The carpet is up and the kitchen is rammed. We’ve been living on curry sauce and chips interspersed with Tesco’s Sushi for three days. A late change to the handover date means we are still here today but it is really the last of the days now. An old window, never fixed, rattles slightly in the wind.

Upstairs, we took up some loose floorboards because a credit card dropped through, I was waving it around on the phone to the removal man. I found a Westlife CD, a quavers packet and a very old, empty leather satchel that must have been left down before we arrived. The old bedroom’s secrets finally revealed, opaquely.

The symphonic silence of space around the stacked boxes swells and rolls between a blutac-stained wall and a boot-imprinted door. I can only apologise to the old spare room for the way we let it go at the end.

No point fixing the washer on the tap now either. It never really worked. Our old bathroom was a source of constant grief.

The ghostly echoes of Sam and Ellie are summoned by the garden, shrieks at a wildly directed water hose on a summer’s day or a dead rat. The old garden became too big without them.

I’ll pick a route between the tufts from taken down trampolines and terra cotta tomato pots. Down to the end to the canal which no longer carries it’s initial romance. We stopped watching for the rowing boats and mallards, the barges and even the rarely-seen herons in the end. Now gentrification pushes prices ever northwards and we thank the old canal for allowing us to move.

Across the canal is the carpark of the Hotel. At night I have stared into it’s lighted windows, bright against it’s dark form and beckoning me to further inspection like a newly opened door on an advent calendar. Sometimes naked silhouettes were revealed to me as I looked into it. I made stories for my mind about them. The squalid adventures of the old hotel may never have been true.

Behind the hotel is the old road out of town. It leads to some big supermarkets and then a dual carriageway that merges into the motorway and leads to Mum’s. The old road to Mum’s we’ll never need to use anymore now she’s gone.

Go the other way and you are on the old road to town. Town is where the station is that brings Sam and Ellie from uni with their increasingly bohemian partners. The last one was a situationist mime artist who didn’t say a word the whole weekend but seemed agitated when I failed to comprehend the signs she was making, Ellie implied I was somehow being insensitive for not playing along. Anyway I hope she doesn’t come again. It surely shouldn’t be possible to be nostalgic or wistful about the old road’s noise or traffic jams? But I am and I haven’t even left yet.

This is the old house where memories are.

“Do you remember when the kids were little?”

“Sam used to love hiding in that old cupboard”.

The new house won’t have so many. Not because we are old yet but because we are becoming too tired to seek adventure and there are now only two of us, mostly.

But the new house will bring comfort and safety and ultimately that will probably be more important as memories recede and time goes by.