We walked the new house room by room before we'd properly moved into it: Fox, Dot and Lou, Max sniffing skirting boards, me and Jas with a torch and a phone full of notes. A strike plate that closed but wouldn't latch. A stove with a self-lighter that didn't. An underfloor heating loop someone had disconnected years ago and never told anyone about. In the garage light fitting we found two wetas, enormous and completely unbothered, and Fox said we should bring the weta farm up from the old place so they'd have company. A few rooms later Dot found out axolotls and tortoises are legal pets in New Zealand and declared herself mature from the turtle. None of that told you anything about the actual day. It's what I remember best about it anyway.
The actual day was that we were about a week from moving, and the question we'd been circling for months, whether to sell the Anlaby Road house or rent it out, had finally landed on sold, after a builder's report written to frighten us into work we didn't need and three real estate agents auditioned like they were the ones applying for something. Getting there cost us more sharp words about money and the move than either of us wanted, and most of them resolved the way ours always do, not with an answer, just one of us apologising and the other one doing a chore.
By then the month before had gone quiet, absorbed into a spreadsheet that already had the house and the move sitting in it. My own Head of AI process went further than most of them do, good conversations, real interest, right up until the two office days a week arrived and neither of us was willing to move the kids' whole lives around it. So that one went back on the pile marked maybe. What I was actually turning over that month was smaller and harder to say out loud: whether to ask Tim to do this with me. We are so alike our wives complain we dress the same, which is either the strongest argument for it or the only one against.
My dad's health came up hard on a call one afternoon, diabetes and something that sounded like more than diabetes, and by evening it had shrunk back to the size it always ends up: an early night, more worry about his diet than anything worse.
The good version of the month was Dot walking into a school called Clifton Terrace not knowing a single kid there, and walking out three hours later with three friends and a book someone had given her, skipping across the car park, already asking when she could go back. That evening I told Matt, who'd been up since some ungodly hour making sure that morning went smoothly, that whatever else happened from there, the day had already been a success, and he should let himself have that.
By the last week we were living in the new place, painters booked for Monday, phone quiet, still waiting to hear about a job that might or might not exist, in a house that smelled like someone else's washing powder and hadn't started smelling like ours yet.
