It’s said that moving house is one of the top three most stressful events in one’s life, the other two being the death of your spouse and losing your job.

While I can’t imagine what it feels like to lose your spouse, I have experienced a job loss before as well as moved house before. In both situations, I very much agree that they can be seriously stressful events as they strike at the heart of one’s sense of personal security and well being (think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).

So I expected to be wholly stressed out during this past week following our move last Monday from Amsterdam back to the UK. But that didn’t actually happen.

There was some stress, to be sure, related to the actual move and would our cat Jones pass unscathed through the UK’s stringent pet immigration system (she did thanks to her EU pet passport), would our stuff arrive on time and undamaged (it did but with a few items damaged), and organizing the myriad things you need to do when moving to a new location. Plus my own bit of stress related to balancing the move with the necessities of continuing to work under rather different and challenging circumstances.

Probably most of the negative stress my wife and I have experienced so far arose due to the fact that we have a lot of stuff (boy, are we accumulators of things!) and we moved from a large top-floor apartment in Amsterdam to a small-ish and gorgeous cottage with a garden in Wokingham, which is a pretty sub-urban place by comparison.

Would it all fit? we wondered. The short answer – no, it wouldn’t. So while we are surrounded by far too many boxes still needing unpacking and stretching our imaginations as to where to put all those things, I’ve rented temporary space from one of the many self-storage companies that are springing up all over the UK as the overflow for the time being.

We’ve also been largely offline since we left Amsterdam last Monday which, for both of us, is akin to the alcoholic deprived of his gin fix. Or maybe stopping smoking. Whatever it is, it’s definitely a peculiar feeling not being permanently online as we’re used to.

I have signed up for broadband internet service which should be installed here around the 17th. So another ten days or so to go of feeling (and being) disconnected.

Notwithstanding all the advice and opinions I received re broadband providers, I’ve signed up with NTL for their 10-meg service via cable. That decision was largely based on my direct experience in using the NTL service my sister has. I’ve been hanging out in her place from time to time this past week using her network, and I have to say
the service is excellent.

Mind you, I’ve had no reason to call tech support, which is where every negative comment I’ve heard about NTL is focused on. I’ll know whether I made a good decision or not when I make my first customer service call.

So we start our second week as returned expatriates, in our new home but not quite raring to go just yet. We’ll see how things look during the course of this week.