they’re heavy. Even the boxes without records in them have books in them and they’re also heavy. This is why you have to ship by container and not by road because with containers it’s about size not weight, whereas a truck can only take so much, like our bodies. There are four removal men coming on Monday. One of them has moved my collection before so he knows what he’s in for. I’m hoping he might be grateful that we can hand the boxes through the window and not have to walk them from the main room up the stairs, down the corridor, left out of the door and into the truck around the corner. Also because of limited access we have to have a smaller truck to ferry the boxes to the bigger truck parked somewhere else. The size of truck we need simply won’t fit down these narrow Cornish streets.

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On the way back from the pool, we always walk past this one particular tree at about the same time (7 PM) and it always has a murder of crows just sitting there on the branches, waiting. There are no leaves so you can see their silhouettes beyond the branches framed against the dusk. Ominous and even more so with their silence, the occasional flutter of a wing but mostly moody statues contemplating something we can never understand.

That’s it for the day because the rest of the day is filling boxes, feeling the strain on your thumbs as you grab the records and pull them out of the shelf. Taping up the bottom of the box and the sides and hoping it holds for its journey to Portugal. I’m hoping to make it back to Portugal in one piece too and eventually with this wonderful collection, create an irresistible musical environment to share – if anyone wants it. Which reminds me, Olivia went and bought 40 spare discontinued lava lamp bulbs yesterday – that wax looks gravity-free, like the swimming pool.

Genesis – Selling England By The Pound – 1973
Genesis – Trespass – 1970
Fotheringay – s/t – 1970
Hurdy Gurdy – s/t – 1971
Freedom – Through The Years – 1971
22-Pistepirkko – Big Lupu – 1992
November – En Ny Tid Är Här – 1970
Amon Düül II – Yeti -1970
Kraftwerk – The Man-Machine – 1978
Stina Nordenstam – And She Closed Her Eyes – 1994

Music Of The Daze