Preparations

It turns out that the organisation necessary for temporarily moving to another country is a complete hassle. I am definitely not good at forms and phoning people up and all this sort of thing, which has somewhat put a damper on the giddy excitement of it all. Luckily a bit of this is being handled by the agency, but I am still sick of Doctor's certificates, Subject access requests, EHICs, E104s, CA 3916s, etc, etc. In good news, my temporarily dead antique phone has come back to life, and I'm pretty sure I'll just be able to buy it an Icelandic SIM once I'm there.

I went to the Post Office on Monday to order a bit of Icelandic cash - a hundred quid's worth, which I'm picking up later today. I can't remember how many krónur this is going to get me, but it's in the thousands. The conversion rate is something tricky like £1 - 187 ISK (although obviously transfer fees mean I won't be getting 18,700 kr.). As anyone who's seen me try to do a sum in my head will testify, I think I'm going to have to forget about "How much is this in pounds?" and just try and get used to it.

I've written a list of all the things I need to pack, and am definitely starting on that this afternoon. I'm also going to the hairdressers, to delay for as long as possible the inevitable terror of getting a haircut in another language.

And then before I know it, it's going to be Friday, and I'll be going up with my Dad (and my Mum if she can find someone to look after the puppies) to stay the night with my Auntie Alison in Putney. And then to Gatwick in the morning, by which point I'll probably be close to having a heart attack. Now the 'Iceland deadline' is really rushing up, and all my vague conceptions about the future are starting to solidify into something very real. People who I've only communicated with via email and telephone - I'm going to be actually meeting them and actually living in their house and actually attempting to communicate with them in a language which hitherto I have spoken only to myself. The Iceland that I've created inside my head won't survive this - I want to talk about Proust a lot at this point, but I'll refrain. I am quite scared.