"Pete - how are we going to carry that?" I looked round to see Clodagh pointing at the one item I'd spent the day trying to avoid. It had been placed in the corner for safety, but now we were getting close to clearing the room and it had returned as an issue.
"Take it with us in the car?" She didn't even need to say anything. I knew how daft an idea that sounded, taking a thing of that size and fragility on seventy mile trip with a couple of five year olds. "OK, so we leave it to the pros. But pack it up ourselves?"
The object in question was an intricately decorated pot about seventy centimetres high and thirty five in diameter at it's widest point. It had been a wedding present from my folks, a huge surprise at the time, and we both loved and feared it. Because this wasn't something they'd picked up at the garden centre. This was a Gerry Mayson.
That was a name I first heard when I was sixteen. As part of the utterance "Bloody hell - Gerry Mayson? Really? What is the bloody Turner Prize anyway?" from behind my father's newspaper. The tabloid lowered to reveal a stunned facial expression and no further sound for a few seconds. Then he told us who this Gerry guy was.
They'd been at school together. When I say together I mean that they were in the same year. Gerald had been one of the bright kids, one of the poncey arty ones that my dad's crowd shunned. There might even have been a bit of bullying, although my father didn't quite phrase it that way. But they had ended up going to hospital together, both having been in the wrong place when light fitting fell from the ceiling, and that created some kind of a bond. Not enough of a bond that they kept in touch after school days, but sufficient for Dad to feel some connection to what he'd just read.
Gerry Mayson had won the Turner Prize for his innovative ceramic creations, and the social and political commentary they resonated with. My determinedly lowbrow father couldn't have told a Rembrandt from a Kawasaki, but even he realised this was a big thing, and he felt some pride by association. But I knew it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to him.
I was wrong. When an exhibition of Mayson's work came to town he insisted on a family outing. And there was the man himself, revisiting his childhood haunts. That hospital trip came in handy, allowing Dad to remind the potter of their common experience, and their unlikely relationship was resusictated. For me, with artistic pretensions my parents had never understood, this was a godsend, and suddenly my painting wasn't just the "fannying about" it had been previously. Gerry got my folks to take me seriously. Better still, Gerry took me seriously, liked what I was doing, and provided me with all sorts of help. I would never have got to where I am now without a bit of potter patronage.
So when my parents presented us with the pot a few days before our wedding day I was bursting with emotions. Pleasure at them coming up with a gift so imaginative and personal. Terror at them coming up with a gift so simultaneously beautiful, fragile and uniquely irreplaceable in the universe. Bafflement at them coming up with a gift that must have required my mother to fellate Gerry Mayson every week for a year for him to present us with a large, shapely, glazed tribute to our connubial moment. And now it had to survive a house move.
So we found a box. We put it in the box nestled in bubble wrap, swaddled in towels, cocooned in a duvet. And then into another, spacier box that was really a wardrobe and gripped the smaller massive box in five winters worth of coats and anoraks and assorted cushions in floral prints and jazzy designs. It was the Amazon package of the house removal world.
Then we let these professional carrying and shifting people take it away and into their lorry and out of sight, and imagined the pot in a million shards in a motorway pile up. People died in the pile up but all our concerns went into the colourful fragments waiting to be unearthed by firemen. They say moving house is one of the most stressful events in anyone's life. And most people, I suspect, don't have a big, shin,y multi coloured pot, lovingly created by an internationally renowned artist, that commemorates the biggest day of their lives and must 'be there' until they become corpses. Do they?
We got in the car. We remembered to bring the children. We drove the seventy miles, making reassuring noises, smiling reassuring smiles. We watched the professionals unload. We watched them unload the wardrobe containing the box containing the pot and the cold weather garments and the soft furnishings. We couldn't hear any rattling.
Settle in first. You have to, don't you? Kettle, plates, get a takeaway, let the kids be excited, makeshift bed making, get the kids into bed, pour a large drink. It's ten thirty. The wardrobe is sitting there. We talk about putting it off until the morning, but know we won't. I open the wardrobe.
Out they come. Cushions and coats. The big box. A duvet. Towels. That's handy, we need towels. And then, bubble jacketed, the pot. There have been no untoward noises. We can breathe, almost. Unwrap, carefully, fretfully. It is as was. No chips, no scratches, no hint of potlessness. We can go to bed, we can sleep. I will not have to pretend to my parents that we've moved to Peru. I can face Gerry Mayson.
