Or would you rather be a snail?

I am really looking forward to starting back at uni again. This is because I have recently been moving house.

It's the twelfth time I have moved house in seventeen years, and I still hate it. So in comparison, uni - the place where I got so stressed and freaked out in 2008 - seems like an enchanted fairyland full of hippety-hop bunnies and sugar-snap biscuits. I hate it mostly because I am the sort of person who always imagines the worst-case scenario, so I spend hours trying to figure out what to do if the removal van collides with a truck carrying fireworks and bursts into flame. Should I run for my life, try to salvage my priceless collection of vintage wargames, or attempt to perform a citizen's arrest on the culpable driver?

We got back from our holidays late on Monday night. We spent Tuesday tootling around without a care in the world, because unless you leave the packing almost too late, it isn't quite horrific enough. Well, that's not entirely accurate that we tootled around. What we actually did was drive an hour to our new house, then move every single piece of furniture in the new house into one of the spare rooms so that we would have room to move in our own furniture, then drive home again.

Here is what we fitted into that spare room. 1 double bed + mattress, 1 single bed + mattress, 2 desks, 2 sets of desk drawers, 2 bedside tables, 1 upright chest of drawers, 1 cupboard, 1 dining table, 6 chairs, 1 couch the size of an aircraft carrier, 2 enormous recliners, 2 coffee tables, 1 TV, 1 DVD player, 1 "entertainment unit" (my nomination for the most misleading name for a piece of furniture), and a fridge. It's stacked up pretty high in there.

This meant we had a whole two days to pack up our house. It sounds like a lot of time, until you reflect on just how much stuff we own. We own so much stuff that a lot of it has just sat in boxes since the last time we moved since we didn't need it. My Smaller Half made me open up these boxes to find out what was in them because the last time we moved I wrote things like "less commonly used stuff" as contents labels on them.

Lo and behold, I found all the notes, books and papers that I have collected through my various previous degrees, both finished and unfinished. It gave me great pleasure to discover that this collection of notes was sufficient to fill up a wheelie-bin.

While packing, I resolved that in future I would only buy rectangular things, because they are much easier to pack. While moving the boxes, I noted that this should exclude books, since not only do we own about three million of them, they are also very heavy. This observation was echoed later on by one of the removalists, who politely enquired whether I had ever thought of joining a library.

Despite all the negativity that is coming out here, (blogging as therapy anyone?) it all went pretty well. We didn't have to stay up all night. None of our antique furniture was smashed into matchwood. None of my CDs got scratched. None of our pets died. However, I am covered with small purple and yellow bruises from where the corners of boxes have dug into my flesh while lugging them around. So the move was a disaster from an aesthetic point of view only.

Finally, a tip for the future - removalists like to talk about shoes. Their job is hard on shoes and they know a lot about what makes a good shoe good. If you ask they'll be happy to share their accumulated wisdom. A happy removalist is a good removalist. And a good removalist is a happy you.