I last wrote in October. According to my calendar, we’re now in March. It’s a familiar story. Once I lose the discipline and stop showing up with regularity, pretty soon I stop showing up at all.

In the past six months I’ve done the same with reading, watching films, golf practice, playing tennis, playing the guitar, the piano, the drums. You name it, I’ve stopped doing it. Why? Because we decided to move house, a project we began almost exactly around the time of my last post.

I use the term ‘project’ in its loosest sense, because a project implies a degree of participation on the part of its originator. In the case of moving house, you’re effectively redundant from the process for 80% of the process. You look at houses, choose the one you wish to purchase, and then invite people into your current home to see if they’d like to take it off your hands. Depending on how decisive you are, the state of the housing market, your willingness to accept a valuation 20K lower than the online estimator tool, and other such factors, this stage can be done and dusted in a month.

After that, your only real involvement in the project is a weekly set of chaser emails – to your estate agent, to the solicitor looking after your purchase, and to the solicitor looking after your sale – to see if there’s any progress to report. Generally, there isn’t. By month three, the tone of your emails has become exasperated. By month four, you sound unashamedly angry, and by month five, you’re issuing death threats.

Even when the estate agent comes back with positive news (the solicitors never have anything positive to say – EVER), rarely does this have any bearing on the overall project timeline. Like roadworks, the process of house moving takes the same amount of time regardless of how much (or how little) effort is put into the project.

I wrote the first three parts of my house diaries five years ago. The experiences of the past six months have reminded me that the main reason people don’t move home more often is not due to inertia, interest rates or stamp duty – it’s because the process involved is psychologically unbearable. As a friend put it to me, “You start off excited, then they grind you down and grind you down, and by the end it isn’t even relief you’re feeling – it’s indifference. They’ve left you feeling nothing at all.”

In a professional capacity, I frequently rail against the over-use of the term ‘disruption’. Does everything really need to be disrupted? Can’t we just make it a bit better, cheaper, faster instead? In the case of the residential property market, however, I feel exactly the opposite. We need destruction, not disruption. A flattening. A page-one rewrite.

Another friend texted me last night asking how I was doing, and whether we had a moving date yet (as we’ve been expecting one for five weeks and counting). I replied no, and told her I felt as though my soul had been destroyed.

So if you’re wondering where I’ve been lately, and it’s been lovely to hear from some of you asking that very question, just remember – it’s hard to muster up the motivation for creative writing when your soul has been destroyed.