Home moves are traumatic - for a month before the big day, you live in a netherworld of boxes and packing tape and realising that you have far, far more books than you thought along with a nagging worry that you should probably take this opportunity to sort through some stuff rather than packing it and having to deal with it at the other end.

You must not succumb to this temptation, however dire the need. Because you know, as we all do, that as soon as you start doing through the contents of that drawer - whether it was stuffed with clothes, papers, or miscellaneous things which you might need some day, like bulldog clips, AAA batteries, dice and broken crayons - in an attempt to determine what needs to go to charity, what needs to be thrown away and what needs to be organised properly, packed away and moved to the new house, you will find yourself distracted and that will be the end of your productive packing for a while. Whole days, even, depending how much you’ve got crammed into the drawer.

Instead, go for the mercenary approach - sweep great armfuls of crap into gaping boxes, then quickly slap them shut and label them. Guerilla tactics. Call it an intervention, if you must. It’s the only way to go.

Years ago, (erk, just realised it was fifteen years ago. I feel old.) when leaving the Canadian college campus that had been my home for the previous two years, and aware of the fact that everything I boxed up would be shipped surface mail back to the UK, I employed a rational method to packing: duvet covers/sheets etc in one box, books and tapes in another, study notes, diaries and photos in another and so on. One by one, with weeks still to go until the end of term, I carefully packed each box, taped it shut, labelled it and took it along to the post office inside the Pharmasave in the nearest town to the college.

As the time until departure got shorter, and my emotional turmoil at leaving more pronounced, I have to say that my approach to packing became somewhat more haphazard, too, culminating in my realisation the day before I had to leave campus, that my desk was still covered in miscellaneous stuff that I’d been meaning to go through and sort out. With no time left and no desire to go through it all then while there was so much farewelling to be done, and a room-mate who’d just said she was heading over to the post office, I grabbed a box, put my arm across the desk and swept everything on it into the box’s gaping maw. On went the parcel tape. On went the address sticker. Into the waiting arms of my room mate. And it was done.

I got home to London a few weeks later, and a few weeks after that, the surface mailed boxes started trickling in, arriving at periods of a few days.

The first boxes were easy to deal with - having been so organised all those miles and time ago, I just needed to open them up and dispatch the contents to an appropriate corner of my mum’s house. No bother. It was easy to be emotionally detached about them, because they held only stuff.

And then, one morning, a box arrived, one with an address label on all skewy. I opened it up and fell apart. That box, the last box, contained raw memories, in a way that I couldn’t have packaged up, and that I’d forgotten about. That box, a jumble of collected shells and half-burnt incense sticks and notes from friends passed in class, and hard-chewed pens used in exams, and sketches made on beaches, and photos of drunken nights - that box summoned all the memories that I thought I’d left behind when I left the college. The smell of it - it smelt like my college room. The fingertip-rough feel of the heavy sketch-paper my friend had used to leave me a note one day. Even the stupid north american three-hole file paper which didn’t fit any of my binders back in the UK - it all felt very foreign and utterly familiar at once.

Anyway, I digress.

Despite the fact that I’m leaving this job soon, I’ve moved office along with everyone else, this last week. Because I knew I was leaving, it made packing all the easier - I resolved to bring nothing at all to my new desk (apart from laptop), and the giant red-and-grey teacrate provided for my use remained empty. It was quite liberating, actually, emptying the pedestal drawers of years of accumulated branded tschotchkes and important documents (which transpired not to be so important after all).

Against my better judgement and advice above, I waded through the stuff which surrounded me, recycled or gave away as much as I could, took home a small backpack full of things I couldn’t quite get rid of (an award which weighs about as much as a gold brick, some t-shirts, a few CDs, my headphones, phone charger and a stress-ball) and chucked the rest. Empty desk.

I think that alone is going to make leaving much easier. I packed up at the same time everyone else was doing it, and the desk that I’ve been assigned in the new building holds no memory or attachment for me - it’s just another desk in an open-plan office, one which is out of the way because everyone knows I’m going, and one which I’ll be vacating soon.

Of course, there’s some irony - or perhaps kismet? - in the fact that with no time to enjoy it, and nothing to make it feel homely, I’ve now got the best-situated desk I’ve had in nearly 9 years with the same company, with views across the rooftops of West London to Wembley and Trellick Tower and the BBC. Ah well.