I am not looking forward to move day.
My wife talks about how nice and pleasant it’s all going to be, and how we’d save so much money just hiring a man-and-a-van instead of proper movers for our relocation from London to Brighton.
If there were a moving house Olympics, I’d probably have a medal by now. I think in my first 5 years living in London I moved 8 times. It’s one of the hazards of flat sharing and renting when you’re young and single – you end up moving quite a bit as friendships/tenancies/arrangements change. Each move was using combinations of the tube, hired cars or vans and relying on the help of very kind friends.
Every one of those moves also involved a lot of sweat, shortness of breath and feeling something go click in my back at some stage during the day and thinking "oh, that can’t be good". Something always got damaged or lost on the day as well.
After my last such move I promised myself that I would splash out on movers next time around. So when it came to booking our move to Brighton, and my wife mentioned man-and-van I replied with a very insistent "no!".
My wife still wanted to explain how easy it was for her to move house with a man-and-van. "But you’re a woman!" I pointed out. When you asked the man-and-van to come and move your furniture for you, he did. As a gentleman he of course did all the heavy lifting. It’s a different story when a guy enlists the help of a man and van – the guy will be expected to do as much lifting, if not more, as the man with the van, because it is his stuff in the first place!
Packing is something else I don’t love about moves – my wife isn’t exactly the epitome of organisation, and would probably be delighted to throw our entire house contents into a giant skip, randomly pick through it at the other end and gradually move the stuff into our new house over the course of, let’s say, 6 months. She would not only find this perfectly adequate as a means of moving house, she probably doesn’t really understand why everyone goes to the fuss and expense of cataloguing everything into boxes in the first place.
But cataloguing is what keeps me sane! Where I am involved all our stuff will be in nice uniform labelled boxes, beautifully taped up and nicely stacked. That way we’ll be able to get at things as we need them by reading the side of the box before opening them all, and it will be all calm and organised.
At least that’s what I’m hoping.
The boxes arrived today – I’ve already started packing them up, and it’s a month to go. Got them all packed before plan B gets invoked and I wake up morning to find a skip outside my door.
