PKPAK.EXE

The trouble with beginning to pack early is the possibility of a lack of forethought. As all my cutlery is now hidden away in the bottom of somewhere, just now I'm stirring hot chocolate with a pair of broken sunglasses.

I am admittedly appalling at packing things. My approach to putting things away is to classify them in to types of object - clothes, books, electronics - bag them up and throw them at random in to large containers in the belief that the order in which they're put in won't affect their volume in any way. The problem with this rather cavalier tactic is that suitcases seem to disobey one of the fundamental laws of physics and the filling order is crucial to getting things to fit inside each other. This was last demonstrated by Whitney just before Easter, when she uncovered TARDIS-like properties in the Ford Fiesta and packed three people's possessions in to it without anyone having to make the journey sitting on the roof.

Despite having been packing things in to other things all day on and off, my room doesn't actually look any different at all apart from becoming slightly messier and dustier, with the bed cluttered by cases and bags. The amount of stuff that I have at the end of a year is always amazing. And there's so much that I didn't even know I had - I found a book at the back of the shelf called "C for Programmers", which raised the question "who else would a book on C be written for?". C for Arts students? C for Single Cell Life Forms? Actually, if it was called "C for Coders" that would have been a clever double meaning. I'm a marketing genius.

As of about five minutes ago, Whitney has graduated!