Having just ranted about problems that I forget about as soon as they're fixed, I thought I'd balance things out by mentioning a problem which has surprised me by not having this property.

In 2000 I moved out of a shared house to live on my own in a first-floor maisonette flat, i.e. the upstairs half of a semi-detached house. In 2003 I moved from that flat into another (nicer) first-floor maisonette flat. So by late 2007, when I bought a proper house, I had been living exclusively on the first floor (apart from tiny entrance halls on the ground floor) for just over seven years.

I was a bit nervous about that, to begin with. I had an irrational worry that I might have – in some unspecified sense – forgotten how to deal with having a ground floor. Perhaps I'd accidentally leave windows open and get burgled. Or perhaps I'd have forgotten how to stop Jehovah's Witnesses from getting a foot in the door (which is very easy in a first-floor flat – you just shout down at them from the window above the front door, and never open the door at all). Or perhaps I just wouldn't feel right without those eight feet of vertical distance separating me from the ground: an Englishman's home is his castle, after all, and castles are more convincingly defensible when situated high up.

But my worries were unfounded. Pretty much as soon as I moved in, it was immediately clear that I had in fact missed having a ground floor – I just hadn't realised it before I got one back. I felt a great sense of rightness at being able to walk around downstairs and not hear the creaking of dodgy floorboards beneath my feet. (And even walking around upstairs, where the floorboards still do creak, became more pleasant once I knew the noise wasn't disturbing a downstairs neighbour.) It's important to me to have a properly solid floor at the bottom of my home, it turns out; and although I had apparently been suppressing that need so well that I hadn't realised I had it, it was there, and suddenly it was fulfilled.

I was fairly sure, back in 2007, that this would turn out to be one of those ex-problems quickly forgotten about: that the delight of not having creaky floorboards under me was a passing thing, and that after a week or so of feeling relieved I would thereafter just feel neutral about it.

But no. Rather to my surprise, I didn't get over it that quickly, and in fact after over a year and a half living here I still haven't. Every day or two I still get up from the sofa, take a few steps, and feel real pleasure at the fact that I'm walking on a real solid surface, there's no give in it beyond the carpet pile, and the only sound I'm making is the whisper of socks on carpet. Quite often I find myself gratuitously pacing back and forth just so I can enjoy it for longer.

(Good job, too: given how much money I spent on acquiring a ground floor, it would seem particularly irritating if I'd forgotten about it immediately!)

As I said in my previous post, it feels to me as if ideally one ought to be able to derive enjoyment from the absence of an irritation for about as long as the irritation persisted to begin with. By that measure, I hope not to get over this one before 2014. I wonder if I will.