jameshurrell.co.uk

Saturday 22nd arrived and it was time to move out of our house and into some temporary (but very nice) accomodation and time for Kate and James to move into our old house!

Perhaps rather foolishly given the state of my back and arms on Sunday, we decided to do the move ourselves rather than get removal people in, so we hired a van and rounded up some very nice friends to lend a hand. It all went really smoothly, but we could not have done it without Rich, Ben and his wife Rowena and Ben’s younger brother David (who was a last minute surprise (but very welcome) addition to the helpers!). We now owe them all an awful lot, and I don’t think any amount of beer will compensate for how they must have felt at the end of Saturday. Thank you so much guys!

By 5pm the house was empty (yes that was the colour of our bedroom!) and we had moved all the stuff into the temporary accomodation:

Now we’re living out of boxes and the great thing is we don’t have to pack any thing else up, but equally we can’t unpack that much either!

The big move is now on and we have a completion date of the 22nd September..! Yikes! By my calculations that gives us precisely 13 days to pack all our rubbish things into boxes and get out of here. We’ve made a good start: our once nice, comfortable living room has been transformed into a storage area and I have discovered that between us we must have hundreds of books. How on earth we ever thought we would be able to read so many is beyond me. I even found what I thought was the original copy of the bible hidden behind a cupboard.

And so it continues. I’ve collected all the pictures and paintings off the walls and disovered what a grimy pair we are - there are now little outline marks where the pictures once hung. Anyway, it’s going OK so far, but this is the first step. We’ve now got to get it all out of the house and into a van.

God help us.

On my internet travels I recently stumbled across a webcam from Svalbard right up in the far Arctic north, between mainland Norway and the North Pole (it is Norwegian territory). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard for more information.

I was immediately struck by the stark beauty of the place and by the perpetual daylight. Not sure how I’d cope though with perpetual night time! I contacted the owner of the webcam, Svein Nordahl, and asked if it would be OK to link directly to his webcam images. He very kindly assured me this would be no problem.

So here we are, two images live from Svein’s house looking north towards the North Pole. I’ve linked the images directly, so each time you open this blog post, they should update (Svalbard is GMT+1).

You can get the full size images here, which really show the landscape at its best! Svein’s main homepage can be found at: http://www.svein-nordahl.com/ - take a look. Thanks for sharing your webcam Svein!