Moving House (To My Mother-in-law's Apartment)

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[00:00:00.960] - Oliver (Host)

In December, I am moving house. Does that sentence fill you with horror? It certainly fills me with horror. I'm starting the process of moving again this week. And even though packing is annoying, it's not the part that I'm dreading the most. It's not the part which I'm least excited about. What I'm really worried about comes later. The chaos and the stress that always arrive after the first boxes are closed. You know what I mean, I'm sure. The moment when you look around and you realise you have no idea where you've packed your charger or your toothbrush or moving day itself when you're standing in the street at 7: 00 in the morning, trying to save a parking space for the moving van with your body and a couple of old shopping bags filled with important possessions. It's that mix of order, and frustration, and annoyance that appears every single time you move. And trust me, this move is going to bring plenty of those moments, and potentially some more upsetting ones, but we'll get to that later. So, why am I moving this time? Well, it's for a really nice, happy reason. My partner and I have just bought a small flat.

[00:01:25.140] - Oliver (Host)

It still needs a lot of work to make it habitable, to make it liveable. Renovations, quite serious repairs, all that fun stuff. And until it's ready, we need somewhere to live. We obviously can't afford to pay the mortgage on the new flat as well as the rent where we're currently living, so we've had to find another solution. And here comes the part that people usually find brave or completely mad. We're going to move in with my mother-in-law.

[00:01:54.260] - Oliver (Host)

Welcome to English and Beyond, the podcast for intermediate English learners who want to explore real and interesting and often quite odd ideas in natural British English. I'm Oliver, an English, Spanish, and Latin teacher from the UK. The usual spiel applies. There's a free transcript and flashcards online at morethanalanguage.com, and you can contact me at oliver@morethanalanguage.com as well. I really love hearing from you, so please do reach out. And in fact, to give an example, thank you very much to Daniel, Daniel from Brazil, who wrote, For some reason, I like your podcast more than I could imagine. I'm pretty sure it's because of the sincerity and sensitivity in the topics. Cheers and keep up the great work.

[00:02:42.940] - Oliver (Host)

It's genuinely really motivating to hear feedback like that. So if you also enjoy the podcast and you find it helpful, please do let me know or follow the podcast, share it, rate it on your listening app or leave me a review. Thank you much. And back to the story. So we're moving for a few months, not to a temporary rental, not to a cheap studio, but instead, straight into the home of my partner's mother. And honestly, she is lovely. She genuinely is. But living in someone else's space is never simple, and I'm sure it won't be simple for her. I'm going to feel very aware of how much we own, how much space we take and how much mess my life generates. And so, because we're moving into her flat, I want to take up as little room as possible, which means going through every object, every book, every jumper, every cable, and deciding whether we really need it, whether it stays or goes, whether it comes with us or disappears forever. Later in this episode, we'll get to the emotional things, the objects that are easy to keep and almost impossible to throw away.

[00:04:04.180] - Oliver (Host)

But for now, let's just say that the practical part is already stressful enough. The good news, though, is that I personally have a lot of experience with moving. I've moved so many times, not just within the UK, but also abroad, that reducing my life to the essentials should, in theory, be easy for me. In theory, I have had plenty of practise. Before coming to Spain from the UK, I had lived in three different countries, Germany, Italy, and China, for a total of about three years. But during that time, I never really settled. I knew I wasn't going to live long term in those countries. I was there for a particular contract or to study, etc. So I didn't buy furniture, I didn't collect objects, I didn't build a home. I lived out of two suitcases the whole time. And to be honest, I quite enjoyed it. It felt simple, light, strangely relaxing. When you only have two suitcases, you can't really accumulate, you can't really collect, that much. There's no space for anything unnecessary. But moving to Spain has been quite different. It was the first time I moved somewhere with the intention of staying long term, maybe forever, to build a life, to become part of the country, not just a visitor, to move with someone I am married to.

[00:05:37.120] - Oliver (Host)

And of course, after Brexit, the whole process became a lot more complicated than when I lived in Germany or Italy. The paperwork the bureaucracy, has been at times a nightmare, and it's still ongoing because I'm beginning the process of becoming Spanish. So this time, it hasn't just been a move like the other occasions. It's been a transition into a a whole new identity, even. And here's where the story starts to become ironic. You see, those years of living with almost nothing should have made me brilliant at keeping my possessions under control. I should be naturally minimalist. That means I should find it easy to own very few things. But, as you'll hear shortly, that is unfortunately not the case. Because even though I I enjoyed living with almost nothing in Italy, Germany, China. Somehow, I still managed to accumulate things now. And not just sensible things, not useful things. Complete nonsense, really. For example, I'll open a drawer and find cables for devices that I haven't owned since back when Tony Blair was Prime Minister. I have no idea why I kept them. I don't even remember what they're for. But here they are, neatly rolled up just in case I need them for some totally unpredictable but presumably important future purpose.

[00:07:07.860] - Oliver (Host)

It's not just unidentifiable cables. It's kitchen utensils that I use once a year, max once a year at most. It's duplicate objects I forgot I even bought. It's Tupperware lids that belong to containers that left this world a long, long time ago. It's all the usual household rubbish that somehow appears out of nowhere for everyone. But the thing is, I like minimalism. I yearn to be a minimalist. I like clean spaces. I enjoy owning very little. But somehow, I don't ever end up living that way. So, if I apparently enjoy minimalism so much and I have the opportunity to clear up my life, cleanse my living space, what am I actually dreading about this move? Well, It's not the organising, at least not at the beginning. That part can feel a bit cathartic, a bit satisfying, before it becomes completely frustrating, at least about 60% of the way through, when it's no longer new, when the novelty has worn off. But no, what I'm dreading most is the physical part of moving, the real-world stress that comes with it, carrying box after box, dragging bags, up and down flights of stairs, bags that feel heavier every minute, and trying not to block the entire street with a van that is definitely too big for the parking space.

[00:08:38.260] - Oliver (Host)

And anyone who has driven in Spain knows exactly what I mean here. Spanish drivers are not shy, absolutely not shy, about using their car horns to express their emotions. If you even think about slowing down the traffic for a second, the horn starts immediately. I'm dreading the atmosphere when a moving van appears - it will probably be quite intense. But even all of that, the boxes, the weight, the stress, the horns, is still manageable. Annoying, but manageable. But there's something else that's much harder for me that I've never been very good at. And this next part is less about objects and more about history, about my own personal history. Let's talk about the emotional side of moving. This part I always find genuinely difficult, deciding what to do with emotional objects, the things that remind us of a person or a place or a moment in our past. And I probably know where this comes from. When my mum moved out of the house where I grew up. She didn't go through things carefully. She didn't sort things into categories or create carefully labelled boxes for memories or make detailed decisions about what to keep. She did the complete opposite.

[00:10:03.080] - Oliver (Host)

She told us to choose anything we wanted to save, and everything else went straight in the bin. The whole house, more than 25 years of our family life, simply disappeared in almost one day. It sounds extreme, and yes, it definitely wasn't very environmentally friendly, and it seems emotionally very cold at first glance. But the truth is, that house was full of memories. Good ones, difficult ones, painful ones. And when she moved out, the house was going to be demolished for a new building. She found this whole process incredibly hard to face. She couldn't even drive past the empty space where the house had been for ages afterwards. For her, throwing everything away was easier than sitting down and deciding, object by object, memory by memory, what should stay and what should go. It was just too much for her. There were just too many memories, many happy, some terribly sad and infuriating. It was simpler to let it disappear all at once than to confront it gradually. I think that attitude, although I don't feel it as strongly, is something I can understand, because when it comes to emotional objects, I'm not much better, although my version is less dramatic.

[00:11:27.020] - Oliver (Host)

I've held on to certain things for years, even when make absolutely no practical sense. I'm just not great at throwing away emotional things. It's not that I'm attached to old relationships or living in the past, genuinely not at all. But some objects carry traces of who we were at different times in our lives, right? And I find it hard to simply drop them into a bin bag. For example, I have a jumper I got one Christmas from an ex-partner. It certainly doesn't fit me anymore. I got it when I was about 22, and I've been going to the gym for the last few years, so it's far too tight. I haven't worn it in years, but I still keep it because it reminds me of a certain period of my life. Good days, complicated days, nice moments, sad ones. The jumper itself is useless, but the memory isn't. And it's not just that jumper, obviously. Everyone has these things, the strange little objects that have no practical value but somehow feel impossible to throw away. Which leads us, finally, to the end of this whole moving story. So, here's the truth. During this move, I will, I promise, I will get rid of a lot of things.

[00:12:48.260] - Oliver (Host)

I'll donate clothes, I will sell gadgets. I will recycle those cables, and I will finally say goodbye to objects I should have thrown away years ago. By the time move into our new flat, I will have much less than I started with. But I also know myself. There will still be that one box that somehow survives every move. A box full of things, I promise I will sort out one day, but I never, ever do. The box full of items that will follow me from country to country, flat to flat, life to life. The box that contains objects I will never use and never throw away. And honestly, I don't even need to open it. I already know what's inside: old letters, souvenirs, bits of my emotional history. Things I don't really want to look at too closely, but I would also never want to lose. So yes, I'm moving house again. And yes, it fills me with horror. But one thing I do know is that wherever I go next, there will always be that one small box sitting in the corner, following to the next chapter, even if I never open it again.