New home, same bookshelves

There is a lot of work in moving into a new house, and my wife absolutely hates the whole moving process. But I have to bite my tongue when she makes her entirely justifiable complaints, because I'm already so very bad at hiding how much I love it.

It's back-breaking and frustrating and I am getting way too old to lift all those boxes full of Judge Dredd Megazines. It's financially draining, and requires stupid amounts of paperwork, and you have to figure out the new rubbish bin times, and how you're going to mow the fucking lawn.

But I've lived in 42 houses in my life so far, and I'm not just used to the process, I'm actively into it. I love sorting everything out, I love figuring out the new configurations for the bookshelves. I love consolidating and sharpening the collection of nerd shit I have. I love working out where everything can go. Where it all fits.

We have finally moved from renters to homeowners, so we won't be going very far anytime soon, but I still desperately sorting out the massive piles of Comics Journal issues, and work out where they are going to go, as fast as I can. Setting out a little space on this piece of land for my pile of Doctor Who novels.

I almost got crushed by several bins of 90s music mags while sorting them out the other day. It would be a truly dumb and extremely fitting way to exit this world, but for a split second there I thought the last thing I would ever see was a NME cover with the lovely Louise Wener on it.

I'm making some real progress sorting all this out, but I still haven't felt the sense that this is my land, and instead of all my earnings going to a landlord, it's going into this property that can go to my kids one day. And everyone keeps telling me that I will be so invested in things like property taxes and interest rates, but I never gave a shit about any of that before, and have no desire to start now.

But I do recognise this feeling of getting all my shit together - and I've got a lot of shit - on a property that is a lot smaller than the past few places we've been in. It's a lot of sorting, of getting everything together and working out what I actually need to keep handy, and what I need to show off, and I'll never get sick of that feeling, no matter how decrepit my aging body gets.