The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. It's morning now and I'm still moving stuff. Right at this moment, with my left hand I'm pulling an old lady’s shopping trolley filled with spider plants, with my right hand I'm pulling a suitcase full of crap, and under my armpit are two cork boards. And there's a box of baby toys sellotaped to top the suitcase and balancing precariously.

All this moving stuff between apartments has got me thinking about the Pareto principle, that 80% of stuff is garbage and only the other 20% is worth anything. The Pareto principle can be applied to our belongings because 80% of our belongings could just be thrown away and we wouldn't even notice. Here are some things we own:

• Twe blood pressure monitors. I don't even need one blood pressure monitor and yet I own two of them.
• Twenty-two mugs. We only use two mugs so why we need the other twenty, I don't know.
• A couple of dozen wine glasses. Neither of us drinks wine. We're kind of expecting that we're going to have a wine and cheese party at some point even though we never have and we never will.
• Satin Care Sensitive shave cream. Girlfriend says it's not hers, which means it must be mine. I don't even use cream to shave so why do I own that. I think it’s my sister, she keeps sending me crap in the post. Crap she thinks I need.

I'm moving all our belongings myself because the new apartment is less than a three minutes’ walk from the old apartment, just literally down the road. One minute if a dog is chasing you. I'm moving stuff in suitcases, one trip after the other because the apartments are so close to each other. Otherwise, we would have just done it in a van and it would have just taken us just one day.

Actually, we did pay a moving company €220 to move some stuff, but they only took the heavy stuff, like shelves and a mattress. It was only yesterday when I realised just how much crap we still have to move.

Keep moving, keep moving or else you die. That's the first rule of business and it's also the first rule of moving stuff between apartments. Actually, I think the first rule of business might be "make a profit" or "don't touch the intern’s bum". But there's no intern here, it’s just me, so I make the rules here, alright?

It's quarter to noon and I'm heading back to the old apartment now to make my seventh trip of the day. Today is more stressful than usual because the cleaner is cleaning the old apartment as I speak, to make the apartment look nice for the landlord so that he might give us some of our deposit back, but there's still loads of our belongings in the old apartment and I have to try to keep one step ahead of the cleaner by taking out all the stuff of the room that she wants to clean in. So far, I've managed to keep up the pace. By now I’m lagging behind, and all I have for breakfast was eight pieces of fuet (sliced meat).

*****

I'm on the last trip. I'm carrying a green baby bath full of crap and carrying that to the new apartment. I feel like a street seller selling my wares to people. "Who wants to buy a dirty old shower mat?", I feel like crying to people. “Get your dead batteries here! Get your dirty old yoghurt pots!”

Every step, I can feel myself getting closer and closer to the goal of finishing. This is it, I can visualise the finishing line. It's taken five days to move all our stuff from one apartment to another. It feels like the end of an era.

Then I get home, drop the baby bath on the floor, collapse on the sofa and say to Girlfriend, "That's it. Finished. That was the last, the last of it."

Girlfriend is lying on the sofa. She's playing Candy Crush and watching TV. "You forgot the cleaning stuff," she says. I forgot about the cleaning stuff, the stuff the cleaner was using to clean the apartment. So I have to go back and get the cleaning stuff.

*****

It's all done. Everything is moved, even the cleaning stuff. I'm sitting in a chair in our new living room and I'm feeling shellshocked. Is it really over? What do slaves do when given freedom? Do trapped birds fly away when their cages are opened?

I’ve been moving so much stuff for so long that it’s all I understand anymore. I’m like one of those soldiers who comes home from a war and doesn’t know how to fit into normal society.

They’ll have to give me a menial job packing groceries into bags like they give to people who come out of life term sentences in prison. And even then, when they hand me the paper bag to put groceries in, I’ll probably try to put the paper bag into a suitcase and move it to the new apartment. Because the need to move stuff between apartments is ingrained into my brain now.

*****

In the window of a dentist, they have a giant photo of some teenage kid in a hoodie with his two thumbs up and smiling and the words “I trust this dentist” or something like that. He looks like a heroin addict you'd see on a council estate; I think it's some kind of scheme to get more teenagers to come in for unnecessary and expensive veneers and crowns. And then I see that actually, it's a picture of Pedro Gonzáleza, a player for Barcelona football club. The dentist must have paid him to use his face to advertise their dental services. You'd think a world-class footballer would look a bit more healthy and less like a heroin-addict but there you go.

Last year, the dentist was using stock photos of generic attractive people instead. Then some kids came along and graffitied them and drew like a swastika on the head of one of the people and blacked out some of their teeth. That graffiti was there for at least a year and whoever was responsible for that graffiti should be nominated for an award, possibly several awards.