The exchange on my daughter's flat has prompted me to add this excerpt from something I wrote during our own house move in late Summer last year. Will we never learn.

August 2009

‘Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more’ Shakespeare had a point.
I know what that feels like. We have been solidly moving house now for three weeks. Bit by bit we have carted the rubbish we meant to throw away from the last move, back to the house we had just moved out of only three months earlier. I’m sure we’re not alone in this. I have a friend who moved to a house just up the road from her previous one and when I helped her unpack she had carefully wrapped a waste paper bin complete with rubbish still intact.

One day this will all stop and frankly I can’t wait. I think this is the 18th house move and it’s more surreal than most. It feels like only yesterday that we squeezed our trinkets into this small bijou forgotten backwater cottage in Twickenham, willing it to expand its walls, only now to have to rent it out because the market’s gone belly up and we need to sell our old house which had been rented out. It’s all gone pear shaped really. The cottage was our bolthole for the future, whilst we swanned around the world in a camper van. Oh how naive are we? Now we are moving back to the old house which we can’t sell, to give it another sales push.
Only it turns out that the people who have been sniffing around the house for simply months may make an offer. But it’s too late to stop the move as we’ve accepted a rental on the cottage. If the sale goes through we are possibly faced with another move in a couple of months and to where? We may be homeless!

Memories are only just fading of a previous move a few years ago, back to a house we had in Brighton. To shorten his journey, Paul decided to camp out in the 'star' dressing room of the company he works for. This worked very well until he got up one morning in his boxers and skipped off down the corridor to use the separate showers. Not easy to explain to the receptionist that the managing director is in his underpants at 7.00am because the door slammed shut behind him. It’s a mistake you make only once.

Anyway, two lovely men are moving into our cottage. I can’t wait.