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I Never Want To Move Again For most people my age, moving house is not an arduous task. You dump the clothes on the floor into a big box, don’t worry that you are mixing the dirty with the clean, the ironed with the un-ironed, no, I take that back, people my age don’t iron their clothes, no, I take that back, people don’t iron in the fashionable years of pseudo-polyester, the un-ironed with the un-ironed, tape it up. Get another box, dump all your compact discs and magazines, no sir, no books here, with your breakable things on the bottom, tape it up and shake it around a few times. You don’t own anything else, aside from two spotting knives, and you leave them for your soon to be ex-flatmates. Then you get your mattress off the floor, bend it up and accidentally drop it in a puddle on your way to the van. Then you drive to your new flat, dump your mattress and two boxes in your new room, head to the lounge, break open a tinny* that is lying around and smoke up. For me, however, moving is not like this at all. I’m in my early twenties, and I own/owned an entire house full of stuff. I didn’t intend to be like this, in fact, I tried to make a special effort not to horde junk because my parents do it, and it used to annoy me immensely when I lived with them. Despite my efforts and pretend restraint, I collect newspaper clippings of “important” events, concert ticket stubs, boarding passes, movies passes, plastic bags and newspapers that I expect to use in the new 10 years which means never at all, worn-out batteries, old post-it notes with phone numbers and no names, pens that I will use when I use up the last 25 pens I already have and papers that are supposedly important. In the space of a year and a half, my single bedroom at my parents house grew like a hungry slorping amoebic blob into one double bedroom, one lounge, one dining room, one kitchen and one bathroom with overflowing cupboards. Now I assure you, reverting this back into one single bedroom is a feat that one only wants to try once. Once, ever. As in, never, ever again. Even though I own a lot of stuff, I would have anticipated about 10 boxes. But this was not the case. My new flatmates, Morticia, Elvira and Lurch as one of my flatmate's Father calls them, helped me move – I asked Helen how many boxes she thought I had brought with my royal highness. “Well, I’d say about 30, but it seemed like 400. Don’t forget the stuff we carried by hand!” To make things worse, I moved from the top floor of a rickety wooden house, to a two-storied apartment on the second floor. This means a lot of walking and lifting and putting down and running up and down stairs and wiping of brows. I got very mad by the end of day two, trip two, that I didn’t even pack everything up. Instead, I picked up everything that I thought wouldn’t break, and threw it off the porch, aiming in the direction of my car boot. Sometimes, I walked down to the first landing, and threw things into the boot, other times, I just stepped onto the porch, and threw in the general direction of the ground near my car. I should have bought some heavy-duty duct tape for the mending of broken items. I think I only broke one of my rubbish bins, my mop, my dustpan, but I’ve been here a week, and I still haven’t unpacked all of my 30 boxes, so I’m unsure of the total amount of broken belongings. To think, I almost had to move all of this by myself. “This” also includes a queen size wrought iron framed bed, matching shelves, a television too heavy for two men to carry down two flights of stairs and all the way up three more flights of stairs once arrived in the final destination, a wooden dressing table and annoying things that don’t fit in boxes like a clothes-horse. My Father, my new flatmates Tahi, Helen and Gemma got roped into helping. It took two days to move and another day to clean.
Most important point: This was all done just before Christmas Day. One week later, and I still have stuff in my car to be unpacked. One week later, and I still have unpacked boxes. One week later, and I love my new apartment. One week later, and I vow to stop hording. Really, I promise.
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