A Moving Experience

We've just recently moved house, which, popular opinion would have it, is one of the most stressful things a civilized, middle class Westerner can hope to endure in their life.

I can confirm that the overall experience was, by turns, tedious, tentatively hopeful, enormously frustrating, preposterously frantic and - finally - liberating, although tinged with despair at the amount of work that now surrounds us like an unavoidable and somehow inhabitable 'To Do' list. Had anyone been documenting my facial expressions throughout the whole sorry process - a Brighton art student, perhaps, or [I flatter myself] a stalker - I might well have ended up resembling that unnaturally gurning brat from the tin plate Fry's Chocolate ads you might see on the platform of a preservation railway station.

I present merely the highlights:

• Our buyers exhibited a tentative grasp of the notion of honour, incrementally nudging the sale price down at every opportunity. I console myself that only now, once they've had time to absorb the scale and extent of the dilapidations - the rising damp, the last-legs double glazing, the unreliable bungaroosh walls - will they have realized precisely who was stitching up whom.

• On the day before we were due to move, the back door of our old house literally fell out of its comprehensively rotted frame. That's Sod's law in action, right there. Luckily my Dad's only decent O-Level was woodwork, so he did a bang-up job of making it look like nothing had ever happened. Thanks Dad!

• The removal company of the house we were moving to let them down at the last minute [allegedly - it's more likely that the dopey losers were out of it on joss sticks and patchouli oil and only realized they were supposed to be moving out when our van rocked up], so we couldn't start unloading anything until the starlings were beginning their final mass congregation of the day.

• Their disorganization meant that the new house was not in the least bit clean and, among other insanitary atrocities, one of our hapless volunteers hauled about a full wigsworth of predominantly human hair out from beneath the kitchen units. We're still fighting an minor insurgency of cat fleas they left as a moving-in present. Thanks a frigging bunch, movey-out people.

• The sofa bed - which I will admit is an awesome piece of equipment, ideal for blocking the main routes in to or out of cities - wouldn't fit either downstairs into the living room or upstairs to any of the bedrooms, so I came back from my final sweep of the old house to find it parked in the garage. We know some fairly open-minded people [which makes it sound like we're swingers - we aren't], but I don't think even the most easy-going among them would take too kindly to being put up right next to the washing machine. As luck would have it, our neighbours a] are accommodating types and b] have already had their lounge banisters removed, so we could just about manoeuvre it through their house, over the garden fence and in through our back door. Thanks Steve and Claire!

Oh well - it's over, we're in and the view really does make it all worthwhile.