The test came the next day when we had to navigate the Tube with all of the stuff that we brought. We ended up on the train away from the airport, the Gatwick Express, at half-past five in the blessed AM. At that point, the fun was just beginning. Dragging our cases through the airport was just the warm-up. After all, it’s an airport. People are supposed to arrive there with suitcases of varying sizes and portability. Here there’s a ramp, over there an escalator, once in a while a lift. All intended to aid the movement of the weary traveller.

The Tube, well there’s a different kettle of fish. For those taking notes, the Tube is also called the Underground. Cleverly enough, because that is where it is located. The whole system is rather old. The best method devised at the time to get people in and out of it was built was lots and lots of stairs. If you recall from just paragraphs before, we were moving the equivalent of the average-sized dead body. A poor combination to be sure.

Last year, in July there were terrorist bombs detonated in the London Underground. This has led to, as you might imagine, a heightened sense of awareness in and around all of the transit systems in London. There are no litter bins anywhere. There are constant announcements over the public address system that bags left unattended would be subject to seizure and destruction. I imagine a dozen transit workers gathered around a small pit on a Friday afternoon exploding my seized bag.

This left us with two options: first, take one heavy bag in one hand and an even heavier bag in the other hand and walk either up or down a set of Victorian era stairs. Second, try to get four bags down the stairs using two people and never leave any of them unattended. Kind of like the brain-teaser with the fox, the chicken and the bag of grain that you have to get across the river in a boat one at a time.

We finally ditched option one. It proved almost instantly too frustrating to carry on that way. We took to taking cases up or down flights of stairs part way one piece at a time. Never out of sight, but occasionally out of reach for a few seconds. If I was to pick a sound track, the music from Benny Hill would have been fitting.

Part way through, there had been enough lugging of cases that had one of them been seized for destruction, my protests would have been meek at best. Add in to all this, our arrival at the Embankment station to find the construction blocking our access to the platform we needed. The less than entirely helpful workers pointed out where we could get the train we needed. Back down the stairs.

By this time, we had gotten off of an overnight flight, hustled onto the express train and had been humping 12 stone of luggage up and down stairs. Add to, or perhaps more correctly subtract from, this situation that we had not had anything to eat since the airplane dinner night before. When we finally arrived at our end destination, Belsize Park tube station, we were hot, tired, hungry and cranky. We were also relieved, as we were ready to start getting settled in our new home.