Box City

The Pryce family have moved too often so there is an abundance of virtual friends, friends that exist by E-mail and Facebook, a children's education divided into Americanised international schools, British international schools and now bullet-is-bitten the native schools. Chasing the Euro-dollar may not have been for the best and has another price. But then unemployment in Blighty was not exactly an option to the MP3, iPod, GPS generation.


So I have shared the upwardly mobile tramp experience having lived with cardboard boxes several times where what-should-be treasured possessions remained resolutely hidden in a box marked "stuff" that the movers felt was equivalent to odd socks. Family heirlooms for years carefully tended by a Grandmother now slightly, badly re-structured by a grandson wondering the sticky tape was. A grandmother turns in her grave a grandson turns up a box.


Months later residence papers hunted down in a bureaucratic jungle of far flung offices in an unknown city armed with a local map and a Let's Get by in getting by book, offices with lifts , some without lifts, with starirs lots of stairs' helpful and unhelpful assistance and thank God we are Brits because the Latinos aren't allowed to jump the queue.

Finally in one country after several dollars we were given our official residence status on a recycled A4 page stamped, signed and bearing a striking simarity to my son's first fading school report paper except his stamp was a smiley face. And by coincidence old school papers of the kids kept for posterity and now also lost in the boxes and should have been chucked, because I am a miser I think they cost about 100$ to move around this continent. But wifey would disagree. On such differences of opinions arguments are formed to seed a divorce. Trigger tempers amongst the cardboard jungle.

Then a year or so later a document is needed to prove one is a paid-up veritable member of a foreign society, a paper for a car, a paper for a bank, a paper put safely somewhere in a safe place in box city. I blame the wifey, she blames the hubby, we should buy a dog and save a marriage. I may be some time.