I’ve moved house again, and I consider this relocation a more positive one; instead of just shuffling between my parents’ respective houses when they got sick of me, I’ve moved in with members of my peer group. Friends, at least for now.
I have a somewhat bipolar view on moving house, although this refers solely to the actual act of moving all the crap you’ve accumulated from one location to another. It’s the shifting of domiciles that gets me all flustered, rather than generally changing location. There are obvious benefits of moving to London (there’s a Caribbean/bagel shop round the corner. That’s the best kind of slash, even better than Buffy/Willow).
Moving house can be a rich and fulfilling experience. It’s an opportunity to imprint a facet of your personality on to a physical space: changing the way a room looks to better reflect your own tastes. One hopes that moving home is a chance to upgrade, to make a fresh start in better surroundings. In these times of financial uncertainty many people may unfortunately find themselves downsizing, moving to poorer accommodation in an attempt to save cash. This is depressing, but even in this case moving home means you can start afresh.
When you move house, you are essentially creating order from chaos. Some of the order you bring with you from your own place: your furniture and your pictures and your telly. Some of it is discretely tucked away in your new house: that cupboard with an unexpected amount of space, that strange little nook in the kitchen that turns out to be the perfect size for the wine rack. This bit I like. The way all that clutter fits neatly in the aforementioned cupboard. The way all your wine bottles look in the aforementioned rack. The way the aforementioned wine gets you pleasantly shitfaced.
The problem is that there is just so much tuppin’ chaos about. And your efforts to unravel complexity and strife only create more. It occurs that I haven’t just lazily listed things for a while, so suck it up:
Things you didn’t plan for on your cheerful ‘New House’ list:
1. It’s filthy. The previous owners or the landlord will have spruced it up a bit, and this will serve to hide the grime until just after it is practical to clean it properly yourself i.e. as soon as your stuff is piled up in the middle of the floor. The obvious bits will be sparkling: oven door, the middle of the carpets, mantelpieces. But anything above eye height and anything below ankle level is going to be mucky and probably with an oddly unplaceable but distinctively unpleasant smell.
Sometimes the house will have been ‘professionally cleaned’ before your arrival. This brings to mind an adept and well practised grime-fighting team, sort of Kim and Aggie with uniforms and without the inherent bigotry. What you probably got is a collection of bored students, or a group of harassed first generation immigrants, rushing to their eighteenth job of the day to earn enough cash to keep little Yaakov in short trousers. You aren’t going to be cheerfully eating off the floor after their lacklustre performance. On the other hand, it might assuage some of the guilt you feel for leaving your old place in such a fucking state.
2. None of your stuff fits anywhere. It doesn’t matter how spartan you were when you moved, or how zen you felt when you took all your old tat to the charity shop. It doesn’t even matter that the space you’re moving in to is technically larger than the one you left. Everything you own is going to spend several days waiting morosely in the middle of the floor. You will fall over it. Several times. Unpacking is not simply a case of transferring your things from suitcase to drawer. Instead it has become, somehow, a three-dimensional jigsaw of hellish complexity and stress, like playing Tetris while ramped up on coke. The only way to ensure you will have a place to store all your shoes is to abandon them all and arrive barefoot.
3. It will take at least twice as long as you anticipated. ‘Oh, we’ll try and get the majority done over the weekend,’ you glibly inform your mother on the phone. Yes, you will try. And, young Jedi, you will fail. Miserably. By Sunday night you will still be craning your neck to see the TV around the boxes marked ‘Kitchen: Misc.’ And on Monday you will go back to work, and on Monday evening you will come back exhausted and look at the box and go: ‘No. Shan’t. You can’t make me.’ You finish moving in roughly three weeks before it’s time to move out.
4. No service providers care you’ve moved. Not a jot. One would think, seeing as it’s all your money in the bank, that said bank might be more forthcoming in updating their details. They won’t: they’re a bank. Instead they’ll fail to update your address at all the first time you tell them, then when you realise you haven’t had a statement in months they’ll change it incorrectly, so your neighbour gets a juicy opportunity to impersonate you on Amazon. And when you finally stagger to the bank and shout at someone they will obsequiously listen to you rant and agree that mistakes have been made and then demurely tap away the changes on their computer. And then the cash machine will eat your card on the way home so you’ll know not to fuck with them next time.
5. Utilities companies don’t want you to move. In fact, they will actively deny that you have done so, in order to keep charging you for the electricity the new tenant is using. Like lovers refusing to acknowledge the end of an affair, they will continue to write and call long after it has become appropriate. When it has become indisputable that you have truly gone for good, they will seek you out at the next property, to make sure that £2.13 you owe does not go unreturned, and possibly post their masturbatory tissues through your letterbox.
6. No one is going to forward you your post. Look at what you did with the old mail from your new house. You collected it up, like an organised and industrious person, then you left it in a prominent place on the table by the door, and when the pile got too big and you couldn’t stand you look at it any more, you sneakily recycled it all.
7. Sky aren’t coming. I’m sorry, they just aren’t. When you think about the service you are getting from them, it’s almost mind-boggling. Information is being coded into a digital signal: intangible, invisible, and amazingly fast; and is being fired up into space and then back down to your television. Imagine how impossible that would have sounded a hundred years ago. And the price you pay for this fantastic, incredible technology is to use up two day’s worth of holiday, and then have to chuck a sickie next week, and finally get it installed three weeks after you were supposed to, and after the technician has drilled several dozen holes in every wall of your house. And you’ll be bored to tears all day while you wait because, obviously, you don’t have Sky, and all your books are still in a box marked ‘Bedroom: Misc’ that you just can’t face opening.
8. You haven’t got the internet. Best get a TV licence. Oh, how do I do that without the internet? Is there a number to call? Actually, wait, the phone doesn’t work. Better set that up first. Um... wait, how do I do that without the internet? Oh you know what, fuck it, let’s just get a takeaway and sort it tomorrow. Right, where’s the nearest Chinese? Just Google... oh for shitting shit’s sake.
9. IKEA hates you. You would think, being a Swedish brand, that IKEA would be fairly liberal, and it certainly pretends to be. ‘Look, much if our furniture is customisable! And we sell Swedish food in the cafeteria! And the instructions are all pictorial, like Lego. Isn’t that so crazy and Scandinavian?’ In fact, IKEA operates much like a Fascist state: everything works fine as long as no one deviates from the set ideal.
‘You vill valk vhere ve tell you to valk! If you deviate from the display path you will end up back vhere you started, or unable to return to the section you need, as punishment for your transgression of zhese simple rules! Ve do not care if you only came to buy vun of zhose tissue paper lamp shades. You vill purchase ALL ze items from a display room, and you vill install ze furniture exactly as ve describe! If you do not, none of it will fit, or it vill look shit! All of our bookcases are unreasonable short, or too tall for ze average room! Zis is to remind you that you are simply a cog in ze IKEA paradise machine. Now nest, you worthless filth. And buy meatballs at ze end. From a can.’
10. That doesn’t work. That thing there, whatever it is. If it worked, they would have taken it with them when they left. If it seems to work, it just means that it’s broken in a way that isn’t immediately apparent, and will only become obvious when you’ve left it alone for a while. It leaks water. Or gas. Or it makes the room smell like burning. Or it might explode. Just leave it.
11. Sometimes making your possessions fit will require a tiny amount of DIY. DIY tasks so small and menial that you cannot in good conscience leave out the Y part. Drill one hole in wall, put in one rawlplug, put in one screw, hang mirror. You cannot justify getting a workman out for that. Even though you know, you KNOW, that you will drill one wonky hole in wall, stuff in incorrect rawlplug, be unable to get it out or get the screw in, dig the whole thing out with pliers and make a horrendous mess, and then in three months time when you’ve gotten over the experience the mirror and possibly the wall will fall over.
12. Every single lightbulb in the house will blow within the first week. Those filaments have been waiting, taut, stretched, aching, aching for release. Click, twang.
Artificial light is over-rated anyway. It gives you cancer, probably. Just put the wine rack somewhere you can still see it, and pray the light in the fridge holds out.
I might not be out of action that long, as I’ll try and sort some automatic updates until I finally get an internet connection (in three weeks). Till then, I’ve got moving chores to get on with (mostly playing Batman: Arkham City. I’m still basically unemployed).
Stay tuned for Verbal Slapstick: Fully Automated.
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