Caroline O'Donoghue: 5 things about moving house
"This is a week of new starts and new presidencies after all, and we’re excited to begin our new term at a bigger house less than two miles away."
There’s a famous Dodie Smith line that begins “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”. I am not writing this in the kitchen sink, but god, I’m not far off. The table my laptop is sitting on is also home to two teapots, a sack of mini Dime bars, an electric tennis racket for killing flies, a roll of binbags, a dustpan, a shredded copy of the Observer magazine, and some Mexican folk art. I am tits-deep in the mess of human life. I am moving house.
This house move has been a long time coming. Our last move was not a happy affair. Back in 2018, what might have been the most miserably stressful six-month period of my life — the death of one of my best friends and the release of my first novel — was topped off with a sudden eviction from our spacious two-bedroom flat. Our full schedules (and frankly, our mental fragility) meant that we picked a flat that was utterly wrong for us.
The sensation of living here has been like trying to break in a brand new shoe that, despite multiple wears, will just not sit comfortably on your foot. First, it rubs your heels, then it cramps your toes, then it makes your arches tired.
“There’s a lot of random walls here,” my friend Ella said one day, sitting at the kitchen table. I looked around like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, amazed at the Statue of Liberty sticking her torch out of the sand. She was right. There are walls absolutely everywhere: jutting out here, there, and everywhere, forming stupid alcoves that aren't deep enough for shelving but you still bash your elbow off when you pass. A stupid pillar for no reason. I was furious. You damn dirty apes!!!!
But enough negativity: this is a week of new starts and new presidencies after all, and we’re excited to begin our new term at a bigger house less than two miles away. Finally, the dog will have a garden. Finally, we will both have our own work space. Finally, a spare bedroom that isn’t a mattress that comes out of a hole in the wall. But, first though, we have to move.
I’ve never had a baby, but have heard much about how one forgets the pain of childbirth every time. I would wager that moving house is a lot like that. In your head, you think: books in a box, clean the kitchen cupboards, clothes in an Ikea bag, final courtesy sweep of the floors, and you’re done. What you forget about is that, aside from your kitchen ephemera, your books, and your clothes, you have a host of other objects in your home that can only be described as ‘miscellaneous’. A rusty toenail scissors, a credit card bill from 2015, a beaded clutch bag (clutch bags — another industry that must be dead for good now that 2020 has hit). All of these objects form in puddles around my house, gathering themselves on random shelves without anyone consciously putting them there.
These ‘clouds of misc’, as we’ve started calling them, have become flashpoints in the house move. Whenever we are exhausted from packing, one of us gestures to a misc cloud, and bleats an accusatory ‘what the HELL are you doing hanging on to a 2017 interview in Times with Zadie Smith? Are you in love with Zadie Smith or something? Is this the Thinking Man’s Guess Jeans advert?’. Thursday night ended with me following him around the house, the Zadie Smith cover in front of my face, cooing ‘kiss me Gavin, I wrote White Teeth’.
Our cultural backgrounds get in the way of our packing. I don’t mean that he’s English and I’m Irish; I mean that he comes from a long line of useful people and I come from a long line of chancers. Everything he does is precise and thought-through; everything I do is random, slapdash, made-up, and fraudulent. I learned this week that I cannot even fold a box correctly. I was doing it the way I thought it goes — folding down both sides parallel to one another – when I was interrupted. “No, Caroline, you have to fold a box like a swastika,” he said gently. I stood back and wondered how I’ve gone six years without realising that the man is a neo-Nazi. He did some quick cardboard origami and reversed it, showing the newly-fixed bottom.
“Oh!” I cried. “It does sort of look like a swastika!” He smiled benevolently. “Now that box’s weight supports itself,” he said. “And a thousand-year Reich is on the way.”
In the great purge of Useless Crap, there have been many existential crises. As a writer, my life is filled with random pieces of paper that are no longer useful but I feel deeply superstitious about throwing away. What if, for example, one of my books gets inexplicably really famous, and I’m able to auction off the early uncorrected manuscript at a charity auction, selling for thousands and funding a cure for AIDS?
Can I really afford to throw the manuscript away, and potentially risk not curing AIDS?
Is it ok to throw away birthday cards? Is it ok to keep polaroid photographs of my ex- boyfriend, when they are such potent physical evidence of my own youth and innocence? Broken jewellery, museum gift shop postcards, jumpers belonging to my dead friend: what place do they have in my new life, and what space were they taking in my old one, when I so often forgot they were there at all?
“The thing about things,” Amanda Palmer sings. “Is they can start to mean things nobody actually said.”
I throw the jewellery; I throw the postcards; I keep the jumper. The clouds of misc start to gradually break up as the sun peeps through for a new phase of life.
- Caroline O'Donoghue is a Cork-born writer living in London. She is the author of and
