To begin with the main challenge with the daily deliveries of parcels was just excercising sufficient self control to hold back from tearing off the brown packing tape  and sinking my sore hands into all that soothing wool. I tried to stash them all in the back store room before temptation got the better of me. It didn’t always work…

I caved in when the Colinette box arrived and prized apart the top of the parcel without actually ripping off the tape. The opening was just big enough to get a glimpse of the  wonderous swirls of  Point 5 . Meanwhile the store room  had begun to resemble a bizaare cardboard city with teetering towers of different sized boxes, cohabiting with the ladders, fire extinguishers, Henry the hoover and buckets of paint – a picture of disorder that adds to the tangle of stuff I’m working out in my head.

So I made up my mind that today would be Store Room Day. Maya and I carried everything out onto the shop floor except the cling-film-parceled flat packed metal garage-ish shelving units – complete with rubber malet. There were some very sparse non-lingual instructions that had 6 pictures of a lone man much taller than me, constructing the shelves, and then one at the end with him standing next to the shelves with a big grin on his face.

First of all there’s no way that anyone could put those shelves up on their own, and secondly being taller than 5″3′ would definitely have helped – or at least made it easier to hammer things together when we got to the top shelf. Maya was the star of the show, patiently holding bits together whilst I pleaded with the slots on the shelves to ‘Plleeeeeze go in this time’, as I hammered the bits together with merciless rubber malet pounding. Eventually we got into our stride and each unit was slightly more efficiently done than the last one. We turned the music up a bit louder to drown out the malet’s thuds on the metal and finally dragged them all into place.

But the best bit was getting all those boxes back into the store room and neatly stacked away on the shelves. Why was that so pleasing? I’m still not sure – but I kept going to check on that little back room all day – each time smiling to myself about the order and calm of that little room. Needless to say my ball-of-wool brain feels a lot like one of the big tangly bits has all been sorted and nicely wound…