What went right

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  If I ever need to get rid of my car and move out of my flat on the same weekend again, I'll know exactly how to do it.

Rather than whine about everything that went wrong, I decided to just talk about what went right:

• It didn't rain on Sunday. Of course it poured on Saturday when I was moving all my stuff to London, but Sunday was lovely.
• I got to see many of my friends, from Stroud to Surrey.  Granted, driving around the country might not have been the best use of my time, but I had rented a car and it was the first time in two months I could visit.  Besides, I filled the car with stuff I wanted to give away, so I convinced myself it was an integral part of the move.  (Unfortunately most of it came home with me, so I had to make an extra trip to the recycling center on Monday.)
• I got £95 for my car.  However, I spent £40 for a battery jumper, which I had to use twice while driving the car (illegally!) to the scrap yard. Oh, and it cost £5 and took nearly two hours to get public transportation home.  (They would have collected my car, but then they would have only given me £75.)
• I was able to squeeze everything into the rental car, so I only had to make one trip into London.  Of course I missed quite a few things, so on Monday I ended up carrying three suitcases and a battery jumper on the train into London.  When my friend Lucy offered to store my stuff, I assured her I only had a few things, so arriving with six large boxes and two bags of clothes was kind of embarrassing.
• I got to walk through Reading and say good-bye to a town I'd grown quite fond of.  This was because I'd been a little overzealous and packed all of my jeans and trousers in those two bags of clothes I'd left in London, so I had to walk to the shopping center to buy some long pants to wear the next day.
• The cleaners were brilliant.  However, they quickly spotted I had two bedrooms -- not one like I told them over the phone -- and adjusted the price accordingly.  The lease specified I needed to have it professionally cleaned, and in a truculent mood I decided that to get my money's worth I would not clean the flat, at all, for four weeks.  Of course, the day before they arrived I was so embarrassed that I cleaned the whole flat.
• It was done.  Hard to believe, after a month of incredibly stressful planning, worry and effort, it all (more or less) worked out.  Yes, the boxes were in total disarray, but at least they were in one place.  Yes, it was extremely depressing to scrap my car, but after spending a month trying to sell it, it was the only realistic option.  (If I hadn't waited until the last minute, it would have been much easier, but by the same token if I hadn't waited until the last minute, I would have always wondered if I could have sold it.)

I'm extremely grateful to my friends for helping me out, supporting me, and keeping me sane during the process.  It's not easy giving up your job, house and car at the same time, even if I have done it three times before.  (That's not true--when I moved to Pennsylvania, I took my car, and when I moved to the UK, I didn't have a car.)  I'm also grateful to all the people, whether they realise it or not, who will be providing me shelter over the next two months.  I'll let you know who you are.