Time flies when you’ve a dozen dozen things to get done. I’m currently sat amidst the chaos of the early stages of packing my possessions up for the move to Sweden. This time next week, a bunch of removals people will turn up and load most of it into a large van, and take it away to be consolidated into a lorry-load destined for Scandinavia the following week.

Once that’s done, me and KJ and a suitcase will make our way to Hull, where we will board a ferry across the North Sea, to wake in Rotterdam the next morning. Then we’ll get in a taxi from Rotterdam ferryport to the train station (which is apparently a good 30 minutes away — Rotterdam is a biiiiig port, and there’s no public transport out that way), whencefrom we’ll get on a train to Amsterdam, there to board another one to Osnabruck, there to change to a third one to Hamburg, where we will stay overnight. (European hotels are, thankfully, fairly sensible about accommodating pets.)

On the Friday, we’ll have a much-needed slow morning before boarding the direct train from Hamburg to Copenhagen at lunchtime. From Copenhagen it’s a quick half-hour ride over the Øresund (the bridge made famous in Scandi-noir dramas) to Malmö, which will be my new home for at least the next five months, and quite possibly the next two to three years.

I’m typing this out here partly for the sake of reassuring myself that my meticulous (or, perhaps more fairly, obsessively paranoid) planning is complete. Travelling long distance by train gets easier with experience, but it can still be a daunting lump of logistics, and taking poor KJ — who I am utterly unwilling to subject to the ignominy of travelling as air cargo — has certainly added to the challenge. (Hence the ferry: no cats allowed on the Eurostar.)

But she’s got her passport and paperwork, and she’s pre-registered with Swedish customs… and as can be seen above, she’s got a comfy new carrier to ride in, which she seems to find agreeable enough to hang out in without prompting. I am not without qualms — she’s travelled moderately long distances in vans and trains in my previous moves, and always taken it in her stride, but she’s never done 48 hours of multimodal adventures. But I take some comfort from the fact that I have done such adventures before, and thus have a fairly good idea of what to expect at pretty much every stage. I very much doubt she’ll enjoy the trip, but I’m confident she’ll recover swiftly at the other end, as we settle into the compact 1940s-era apartment that I’m subletting through to July.

I sure hope she settles in, at any rate — because I have about a week and a half to await the arrival of my stuff on the lorry and sort the place out before I depart for a week of meetings and workshops in the Netherlands.

Congratulations and apologies, KJ; looks like you just became an obligatory member of #1000mphclub.