The horror! The horror!

When my smaller half and I moved house way back in 2005, we grossly miscalculated how long it would take to pack up every single damn thing we owned into boxes. We also miscalculated how many boxes it would take. As a result, we stayed up for close to 48 hours, packing non-stop, with the removalists chasing us from room to room for the last 6 of those hours snatching boxes from our hands as we sealed them. We had run out of boxes at about 2 a.m. and had had to bust into my smaller half's old place of employment, using her still-valid pass, to "borrow" a heap of carboard boxes they had used several months before when relocating their office became necessary because one of the floors of their building was gutted by fire. Later that night we sat at a friend's house just about falling face-first into our take-away Indian food because we were so exhausted. "Never again", we swore.

When my smaller half and I moved house in 2007, the above scenario repeated itself, minus the midnight raid on the previous employer, the office fire, the Indian food, and the smaller half, who had gone on ahead to seize a forward position, and whose absence is probably a fair explanation for the mayhem that ensued. Instead, it was me packing single-handedly, I ran out of tape at 4 a.m., and I was nearly falling face-first into a delicious French meal with my siblings the next evening.

The reason I am writing about this is that a friend of ours is staying with us and as I type she is packing her bags to leave tomorrow. She has about 20 cans of tuna and 7 million packets of tim tams (a story for another time) and is busy wrapping everything in bubble wrap and packing tape so the drug-smuggling larcenous oafs that work as Qantas baggage handlers can't create havoc even if they try. And I am getting chills down my spine listening to the packing tape ripping off the roll like the fart of an angry god.

I appear to have post-traumatic stress disorder from moving house. The sound is making me remember the smell of that packing tape. It smelled like the taste of dry pasta when you chew it (a despicable habit of mine that will one day thrill my dentist). And the smell is making me remember the lights of the house which had been burning all night until any semblance of a circadian rhythm had been likewise burned out of my head. And the lights make me remember the cobwebs and dust in the store-room making my fingers feel sticky and dry and slippery but there's no time to wash them, and the feeling in my legs after I walked up those damn steps for the hundredth time that night and I just knew there were probably another hundred to go.

I just got the most awful sinking feeling that I am going to have to live in this house for the rest of my life... Is there a word in Greek for my phobia - the morbid fear of packing tape?