Christmas - Open house: a life in thirty-two moves

I cannot live in our home anymore. We have to move.

The Husband and I face one another at the security cordon of Londons Gatwick Airport. These words have not yet sprung from my lips; they remain in my head, though they have also spilled onto a missive, crafted in careful language, which is folded and tucked under my husbands pillow at home. It awaits his patient reading and will demand his complete understanding and action. I am asking a lot of him, because unlike me he is a creature of routine and stability. He does not like change. He does not like moving. Less than two years earlier, I had promised him that this was it; that we would not move again for a very, very long time. But now that promise must be broken.

Back when the promise was made it had been a reasonable, heartfelt one. We had just endured a level of home-buying stress that had all the bewildering confusion of a pantomime and none of the hilarity. Englands convoluted system of buying and selling houses is not built for gentle constitutions, which goes some way in explaining why Britons are one of the least mobile and most risk-averse cultures on earth.

As a Canadian, I am made of hardier stuff: I enjoy moving house. No, let me rephrase that: I love moving house. I love the search for a new home, the packing up and the subsequent assessment and de-cluttering of all that I own, when old and new face off in a fight to survive the charity shop box. I love planning a new space, designing and styling the interior, thumbing through stacks of paint and fabric swatches. I love the ruminating, the budgeting, the logistical organization, the legal details involved in a title search. I have even grown to enjoy (with the exception of our last move) the chaos that is part and parcel of the moving experience.

Statistics reveal that Britons move on average three times in a lifetime, Canadians about seven times, and Americans about eleven times. I, however, have moved thirty-two times.

To some people, thirty-two house moves looks like recklessness; to me, thirty-two moves looks like life. And life is one big open house.

A track record like that does not come without personal stock-taking. Here is one: I have had more homes than lovers, by a long shot. A virtuous statement, and one that I wear proudly. Thirty-two homes in sixty-three years works out to one home every second year. Would I trade that for a new lover every second year? Are you crazy? I could never maintain a sex life like thatI would be too bored. But while I am not sexually promiscuous, when it comes to homes I am a shameless, serial adulterer. I have cast a covetous eye over other homes in my neighbourhood. I have brassily walked up to a new neighbour and drawn him or her into such intimate conversation, twirling the ends of my hair around a painted fingernail, that within seconds I am purring my way into their home just to check the layout and decor. I have sat on the sofa in a home I have just moved into and immediately started swiping left and right on Rightmove or MLS. Sex toys? Forget it. But give me a pencil and a floor plan and, oh, baby, I can reach ecstasy before you can say stud wall.

Second fact: I fall in love faster with a house than I do with a person. This I am not so proud of, because it probably puts me at the wrong end of the Aspergers spectrum. Nevertheless, it is the Gods honest truth: I get more excited about meeting a new house than I do about meeting a new person. Perhaps that is true of most introverts. No tedious or awkward conversation required, no probing questions to circumvent. Does that make me cold-hearted? Indicate intimacy issues? Does it mean I relate better to buildings than humans? Does it look like I care?

For their part, houses are not as obviously discriminating as people, but they size you upoh yes, they do. They absolutely pass judgment on you. For that reason, I am always on my best behaviour when I meet a new house, especially one that is for sale. A house can smell desperation on a potential buyer as surely as you can smell damp on it. There have been times when I have been actually flustered, almost on a crush level, about visiting a particular house. I think a home can smell that, too. Where I draw the line about lusting after a house is when it is a friends: I never flirt with or fantasize about their homes. I will cheer their own plans, and gush about their decorating expertise, but I will not so much as tamper with the placement of a sofa cushion. Unless, that is, I am asked.

Like lovers, houses can and do disappoint; on the outside they can be as sleek as a runway model, but on the inside they are vapida few radiators short of a heating system, if you know what I mean. The seasoned homebuyer deftly learns to separate the pretentious from the practical.

That is not to say that I cant easily be seduced by a house. My pulse quickens when my eyes land on something that I know was built for me. There are some that I have actually stalkedonline and in personand I have occupied pleasant hours gazing at photos of its interior online or in a realtors brochure, imagining the place decorated and arranged with my furniture, and me cuddled into it with the sort of happy contentment that puts an end to my roving eye. When the object of my affection falls into the hands of a real buyer, I have been known to become distraught and to tumble into a period of deep mourning.

Buying a home has never frightened me or kept me up late at night; buying a car, yes; perhaps an item of clothing; but never a house. I am completely at home with homes in the same way people are at home with horses or recreational drugs. Nothing scares me about them. If a house intrigues me, and as long as a murder has not taken place in it, I can work with anything. Actually, if a murder has taken place in it, I will still look at the floor plan. I have been in houses where the layout was not appealing or where the scope and the result of a renovation would not produce enough of a satisfactory buzz, but I can pretty much look at anything and envision a spotless transformation. No floors? No problem. Leaky roof? Whatever. Dated and ugly bathroom? Piece of cake. My fantasies extend into that semi-masochist stratosphere of buying and renovating a home in a country where I do not speak the language. What a delicious thrill that would be. But I am not there yet, and I have accepted the fact that it is unlikely to happen. Not in this lifetime, anyway.

The only time I have come close to swearing off houses is when the experience has been a nightmare, such as our last move. It was so nerve-racking that I vowed never to go through it again. More specifically, I vowed never again to put my husband through it. As The Husband will read in the note that lies waiting for him beneath his pillow: I do not relish the idea of moving, either, but I am prepared to take it on because I am desperate. The combination of unbearable noise and lack of natural light hampers my concentration. All the ideas and dreams I have when I am outside the house are crushed the moment I walk through the front door. This house is suffocating me.

Of course, he does not know any of that right now because we are at the airport. I am about to fly across the ocean for three weeks of work, which will give him time to digest my note and acclimatize to the idea of boxes, house hunts, and unforeseen costs. Of uprooting a settled life and starting over.

It is only when he kisses me goodbye at the security gate that I tell him about the note under his pillow. I do not tell him about its contents.