Is it possible to move house without any signs of attrition? Is it completely outrageous to speak of grief in relation to this sort of change? If your home is almost the fifth member of the family, can you separate from it reasonably and with good cheer? Somehow, I don’t think so.

You say the stern thing: it’s only bad if the place you are moving to is worse than where you are. And it is not. It’s lovely.

It’s a high-class problem, you realise, so you are in the wrong to have it at all. Besides, it's a moral failing to care about bricks and mortar as, for all their poignancy, they cannot quite be said to be human. People move house every single day of their lives. Moving house is one of my mother's favourite past-times. She has to try quite hard, on a daily basis, not to.

Yet I got married from this house, left here twice at the crack of dawn to have my children, returned with my pink bundles, stunned. Moving house, I realise, is a form of break-up, but none of us has done anything wrong! Who's leaving whom? If I reject something in life, I often identify with it so quickly that after a space of seconds I am flooded with compassion. This kind of carrying-on gets you into trouble. If you're not careful you can blink and find you actually feel as though you love the things you hate. Hello! Where did that come from?

“You must be disciplined about things,” I chide, and that doesn't mean packing up a room and reading seven letters, one of which you did not know you still had, and it's from someone who died at 21 and suddenly you feel you are deserting him, or he is deserting you again ... and you feel the nip and swipe of loss gathering all around. I suddenly remember the day we moved into this house 12 years ago, when the children who were leaving were all sitting on the doorstep weeping, with little suitcases, like evacuees.

So I issue a few commands: “Don’t read any letters as you sort; don’t allow things to get memory-lane-ish; do all the packing at arms’ length.” Twelve years of accumulated stuff. Can I keep my arms extended for that long?

Keep yourself on a tight rein, I insist.

I usually love this time of year. It’s so productive! I probably have 75 per cent of my annual turnover of feelings between September and the New Year. Well, not this year, sunshine. This year there need to be certain budgetary adjustments. This year I must put my feelings on ice until the spring. 

. . .

I go and see a friend who is delighted and excited about her own imminent move, to see if the sensations might be catching. Her dove-coloured sofa is covered in wallpaper scrolls and fabric swatches, paint charts, chequered Portuguese curtain lining, tufted carpet samples, boxes of trims, bolts of curtain tie-back, Greek paper borders, smooth counters of oak boards in different stains: waxed, steamed, oiled. A swathe of blush-coloured paper taffeta is draped across a chair. She’s not going to use it, she says – too shiny – it’s just there to keep the mood romantic. The mood is so romantic I almost ask her to dance. It’s a bit like being in a Parisian atelier, though not the sort where they tell you to lose 10 pounds before your next fitting, and that coffee and cigarettes will help, obviously.

Some of the things my friend has found are completely beguiling. She has a stretch of wallpaper with a trompe l’oeil design of lace veils intersected by pink roses against a grey boarder. It's based on something in the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris it transpires, and it speaks of weddings and cake shops and little girls and Old Hollywood all at once. (Perhaps the four best things in the world!) “Bit camp,” she says, “but how could I resist?”

How indeed? She cuts me off a bit of her wallpaper, and I cradle it in my arms. 

On the way home – home! – I put it to myself gently: was it foolhardy to arrange a move that wasn’t strictly necessary? Did I think it would be water off a duck’s back for a person who hates, loathes and abominates all change? What did I think I was doing? How did I imagine I would feel?

I didn’t think, I didn’t imagine, is the answer. I was very anxious about something else I can barely remember, and thought moving house would be a good distraction.Well, I was right about that.

susie.boyt@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/boyt