At last, at last

[owl]

Our container is back home! We've been unpacking it all day. It's a little like Christmas, unwrapping the paper off everything. Mam keeps saying, "I'd forgotten we had that!", and has forgotten how we used to use things like the chopping board and the laundry basket. So far the only casualties are an ugly old glass lampshade that was older than I am, and David's model of the Bounty, which lost the bowsprit and a topgallant yard.

I had some slight distress when unpacking the books seemed to be at the bottom of everybody's priority list, but I promised to pack them all again if necessary and am now in a glut of reading. Such a choice! I'm simultaneously reading Mansfield Park and nitpicking the chronology of Mr Midshipman Hornblower (now having been to places the character himself hadn't; I wonder was he seasick :-P?)