Stressing over a House Move by the River Thames and Tower Bridge [Ice Cream Sundae]
I’m in the middle of packing all my stuff and getting ready to move to London in about ten days. As I was considering writing this Sundae about the experience of moving house, out of curiosity I counted that this is the 15th time I move in my life (if I’m missing any I was probably too young to remember). It seems like a fortuitous topic for this 15th newsletter.
Reading a few articles about moving online, headlines often state that moving house is one of the biggest causes of stress in life, after death and divorce. I would have thought of death as the ultimate stress reliever rather than the opposite, but what would I know about it.
Earlier this week while taking my books off the shelves and boxing them I couldn’t help but feeling nostalgic. I’d only unpacked these books 11 months ago. I was so happy to display them nicely on shelves after they’d been in storage for four years while I lived in Asia.
I’m selling and giving away furniture and appliances I bought less than a year ago. I’m not that attached to those but still, thoughts about what is going on and whether I’m doing the right thing come to mind. If you’ve seen Pixar’s Inside Out, you can imagine the voices of emotions arguing, same as what they may well be doing one way or another in your own head.
I’m also sorting out what I want to keep. What they say in all these articles to help people move house is true, it’s a good opportunity to sort out and get rid of a lot of stuff you don’t really want or need. An example this time round it’s my small CD music collection. I’ve unboxed that a year ago with the books but while the books went on display as proud shards of being, reflecting who I am as a person, the CDs went on to keep collecting dust in a cupboard. I don’t have anything to read CDs anymore, all my music is digital. I vaguely considered copying the contents of the music I don’t have on my hard drive, thought of how long it would take, added the fact I don’t even own anything that reads CDs right now and they ended in one of the several bags I packed full of donations for the charity shop nearby. I’m mainly keeping what I’m starting to think of as my minimum viable book collection.
The main leitmotiv from one of these moving articles to another is a quote from British interior designer William Morris: “Everything must either be useful or beautiful”.
It sounds good as a quote, though the visceral aspect about some of this stuff doesn’t feel useful or beautiful. It sounds like the practical arguments of a person in charge of someone else’s house rather than their own, who doesn’t have memories, little scraps of self, contained in every object. That emotional charge we can have associated with objects may have led to this idea of an extra-sensory perception (ESP) power capable of “reading” the history, people and events associated with a particular object. The claimed ability is called Psychometry. I guess it’s very useful to psychic detectives, like Douglas Adam’s character Dirk Gently who runs a “Holistic Detective Agency”. BBC America recently announced they are adapting the popular novel for a TV series that I’ll be looking forward to.
It’s definitely liberating to get rid of a bunch of stuff like this, and it’s certainly worth realising much of the stuff isn’t that useful or necessary. It’s also not that straightforward. There’s a process involved, at least for me there is. And this is after getting rid of many things since I moved from Paris to London eleven years ago, or from London when I left there five years ago now.
I looked up some numbers available on how often people move on average in their lifetime. I found some data from the United States, and United Kingdom. 15 times isn’t too crazy on a country level, particularly with younger generations that tend to move more often in their lives. The average for people in the U.S. is to move 11.4 times over the course of their lifetime. I’m a little ahead. Where are you at? Count the number of times you’ve moved, some interesting thoughts might come up as a result.
I didn’t find much about how long people live in each location. I know that’s been pretty varied for me. The 11 months I’ve just spent in this flat is certainly not the shortest stint I’ve had. That one is a slightly different story, maybe a good time for it now actually.
I’d been living in North London in the Finchley area for four years when I thought it would be time for a move. I was increasingly bored of taking long underground train rides every morning to get to work and thought it would be nicer to try to live closer. I was working for iris at the time, right behind the Tate Modern museum and close to London Bridge.
I visited a few different places after I gave notice to my landlord in Finchley; I looked in the Rotherhithe peninsula because a colleague who lived around there recommended it. I also liked the idea of living by the River Thames. It’s an area South of the River, further East from Tower Bridge. I’m sorry if you can’t picture it, suffice to say I visited a room in a flat that seemed nice, to share with an Australian dude that we’ll call Jim.
It was either a 40 minutes long lovely walk along the river to work, or a fairly short bus ride. The room was nice; the flat had a balcony with a BBQ from which we could see the river, a stone throw away. The Mayflower, one of the oldest pubs in London was nearby. The Salt Quay, another pub with a lovely terrace on the river was even closer. I packed my books up and moved over around October 2008 time. You may have noticed books are the only things I talk about in relation to stuff I’m carrying around from one house to another, perhaps I’ll write about my book collection some other time.
A few cold and brisk autumnal walks along the river to work later, my new Ozzie flatmate Jim casually tells me that he’s in some “trouble” with his work and visa, essentially that he’s unexpectedly been bereft of both. No worries though, given he has a new awesome job opportunity thanks to a friend who will also take care of his work visa, that he’s just going to visit family back in Australia and update his visa situation at the same time. I wasn’t sure I’d understood much of what was going on but he told me not to worry, I was busy with my own work, so I didn’t. Fast-forward a couple of weeks later, his girlfriend returns from the trip without him. His UK work visa hadn’t been renewed. He wasn’t sure when he’d be back. We talked on the phone, he told me not to worry. So this time I did.
The lease and all the utilities bills were in his name. As the temperature outside was getting colder in late November and early December, news of Jim were getting thin on the ground. While I really enjoyed being in that nice flat by myself, I was also aware that I couldn’t really afford it on my own and that I didn’t even have the details of the landlord. Around the same time, I also realised how cold and humid it can get living that close to the Thames. The pubs were nice but I hadn’t paid enough attention to the fact shops to buy groceries and the like were a little too far away for comfort. I wasn’t warming up to the neighbourhood as much as I thought I would.
Once most of this information computed, I started planning an emergency exit of Jim’s flat in Rotherhithe. Jim could deal with the flat’s landlord and the utilities whether he was coming back or not. It turned out fine for me not to be legally responsible for much beyond telling the people involved I was leaving, though it was leaving from that brand new house a little faster than I thought.
I packed up just three months after moving in, so eleven now isn’t so bad. If it’s somewhere you appreciate and enjoyed living in, there’s always a certain level of emotion involved in the process. It’s also probably a good thing to stop and look back, take stock of the emotionally charged location and then move on to new adventures; looking forward to the new and possibly less burdened from the stuff of the past.
Did you have that kind of short stint in a home, move in thinking it would be nice and then quickly realise the first impression was wrong? I’d be happy to hear about the story!
If you enjoyed reading this, please think of forwarding the email to another friend who might enjoy it too. I’ve also published a new episode of the podcast this week, I caught up with my old boss George Nimeh while I was in Vienna, and we have a great conversation about the evolution of online advertising, the future of media and publishing.
Till next week!
Cheers
Willem
This newsletter was originally published via email on the 10th January 2016. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae on the Ice Cream for Everyone website.
