LOOKING at the calendar this week I realised it is 26 years since I moved to Cornwall. Perhaps I should have celebrated the quarter century last year, but it seems to have passed by without notice.

It's a cliché but it only seems like yesterday we drove down the hill to Gunnislake Newbridge and into Cornwall. The primroses were out, daffodils were in full bloom and we were on our way to a new life.

Of course a 250 mile plus journey with two adults, three children and four cats all crammed into a Ford Capri had not been a piece of cake.

The latter, I mean the Ford Capri, was the married man's answer to a sports car. Sitting in the low seat, with the sleek bonnet in front, and a sloping roof above, a chap could dream that he didn't have a wife, three children and four cats stuck around him but was in fact driving a little sporty number which would wow any female who saw it. The fact that it actually had less room in it than the mini it had replaced didn't matter.

Not only was the car packed with the family, it also had a variety of objects which wouldn't fit in the removal van, including a giant rubber plant which resided in between my legs for the whole journey, a position which did neither of us any good.

Three of the cats, as I have described in other articles, were tranquillised into slumber and were neither seen nor heard. The fourth, who had either resisted the vet's knockout drop or had managed to spit it out, rampaged round the car and its passengers for almost the entire journey. As we left the children started their usual 'It's not my turn to sit in the middle' fight and as we arrived were still at it; I was scratched by the cat, so was the rubber plant; one child had been sick out of the window, or nearly, and the car was still filled with the aroma of sardines which I had fed to the rampant cat when we stopped at a Little Chef in order to stop her getting out of the car while we tried to get back in.

All in all, not an auspicious start.

The overloaded ark was due entirely to the fact that my husband had booked a removal firm run by the Del Boy and Rodney Trotter of East Sussex.

Once we knew we were moving to Cornwall we had had estimates from a couple of nationally known removal companies and when their estimates arrived my husband had had to have oxygen administered to bring him round from his dead faint. He said it would be cheaper to trash all the furniture and buy new.

Then somebody down the pub suggested a small local firm and my husband rang them and the man said he would pop round one evening.

I should have been slightly suspicious from the start because he arrived in his removal van, which naturally we thought was part of the fleet but turned out to be the only one he had.

Secondly he didn't really look into any of the rooms, he just poked his head round the door. The other firms had clipboards and counted things, opened cupboards and mentioned attics, measured and calculated square footage. Our man had a tiny red notebook and soon sat down gratefully for a cup of tea. He didn't even look in the garage, or the shed. Nor did he go upstairs. I think he thought it was a bungalow.

Afterwards I also realised that he hadn't really asked many questions about where we were going, while the other firms had practically wanted an architect's drawing of the outside of our new home, its accesses, parking facilities and width of doors etc.

The estimate, when it came, was very low. Probably lower than the other firms would have charged to move us two doors down the road. But it was accepted and the date was set.

Now I can't honestly say that there was anything wrong with the removers. They were friendly and very co-operative. There just weren't many of them. And the van, when we looked at it, was plainly not big enough, not unless there was to be a kind of miracle of the loaves and fishes in reverse or it had some kind of Tardis like properties we couldn't see. It didn't, and there wasn't.

Holiday

The end result was that we had to pile a lot of our possessions into the attic (fortunately the house wasn't yet sold), ignore the shed and hope that anyone who fancied a holiday in Cornwall in the next few weeks would agree to pack a sizable percentage of our wordly goods into their boot.

With the van loaded we waved them off, not entirely certain we were ever going to see our furniture again.

They were going to stop halfway to sleep overnight in the van, although where I don't know because there didn't appear to be room for a hamster to settle down for an overnight stop.

So we were a slightly bedraggled group who arrived much later that day at our destination, and next morning a slightly anxious one too, because the van was late, they'd somehow mislaid Cornwall. But they turned up and blanched a bit when they saw where they'd have to carry the furniture, but cheered up when they realised we had moved into a pub.

In the end everyone helped them, including some of our new customers who had no doubt come down for a quiet pint and a chance to look at the new owners. Instead they found themselves carrying tea chests full of books and heaving beds up the path.

When everything was in I fed them pasties and provided drinks and when my husband prepared to pay the bill I suggested we give them a really good tip. 'Yes', he said, I'll tell them to make sure they look in every room before they write the estimate next time'. Well, what can you expect from a Welshman?