My wife and I moved house recently and if you've never had the experience I can tell you that, of all the things you have any control over in your life, moving will probably be the most traumatic. I'd go even further and add that, if you don't plan it very, very carefully, it is an experience that can threaten your very sanity.
Fortunately, our move was planned and executed so smoothly that the other day I was able to sit down in our new home and say to myself: "Elvis, I think it's time to think about a comeback tour". Which is why I'm writing this from a hotel in Las Vegas, where I'm due on stage in five minutes. If only I could remember where we packed those damn blue suede shoes . . .
My apologies to the many Elvis fans who grasp at any evidence that the King is still alive, but I'm afraid I was only exaggerating for humorous effect in that last paragraph. Moving wasn't that all bad, in fact, partly because - for reasons I can't explain without the presence of a lawyer - it was the second time we did it in five months. So most of our stuff was still in boxes, a system which has worked so well that we're thinking of leaving the stuff in boxes until the next time we move, which will be sometime in the second half of the next century.
There are no short cuts to moving, but I found you can save yourself a lot of trouble just by being sensible. For instance, one of the things I learned early on is that the business of packing is best left to trained people who know what they're doing. For this reason, I left it all to my wife, who has a lifetime's experience of packing the entire contents of the house every time she left for a weekend in the country.
So actually, moving house was nothing new to her. Nevertheless, one of the other general rules I have established about moving is: you will be amazed at the amount of stuff your wife has! Even if all her possessions were previously contained in a two-room flat, there will come a time - around about the 27th carload - when you'll be convinced you're moving Duffy's Circus rather than the contents of a house.
It goes without saying, then, that you cannot survive without a good labelling system. Luckily, my wife's system is so sophisticated that if I need a given object - like, for example, the kettle - I can instantly narrow the search down to one of 14 boxes. Of course, this is not allowing for the kinks in the system which could mean it's in one of the black plastic bags instead, marked "linen," or indeed the one removed by the bin lorry this morning.
But I think the main reason that moving is so traumatic is that all the routines you have built up over a lifetime break down overnight. Take my filing system which, broadly speaking, used to consist of: (1) urgent correspondence and bills, which were filed on the floor to the left of my armchair; and (2) books, newspapers, cans of beer and the TV remote control, which were filed on the floor to the right. It was a crude system but it worked, until moving caused it to be abolished overnight, since when I haven't known which end of me is which.
The incident with the sock drawer illustrates the difficulties even more clearly. I have never given much thought to the problem of storing socks but, again, over the course of my adult life I had developed a routine for keeping track.
Under this system old, smelly socks tended to be in one of three places: on my feet; in the plastic bin behind the door where my wife keeps the briquettes; or in my old sports bag along with, come to think of it, the sweat-soaked jersey I forgot to take out two weeks ago. Meanwhile clean socks off the clothes line were kept in a pile in the corner of the bedroom where, after a few days airing, the ones at the top were usually dry enough to wear.
I might as well tell you that, even before this move, the system was coming under strain. I'm not naming names here but somebody in the house, and it wasn't me, had been moving the socks from where they were supposed to be. But since our first move, the system had broken down completely, in that 95 per cent of the socks had simply disappeared, leaving me with three working pairs, one of which wasn't exactly the same colour.
My brain was vaguely aware that there was a big sock deficit but being a male brain, it wasn't equipped to deal with this in a structured way. Socks disappeared from time to time, my brain knew, and they would turn up eventually, perhaps alongside the remains of that football jersey. In the meantime, I improvised as best I could.
It was only in the course of a casual conversation with my wife recently that I made the chance discovery that I had been allocated a sock drawer in our interim home some months ago. On investigation, sure enough, I discovered the socks were all there, like old friends. Emboldened by this revelation, I asked my wife if she hadn't by any chance seen my suit lately, whereupon she pointed me in the direction of a wooden device I now know to be a "wardrobe".
So I have learned an important lesson not just about moving but about marriage - the need for constant communication. But the other important thing about moving is to be utterly ruthless about what you bring and what you throw out. To some extent, the very experience of moving will help you with this, in that you'll start out carefully packing everything and then, when you realise you're getting absolutely nowhere, you'll start dropping dinner sets deliberately just so as you can throw them in the skip rather than have to pack them too.
But it is easy to become possessive about the most worthless of objects - especially if you're my wife. Like that useless old record-player which I couldn't throw in the skip because she was so attached to it (yes - she'd chained herself to it while I had my back turned).
AND let me admit that my own thinking is not flawless, especially in the matter of "things that can be packed early because we won't need them before the move". My bicycle has been punctured since about the time of the Falklands War, but when my wife suggested we could pack the pump and spare tubes and things early, I got into such high dudgeon I almost had to be helped down by the fire brigade.
But now if you'll excuse me, I think I will go and fix that bike. Then again, maybe I'll just spend a quiet evening looking at the box. The one I think we put the television in.