Why is moving house always such a horrible experience?: OPINION

My family and I are currently moving house. Nothing about this process has become any easier across the years, but I have developed a hardcore streak as regards clutter.
Verity is mired in the chaos of moving house...Verity is mired in the chaos of moving house...
Verity is mired in the chaos of moving house...

I am sick to death of trawling through old boxes and finding remnants of tat that I have clung onto for no apparent reason. It has been enormously satisfying to dump said tat because therein lies the only benefit of tat – one person’s tat is another person’s treasure.

The old handbags, the defunct swimming armbands, the letter rack, the knick-knackery.

All tat.

The umpteen mugs and innumerable baking trays. More tat.

The never-ending piles of soft toys. Tattus Maximus.

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I am totally determined that when we move into our new home, it will be without superfluous bits and bobs.

My husband, given half a chance, will sneak stuff from the ‘Tat’ piles back into the ‘Keep’ piles, but I have cottoned onto this nonsense and have kept him in my eye-line for the duration of the task.

No more lone packing for him.

We are surrounded by bubble wrap, boxes, reams of packing paper, and reels of sticky tape.

I am marking all boxes with their contents and destination, and have every intention of being good to go as soon as we have a confirmed date to move.

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Which leads me to another point of stress during this process, and that is the dreaded wait to exchange.

Waiting for that point feels much like waiting for the stars to align.

Why on earth there cannot be a simpler way of managing home moves in England is a complete mystery to me.

There are clear points of peak stress during the process, from start to finish, so why is nobody looking at those and finding ways in which to solve them?

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According to those infamous lists of life’s most stressful events, moving is apparently worse than getting divorced.

How can we still be living in a society where willingly uprooting yourself and all of your possessions is made harder than actually divorcing your partner and ripping your life apart?

What on earth is this ‘cloud’ we are all so reliant on?

Extra stress was added to the Lush family mix this week by the updating of our mobile phones.

There we were, like lambs to the slaughter in the phone shop, with a guy who was about six years old telling us how simple it would be to simply back-up one via the ‘cloud’, then wipe it, turn on the other one, update it via the ‘cloud’, and so on down the line of phones.

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The issue with this was everyone having to remember their passwords that for the past 24 months had been remembering themselves thanks to the ever-perplexing ‘cloud’.

Hours of gibbering and increasingly irate capering about with the phones later, and it was done. The very definition of frustration.

My granddad died having never touched a computer

On the subject of phones and such, I do wonder how older generations cope with the new-fangled nonsense of mobile technology.

I am 42 and savvy enough with tech to use it for work purposes and so forth, but I can’t bear having my stuff linked together or shared between devices.

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I have little interest in new updates which are out before I’ve cottoned onto the basics.

My granddad passed away four years ago feeling very proud of the fact he’d never once touched a computer. I can appreciate exactly why you wouldn’t bother, even though it seems extraordinary.

It seems this is just another step towards me turning into my mother.

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