If you ever find yourself struggling to understand how an arsonist could bring themselves to burn a place filled with priceless domestic mementos to a pile of ash, try moving house. The empathy will come flooding in.
My partner and I moved recently and, after the last one about a year ago, I was feeling pretty confident that this one would go much better than it did.
I had, pretty successfully I thought, turned Marie Kondo-ing my things into an extreme sport last time. Having rid myself of so many worldly anchors that probably had my neighbours thinking I was moving to a monastery rather than down the road, getting what few possessions survived the cull into a box would surely be a breeze this time. My grandmother even gave me a copy of The Little Book of Hygge as a housewarming gift, all about how good the Danes are at being domestic compared to us hopeless, non-lifestyle-having Philistines. (Shamefully, I admit, I haven't read it yet.)
So confident was I, in fact, that I even delayed the packing by a day or four, reasoning that those days that I spent last time going mad on the fumes from spray and wipe were long behind me, and I had time to goof off a bit before breezing into this change of domestic situation with the effortless ease and confidence of Nigella Lawson whacking something in the "micro-wahvae" and then putting the recipe in an expensive cookbook.
I am an expert at this point, thought I; look upon my moving, ye mortals and despair. Anyway, this story is about how it all went wrong.
Packing: Everything fits until it doesn't
There are - as the adage goes - two kinds of people in the world: those who colour coordinate their Christmas tree decorations and those who can't remember where it is.
The last time I decorated a Christmas tree was a few years ago at home, with AC/DC almost drowning out Dad's go-to choice of that Mariah Carey Christmas album while I chucked tinsel from a distance of about five feet with a glass of wine in hand. I thought the result was a kind of exciting mix of Dadaism and cathartic action painting that spoke to the commercial weirdness of the season, but for some reason, no one has asked me to help decorate the tree since.
I was thinking about that while packing all of my sensibly shaped books in the first moving box and considering how well this whole moving lark was going. Then, the first box was done, and I was tired of moving and wanted to go to the pub, so the second box was done with a different kind of energy.
Speaking of the pub, it didn't occur to me until then that the last time I was feeling this confident about moving was when I left Tamworth for Newcastle about seven years ago - I had a room in a journo house that I was convinced couldn't take longer than 45 minutes (an hour tops) to whack into a car (something I repeatedly said to my increasingly concerned mother who was helping me move that weekend) and the night before D-Day I decided to go for a quiet schooner.
[SCENE MISSING].
Next thing I know, I was woken suddenly and painfully by the sound of my mum knocking on the door with an armload of McMuffins (apparently she had called earlier and I had simply said "McMuffins" down the phone like a pre-animated Frankenstein) thoroughly sure I was going to die with zero packing achieved. I've never quite lived it down.
Stay in school, kids.
The only thing worse than packing
Having got even the most creatively shaped kitchen appliances into boxes with the help of several long-suffering friends, the moving guys arrived, and the stuff was hauled off to our new place. We were all tired, hungry and thoroughly over moving. That's how we ended up with the lids, I think; two of them and the jars that they were once attached to were gone. So gone, I thought they were, I threw the lids out after the first night because I was convinced that the jars must have been Marie Kondoed long ago. I found the jars yesterday.
A current inventory of the kitchen drawers now includes, but is not limited to: about three glass containers (lids pending, but I've learnt my lesson now); multiples of several herb and spice varieties (I've been banned from that grocery aisle until further notice); no less than three different kinds of small sieves (no colander); three pairs of kitchen scissors (I thought we only had one); noticeably more spoons than forks; and an electric wok.
Funny thing about the wok: I have no memory of how it ended up in that house. So convinced was I that I didn't have a wok for whipping up stir-fries and such that my loving better-half went out and bought one a few weeks ago because she's very caring like that.
Can you imagine how thrilled she was?
The number of still packed boxes is dwindling, though, and while I'm losing confidence that a trove of forks and lids will appear packed alongside the winter scarves or something (weirder things have happened), the end is, mercifully, in sight (he writes, imagining a calm blue ocean and repeating the therapist-prescribed mantra).
