Thank you Aram and Hud (and Dave for helping to load in the boxes), for all the packing and deconstructing and making the initial stages of this massive undertaking almost complete (I have a few more hours on my own tonight). Olivia as usual, amazing work, but now she’s gone ahead to the campsite to get to work in the storage tomorrow in Wells. Also to greet Mr and Mrs Argir who have flown in from Minneapolis to hang and help. Thank you. I’m sitting alone in the room, listening to Van der Graaf Generator, the place full of boxes and shelving and guitars and amps and tomorrow morning the men from the removals will be here to start loading it all onto the truck. The problem is they can’t get the big truck down the street as it’s too narrow so they are sending a smaller truck to load, to drive to the bigger truck to unload and so on and so on till the room is empty. It seems like a hassle, but there’s no other way to do it, I’m just hoping it doesn’t rain, but this is Penzance.

Although there’s a certain sadness about leaving this place after all these years, all the records we have made here, all the records we have collected here, but the truth is, it’s too small and it’s too damp and on packing the boxes I’ve found some victims of the famous Penzance mould. It’s damaged CD covers, not albums, and it’s mainly cardboard sleeves that are irretrievable as the paper soaks up the moisture and ruins the artwork. The CDs themselves will probably survive but the covers will have to go. As Aram said tonight, it’s a miracle really that I’ve managed to keep it as under control as I have. It’s all about the dehumidifiers.

Aram brought the drill today and Hud drilled the bar out of the granite blocks, held in by concrete so that the removal men can pass boxes through the window instead of hauling them up the stairs. We will still have to take the bannister off to get the couch up the stairs. Outside the window, the same car has been parked there the whole week. Olivia noticed today that it has a flat tyre and it looks abandoned but for some reason, there’s never any parking tickets on the windscreen. Maybe they’ve given up issuing them to an abandoned car but usually, they just plaster the windscreen anyway (quota). The point is that it’s directly outside the window where the truck would want to be, I wonder if we could push it forwards?

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Now I can smell the mould where the CDs were covering the wall. Did you hear the strange story about the death of Brittany Murphy and her boyfriend Simon Monjack potentially due to toxic mould in their apartment? They died three months apart from the same mysterious cause. So no breathing when I sleep tonight but maybe the spiders I’ll be swallowing will protect me. My only companion tonight has been a daddy longlegs that has found its way from the kitchen to where I’m sitting on the other side of the largest room, navigating the boxes but still banging against the wall as insects do. I reached up and grabbed it in my hand and took it to the window and threw it out but it flew straight back in and immediately caught itself on part of an old discarded web. I grabbed it again and this time kapla’! Now it’s gone to fend for itself in Morrab Gardens.

A sesh tonight with Abby and Nick in Philadelphia as Olivia was packing Ariel with as many fragile things as possible, including the stereo, the large lava lamps, her violins, the space echoes, her paintings and as much as we could fit bearing in mind that she has to sleep at the campsite tonight and needs a space to lie down. Although there’s a fuel crisis she managed to fill up but had to stop on the way to put on her coat and a blanket around her whilst she was driving because Ariel’s heater doesn’t work – MOT 25th October in Portugal, so that will be something to fix amongst other things. On the subject of Portugal, Stephen (from Schoolkids Records) and Naoise have arrived at our apartment as a welcome break from Belfast and our plant may now have a chance of surviving as there’s someone there to water it. Thanks to Ricardo for sorting them out with the keys.

Spot the song: “The loading has begun”