We moved house last year – across the road. It took six men with a lorry a day to pack up our stuff, 160 boxfuls plus the furniture; then they drove their lorry to their yard. The next day they drove to the house across the road, and unloaded everything, leaving us with 160 boxes and hundredweights of paper.

It cost €3,512.60 – thankfully we were not paying. Our builder parted with the money without demur.

This week it was time to move back across the road. No way were we going to allow that amount of money to be paid out again, and no way were we going to spend days unwrapping everything from five sheets of packing paper.

Yesterday and today it was one of the builder’s sons and two Polish guys. Where the removal men took four people to lift our piano, the Polish guys did it between them. No removal van, instead a builder’s van and trailer.

The operation was completed in a fraction of the time and I felt a peculiar sense of satisfaction. It took me back forty years to the Saturday when my family moved from our house on the farm. My uncle was married and needed our house, so we had to go. We moved into exile, to a council house in a village about four miles away. It felt like forty miles, it was a different world.

The journey was heart breaking. Our furniture was carried on the back of Charlie Brewer’s coal lorry. It being Saturday, he wasn’t delivering coal.  A friend of my parents called Dot came to help out.

Being the sort of person whose family moves on the back of a coal lorry, I didn’t take to the idea of packers and strange men filling my house. Anyway, you haven’t lived until you have seen your furniture going down the dual carriageway on a builder’s trailer with a Polish bodybuilder sitting on the sofa!