Parting is such sweet sod-it.

Moving house is a little like being given a death sentence.

Now, before you accuse me of being too dramatic, I don’t mean it’s a bleak or terrifying thing, or that it’s a depressing experience. What I mean is, were I to go to the doctors tomorrow and be told I had two weeks to live, or were I on death row for heinous crimes and finally get the date set for when I would be officially ‘let go’ from Life inc. there are definite emotional similarities.

We live our lives with a curious and rather baseless illusion of permanence. We tend to think, however our lives are shaped, that this is it, and how it will always be. I do this job, I live in this house, my hobbies are these, my family unit is x-y-z. And I think it can have the curious effect that you start taking the things you have, your whole situation, for granted. Life is busy, and we are all so caught up in rushing around and acting out our lines, that we barely pay attention to the stage dressing or the sets on which our lives play out. We assume they are bedrock, when in reality of course, they are cardboard and paste, lifted into the rafters above at a moment’s notice and replaced with the next scene.

This is true of many aspects of life. If you’ve ever changed careers dramatically, you’ll know the strangely alien feeling of looking back at your old self, in that old work environment, from the comfort and familiarity of your new ‘normal’, and seeing someone who is almost a stranger to you now. and yet back then, you likely couldn’t picture things ever changing.

Family life is just as fluid and transient. I live with my two daughters, and myself and my wife watch them grow up. we have our routines, our traditions at Christmas and birthdays, our habitual holidays and our weekend baking and crafting. I sing to them at night, we watch our favourite shows together. But i’m achingly conscious that this is not forever. ( no matter how much I want it to be).

I know my kids will grow up, go off to university, maybe get married or find their own partners, have whole lives away from our current familiar dynamic. That’s the natural order of things, and it makes me appreciate our current time so much more, knowing it’s limited. I will only walk them to school a number of times more, chattering happily amongst ourselves about nonsense. We will only go on our family vacation to our little cottage a set number of times more, before they’re old enough to want to make their own plans, holiday with friends.

And there will come a time when, despite me having sang the same song to both of them at bedtime every night since they were born, they will be ‘too old’ to want one. and that will be the end of it, break my heart as it will. (I am reliably told, often, that I did the same thing to my own mother when i was a child. One night simply telling her ‘mummy, don’t sing anymore, I’m a big boy now’. no big deal to me at the time, but apparently my mother went downstairs in tears…as she FREQUENTLY brings up, even now, when i’m in my forties.)

Little tiny ends-of-an-era everywhere. Slices of our established reality are nothing but shifting sand.

But to get back to my point, this is also oddly true of moving house. When you’re not expecting to die in say, two weeks and three days, i’m sure you would go about your daily life, busy and with little thought to the things around you. They’ll always be there, right? But being told ‘it ends in X amount of days’? People live differently.

And so it is with moving home. We’ve been in this house for eight years, which, with a young family is a LONG time. My eldest daughter was two when we moved in, watering plants in the garden dressed in her baby-ballet tutu. She’s headed off to high school this September. time flies like the wind, fruit flies like a banana, as the saying goes.

My youngest was born here, and has never known any other house. The thought of moving away still seems to be something she is wrapping her head around. She’s the quiet type, but a deep thinker, and she keeps tentatively coming back to explore the subject, like your tongue to a loose tooth.

We are not sad to move. We’re all excited for the changes ahead, and the new adventures we will build together in our new house. It’s like opening a new and exciting chapter. But despite that, there are odd sensations, as I move around this house and pack it all up. Like the guy with the death sentence, I find myself acutely aware that many of the things i’m doing, i’m doing for the last time. I’ll only sweep this garden one more time, then never see it again. I’ll only tidy my girls bedrooms, putting everything away in its assigned and familiar place, a finite number of times.

I’ll only chat with the lady at my local shop, who I’ve seen almost every day for the last eight years, a few more times. And then everything will be gone, and new things will take their place.

It’s not upsetting. but like any change, it’s oddly bittersweet. This has been a house filled with love, and laughter, crafts and baking, parties and cosy routine. we have packed our whole lives within its walls, and made it our own, and even when we leave, it feels like there will still be echoes, hopefully for the next family to hear and build on.

I am, of course, by my own admission, an emotional lunatic even at the best of times. I cry at TV shows and commercials. I cried at a tweet the other day, for shame. My wife is by far the more pragmatic half, and is frequently reminding me that everything that makes our family special, everything that makes it what it is, is coming with us to the new place.

We will still bake, still craft, still all snuggle up on the sofa when its raining and watch dumb TV shows. I will (for a few more blessed years at least) still sing my kids to sleep, and walk them to school. The family, and everything I hold important, isn’t changing, just the venue.

We’re leaving behind only bricks and mortar. The memories, we get to take with us, and build on, and expand. It’s also a handy time to de-clutter, when you are boxing up your entire life and having to make decisions on what to keep and what to throw away. How exciting, once all the sorting is done, when we move into the new house and fill it ONLY with the things we want to be in there, not with the extraneous detritus that accumulates over the years.

I’m sure the new house will eventually fill up with detritus and drawers full of bent spoons and old receipts eventually, such is the way of life, no matter how Marie Kondo you try to be. But it will also fill up with more years of life, ever growing kids, and traditions and routines both old and new, that no doubt I will come to take for granted once again.

And it’s an honour to be able to take good things for granted.

(Now, if someone could come and help me with these eight-thousand boxes, that would be great - i’m just going to say goodbye to the garden.)