Well, it's nearly here at last. My new house had some carpets fitted on Monday to replace the dodgy laminate flooring downstairs and one completely destroyed carpet upstairs; so it's now a genuinely habitable building and all I have left to do is move into it, which is booked for Tuesday. (And then take care of an endless to-do list of big and little things after that, of course, but at least the waiting will be over.)

Which means it's time to pack. Also on Monday I drove over to the removal company's depot and picked up a carload of sturdy cardboard boxes, and last night I began packing my belongings into them.

I … hate … this bit. I really, really hate it. Words have a hard time expressing just how much I loathe packing to move house, but I'll give it a try anyway.

For a start, it's fundamentally demotivating. Everything I take off a shelf and put in a box is making my home look less like a home and more like a mess, and I like my home. I've been working hard all year to move out of this particular home, admittedly, but that's irrelevant, because what I'm talking about here is the abstract concept of ‘my home’ which isn't about the building but about having a layer of all my stuff arranged around me in a comforting and cosy manner. That aspect of ‘my home’ has evolved gradually over the years, but there's been a continuity to it which has made it perceptibly the same thing for far longer than any particular house or flat has contained it. So tearing it down piece by piece, even though I know in a week or so it'll all be back around me again, is heartbreaking and difficult. Every time I finish packing a box I just want to sit down and mope about it, and the very last thing I want to do is to start packing another one.

By contrast, I find unpacking at the other end of the job to be a breeze. People often seem to find this unusual, but it's true: when everything that comes out of a box on to a shelf makes the place look more like a home, it's constantly making me happier as I do it, which encourages me to keep on doing it. So the process is self-motivating, and things just seem to fly out of boxes as if there's no tomorrow. In fact, last time I did it, there wasn't: I spent days halfheartedly packing and still hadn't really finished when the removal men arrived, but unpacking zipped by in a matter of hours and by the time I went to bed on moving day I'd completely finished it.

Secondly, a lot of packing is difficult. It's not so bad when it's things like books, which are collected together already and arranged in orderly lines; I just hoist them off the shelf in the largest armload I can carry without them going everywhere, and I stick them in the bottom of a box. But going round the edges of the room picking up endless large and small things that I've been treating as unnoticed parts of the scenery for years and now have to readjust to treating as foreground and work out how to fit into a box … that's hard, not (just) emotionally but intellectually, because I have to try to make my brain point in a direction it isn't used to pointing.

And because I've been treating half my stuff as background and scenery, there's always more of it than I think. I'll fill a box, and I'll look around, and I'll realise that behind all that lot there was another lot of random stuff I'd completely forgotten about which is going to take another box. So my estimate of the number of boxes still to do remains largely constant, which is another demotivating factor. By contrast, again, when I'm emptying boxes it's much easier because the boxes are big and discrete and in my way and I can't possibly miscount how many I've got left.

I hate this, with a passion. I remembered from my last move in 2003 that I disliked packing and was slow at it, which is why I'm starting it a week ahead of time instead of a few days. But I had forgotten just how much I disliked it; in fact I had even forgotten the order of magnitude of how much I disliked it. I hate packing.