Sofa, so good

Well, we've certainly had a busy couple of days here. Almost everything's unpacked, just about every piece of furniture we had in the living/dining area has moved (at least once) to accomodate our sofa, which was a large part of the shipment. Why would we ship a sofa halfway around the world when India actually makes really quite nice sofas? Well, we love this sofa, it's incredibly comfortable and it reminds us of home. Rod's parents gave us this sofa when we moved into Marina Avenue in 1997. But it was not new, they were downsizing in Edinburgh, and it was fortuitous that we were able to make use of it at a time when we were expanding up from a one bed apartment to a three bed house. The sofa was not new in Edinburgh, Rod remembers it from his childhood home. By his reckoning, the sofa is nearly 40 years old. I asked David, his Dad, how old the sofa was on his last visit down to us before we left, and I found out Rod is wrong. Yes the sofa was in his childhood home, but it wasn't new when his parents got it. It had actually been bought by Rod's grandparents, so it is even older still! It certainly was too old to stay in Marina Avenue when the house was rented out, because it seems the authorities were less concerned about fire regulations in the post war years, and it wouldn't pass fire safety tests. We don't care about that, it now has pride of place in our living room, in front of our big flat screen TV. We are happy bunnies. Happier still once we buy a bookcase to hold the books, CDs and DVDs that haven't yet been unpacked.

Another reason we were so desperate to get everything sorted quickly was my Mum, Marcia, arrived yesterday to stay for six weeks. We had chosen late October so she could be here for Diwali, and to allow us time to unpack all our stuff and get sorted. We had been planning on having at least a couple of weeks to do this, not a couple of days. But she's seen a cardboard box or two before, and that's not what she's focussing on anyway. So we're off to do some shopping!