Moving

I hate moving house. No, to be accurate, I hate buying and selling houses that you intend to live in. Conveyancing, it’s such an innocent sounding word.

My family and I have been in our new house for nearly a month now, and the horror is just beginning to fade. It’s like waking up from a nightmare. You know it’s over, the terror is fading, but you’re damned if you’re going back to sleep just yet. 

The actual move itself isn’t so bad, just work and expense. Putting your place up for sale is expensive but reasonably simple. Finding a place to buy is exciting, almost enjoyable with its initial hope and optimism. The pain begins just after the joy of finding your buyer or seller, when the lawyers get involved. From there it’s a rapid descent into hell, and you soon realise that this rollercoaster is just a bit too scary for you.

I work in process improvement, and if there’s ever a process that needs improving, conveyancing is it. The whole thing seems to be a cobbled together gentleman’s agreement, where each buyer has their vendor’s testicles in an inescapable grip. If everyone is nice and calm then we can all pretend to be friends, but as soon as one person squeezes, the pain chain begins. Meanwhile the solicitors and estate agents sing softly to each other, telling you not to worry as your sanity unravels. 

If a political party pledged to throw the whole system up in the air and start again, they’d get my vote. Unless they were Conservatives, UKIP or racists of course. 

Still it’s done now, and we’re in. I now have a front room to sit in and write, or listen to the radio, or hide when it took me an hour to notice a new hair cut. It almost seems worth it. One woman told me moving house was like child birth. You swear never again, but soon forget how horrible it was. Before you know it you’re planning your next one. 

I’m surprised there aren’t more books about moving house, or stories with a move as a backdrop. There’s drama, intrigue, uncertainty, stress, arguments, hope and despair. If anything would push someone to the brink of murder, this is it. 

I don’t think I’ll write it now though. I’m still too traumatised. I should fill a notebook with everything that happened and how I felt about it. That way I’d have something meaty to work from, or should the urge to move ever return, I can use it to cure myself of the notion.