I should say at the start this isn't just a blog about the nuts and bolts of moving house - property valuation, marketing and booking the removal van. All that's bound to come into it, but I think it'll be more about change.
I don't hope to rival 'Location, Location, Location', for interest, but I'll write about change and places and how they affect me. First some details about myself and where I've lived so far.
Lord Street, Southport
I've always been restless. As a child I loved to explore the industrial town where I was born, and the surrounding countryside, known as the Fylde. Like many children then, I was free to roam because my mother didn't come home from the mill until after five thirty and I was encouraged to 'play out'.
In Summer I would cycle the 14 miles to Blackpool with a cousin, mostly via the flat coastal roads of Lytham St Annes but sometimes by the hillier route near Kirkham.
The family home was a rented terraced house without a bathroom. The toilet was at the top of a backyard. I lived there with my mum and dad and two younger sisters - a third had died in childhood. My brother was born after I left home and married. That was a shame, because if one of the children had been a boy we'd have qualified for a council house on one of the new estates on the outskirts of town, where the houses had bathrooms and gardens.
I was born in 1943 and left Preston, my home town, in 1960 to go to Portsmouth. My future husband, whom I met at a CND meeting just after I left school, was accepted as a degree student there. The decision was a sudden one - we marched from Aldermaston to London in 1960, and I just decided not to go back. It was easy to turn my back on the NHS, where I'd mainly written out medical card for 18 months, and the flat I shared in the suburbs with a slightly older girl.
With John on Lake Windermere in 1960
John had to live in 'approved digs', in Portsmouth, even though, at 22, he was a mature student. So I needed to find somewhere to stay. I worked for a very short spell- about a week, I think, as a live-in chambermaid at Southsea's top hotel. I got the sack for general incompetence and specifically for not knowing to dry the bath after I'd washed it. My only luggage was a duffel bag, so that made a bad impression.
The manageress contacted the local police because I was so young (seventeen, but being short didn't help) They in turn contacted my parents back in Preston. Fortunately, they pretended they knew where I was. We hadn't spoken since I'd left home after they refused to allow me to stay on into the sixth form at school, and I'd moved into a rented flat with a friend. Our office jobs just about paid the rent.
Having failed as a chambermaid in Southsea, I was employed by Radio Rentals to chase up late-payers by post, and moved into a depressing bedsit. Unfortunately, the landlady wouldn't allow male visitors. But I liked Portsmouth for its raffish atmosphere and seaside light.
If we were to live together, John and I would have to be married and in 1962 you needed to be 21 to marry without parental consent. Not surprisingly, my mum and dad said no. The Portsmouth registrar was unhelpful ('Go home and talk to your parents, young lady!' )but I knew you only had to be 16 to marry in Scotland.
We chose Melrose, a lowlands village with a ruined Abbey, because it also had a Youth Hostel. The warden could witness that we'd fulfilled the two week residency qualification. There was an idyllic interval of two weeks, spent roaming the Eildon hills -all three of them - and reassuring locals we were not 'runaways'. Smiles on both sides acknowledged the deceit.
Melrose Abbey
In Portsmouth we lived in a succession of furnished flats - the landlords put the rents up in time for the tourist seasons. From Portsmouth, with a newly qualified husband, I returned to Preston, where daughter Catherine was born (the Portsmouth maternity hospitals were all full for October 1964) . We lived above an antique shop in a shabbily furnished flat with rampaging mice.
John commuted to Manchester for FE training and in 1965 we moved to Boston, Lincs, for his first lecturing job. I didn't like it there -too flat, and too small - but son David was born in January 1966. I went to French classes at an adult college called Pilgrims to keep up my studies -they didn't do evening A Levels at Boston College.
We were lucky to rent a house owned by the widow of the Chief Education Officer. It was large, unfurnished and draughty, and had bell-presses to summon servants. John's colleagues donated furniture but it was hard to keep even one large room heated. We never got to grips with the garden.
All along, I'd wanted to go to London, and we moved to Penge in 1967. I did my A Levels at evening classes in Croydon then an English degree at Goldsmiths. In those days, married women could get a grant. We were still short of money but rented an unfurnished flat in a rundown thirties block overlooking Penge West station. It had a rickety lift with a concertina-like metal door and was handy for local schools and commuting to the city, although conversation had to pause for passing trains.
I chose to become an English teacher because I liked reading and it would fit in with the children's school terms. In 1973 I moved in with Roy, my second husband, and we lived in a succession of scruffy furnished flats within reach of my job in Camberwell until a colleague put in a word for us with a housing association. We moved into a newish flat in Selhurst. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, we were able to sell up six years later and buy a place nearer to the Blackwall Tunnel, a lovely south facing flat on the northern edge of Blackheath. By then I was teaching in East Ham.
Although it didn't occur to me at the start of my teaching career, teaching English gave me the opportunity to work abroad. In 1990 I encouraged Roy to take early retirement, gained a certificate to teach English as a second language, and picked a job from the TES foreign jobs section.
We'd sold up and moved to a rented flat in Richmond for a year, at the top of a thirties block on the Upper Richmond Road with an entrance to the park across the road. The flat was directly on the flight path to Heathrow and it seemed to be a landmark for pilots to let the wheels down from planes as they flew overhead at two minute intervals. I liked that.
From Sept 1990 to Dec 1993 I taught in Singapore, which was exciting and well-paid enough to allow lots of travel.
With Roy in Singapore in 1990
We'd sold the Blackheath flat, prices had gone up and although I returned to my lecturing job in Richmond we couldn't afford to live there and we bought a flat in Lewisham. The road rises from the station at the foot of the hill to the heath at the top.
Where I live now
In 2003-4 I had a job as an editor with a publishing company in NE China. I visited cities in the region at weekends.
The accommodation in Singapore was luxurious - a flat in a condominium, which meant a block with a palm-fringed swimming pool. In China I had an inhouse flat that was like a hotel suite, and a view of hills and shortest commute ever to work -three floors down in a lift.
The publishing house in China where I lived on the 7th floor
In 2009 I lived in Northern Spain for three months, working as a voluntary classroom assistant, commuting from the medieval city of Zamora to a small village. A flat was provided, and my favourite room was the kitchen, which faced south over a sports arena.
Apart from the early moves in South London, and the intervals abroad, Roy and I have been more or less settled in Lewisham.
