Moving house feels as if it ought to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Unfortunately for house-dwellers and fortunately for the livelihoods of removal firms, this is not the case. Of course the experience can sometimes be sad and poignant and emotionally draining. It can also, sometimes, be pretty farcical.

For example, realising that the emotional currency of your marriage now largely consists in cheering one another on at the completion of yet another box. And that the ferocity usually reserved for severe breaches of trust can be inspired by the realisation that someone has moved the tape and scissors.

Or the moment when you dig into an old box of mementoes, packed the last time you move, and you scratch your head and wonder how mad you must once have been to treasure these things enough to keep them (why was the tiny notebook never written in? where did that bit of slate, one inch by half an inch, come from in the first place?). Then you realise that either you’re still mad or that when you packed last time you felt exactly like you do now, just wishing it was all over. And so you carefully pack the tiny notebook, the bit of slate, the unworn dolphin earrings, into a new box for a new house.

Then there is the ever-growing corner of tiny, fiddly things that don’t seem to fit in any box and that you know will end up stuffed in a carrier bag at the very end and hidden in a rucksack to be found, months later, when you go camping. Things like hairbands, stub ends of pencils, single pennies. You could throw them out and your life would  be none the poorer (well, excepting the pennies, I suppose), but by force of habit they come along, to gather in dusty corners in a different corner of the country.

And then there is the moment when this home you’ve poured all your memories and waking hours and sleeping nights into suddenly looks half-naked and unfamiliar, and that’s when you really want it to be over because it would be better to have left for good than be only half gone. But whilst you might take away every twig of furniture and throw every last hairband into that plastic bag, you know you’ll leave something behind: the shape of your life when it fitted into those rooms, that particular space.

I’m sorry, did I say it could be poignant?

Last time we moved house, we didn’t quite get to the point of wanting to burn all of our belongings, but it was pretty close. A couple of years ago I decided it would be an awesome idea to get the real-life blue narwhal a piano for his birthday. I think fifty or sixty years ago practically every household must have had a piano: surely the only explanation, anyway, for early- and mid-century pianos being so common that people (probably having inherited them from parents and grandparents) are desperate to get rid of them. So I pulled off a Secret Mission of which I am still extremely proud today: I tracked down a dirt-cheap piano in a nearby town, organised a delivery van to pick it up, received it whilst the blue narwhal was out, single-handedly re-arranged our furniture around it and hefted it into place, polished it, and enjoyed the look of astonishment when he walked through the door.

I neglected to consider that the life of an academic is an itinerant one, and that pianos are heavy.

Moving into our latest flat the piano had to be got up a set of stairs with two 90 degree turns and a door at either end. The people we had engaged to move our worldly goods failed to bring the third person and vital piano-moving equipment that their employer had promised would be present. We spent an agonising 60 minutes stuck outside our house as the piano and the two men lifted it were stuck on the stairs, moving it with nothing but their bare hands inch by creeping inch. I was honestly  convinced that at any moment the piano would come tumbling down onto the man at the bottom and that we would have a truly awful situation on our hands and consciences.

Of course, the piano made it, and we gratefully shook our moving people’s hands before collapsing onto a pile of boxes (which turned out to have been soaked overnight thanks to a leak in the moving van) and eating fish and chips straight out of the cardboard.

Anyway, I don’t think the minimalist life would suit us (we love physical books too much, for one thing), but sometimes I think back on the sheer trauma of that hour, and look at the piano, now safely ensconced in the corner of the living room, and think… maybe, that particular piano has had its last move. Because I don’t even want to start thinking about getting it down those stairs.