Moving home is a melancholy affair

So it goes. The accumulated detritus of a decade living in my flat is, as I write this, being packed into cardboard boxes by David the removals man. Today I am a resident of SW2. Tomorrow night, I sleep in N19.

Up the stairs, relentlessly, come the clatter of cutlery and the starchy ZZZZOOOOooooOOOPP! of packing tape being briskly unwound. It's not quite the offstage crack of timber in the final scene of The Cherry Orchard, but it will do.

The cartoonist Martin Rowson's memoir was called Stuff, and he based it around the accumulation of objects. He was on to something. We're very invested in stuff, even those of us who think we aren't. Like Larkin: "That vase."

So there is something melancholic about packing for a move. It's all the more disconcerting if — in line with Nervous New Freelance Standard Operating Procedure — you have said yes to every scrap of work offered you, so you cannot sleep more than five hours a night, let alone take a day off to supervise packing. What Fish? magazine needs 2,000 words on guppies, dammit, and the company behind such titles as Fish and Fishmen and Fine Fins does not take kindly to deadline surfers.

My grandfather's old desk — currently bearing a computer, a coaster bearing the jocular motto "Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans", and a pen that doesn't work — is all that remains of my old world. My dad's old dining-room chair is my only bulwark against the contusional effects of gravity.
David hunts through the flat: playing Tetris with the wireless modem, the Sky box, that coaster. That vase.

Anyone catch Obama's inauguration on TV? Nice speech, yes.

But then, my word, the poem! Can we talk about the poem? Jeepers. It's probably the only poem many people were going to hear this year. Couldn't the nation that gave us Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Bishop and the rest have mustered up something a bit less embarrassing than Praise Song For the Day?
"A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.'" Lawks, what baloney. Prose song for the day, more like.

Oops. Here comes David. "This wouldn't fit in the last crate," he says, and passes me a small white box. The heart of the Wii. A tear comes to my eye. I think of Le Petit Prince, where he keeps a tiny sheep in a box. Mario — darling. Are you all right in there?