1. Put spare lightbulbs in understair cupboard and write tenant a note to Let Him Know

2. Put instructions for lawn sprinkler in same Note.

3. Empty garden shed of flammable liquids, paints, etc, and take it to the recycling centre.

4. Schlep ski machine atop roof-rack of car to house of friend who wants it

5. Lovingly dismantle solid wood desk, (certainly not a figurative table, this), bungee-cord it to aforesaid roof-rack, drive to deepest Surrey and unload at house of long-suffering friend for indefinite  storage in his garage. Enroute to the Channel Tunnel to catch our train back to England.

My own list was as pressing:

1. Ransack local Boots shop and purchase enough Protect and Perfect products to create a modest stockpile in Brussels

2. Get eyebrows reshaped at local Glow Beauty Bar to get one more tick on my loyalty card

3. Have last supper of dim sum at Imperial China

4. Stop and see my cousin in her new house in Surrey so that Stella can have a cuddle with her beloved eight-month-old cousin Finn.

Understand that in my mind, I had done the hard graft already, a week ago. The move was complete, I had paid my dues and then some. I was not going to rootle in a spider-infested shed in the baking heat.

The Engineer had originally wanted to take an inflatable mattress and bedding with us and kip down in our house for the night.

I talked her into a less exciting night at the frill-free, thrill-free Premier Inn. Stella, who passionately loves all hotels, was in her element. Had she lived in the time of Gigi Goes to Rome, she would have travelled with a snakeskin beauty case, a hatbox, and a porter.

“I’m very busy packing for the hotel,  Mummy,” she anounced before shoe-horning her Disney perfume, eight Ladybird books, a torch, a bag of Haribos, Teddy, a blanket for Teddy and a toy for Teddy into her creaking wheelie.

I put frivolous foibles like her clothing and toothbrush into my own case.

It was strange, reentering our home. Empty, smelling of varnish, free of Stella’s fingerprints on the walls, this was not our house anymore. At least for me.

The Enginer, on the other hand, was having great difficulty letting go of the home we had remodelled from scratch over the last 12 years.

She pored over every skirting board. She ran her fingers over newly-plastered walls. She spent half an hour unearthing an extension lead so that the tenant could mow our lawn with the same forensic care she usually applied to the task.

Bereavement, divorce and moving house — life’s most stressful situations. Time was ticking. Stella had not eaten in five hours. I did not know we had so many planks and boards and 2x2s the Engineer was wedded to. She was trying to stack them according to size in the shed.

I began trailing The Engineer around the house sighing. “We’re not going to be back in years, leave it.

“Look forward. You would have forgotten those birch wedges in the next few minutes.

“If the lawn dies, the tenant will have to make good, it’s in the contract.”

Then I began clicking my teeth. We had planned on leaving at 2:30 in order to drop the desk off and see my cousin Lila.

“No, you don’t need to mow the lawn now.”

“Is that bin bag full of screws and metal bits crossing the Channel with us?”

“Leave it.”

“Leave it.”

“Leave it, for God’s sake!”

Then the desk saga began.

The Engineer made the Desk five years ago when Stella was a few months old. Eschewing MDF, she plashed out on high quality birch plywood from Moss  Timber Merchants .

The aim was to craft a trestle desk to fit our study bay window exactly. Sketches were made. Circular saws wielded. Much planning (and planing) ensued. I hated the desk. It spun woodshavings into the same air my newborn baby was breathing next door. Hulking slabs of wood lay upstairs for weeks. And when it was finally done, it took up a third of the room.

And now, we wheezed as we dragged it out through the front door. Our neighbours saw us and came out to help. The four of us made our way across the street like a slow cortège bearing this beast on its last journey to eternal ignominy in a garage.

When faced with potentially embarrassing or stressful situations in front of acquaintances, I quip. Nadia and Paul hoisted the desk onto our roof rack. Then came the business of bungee cords and ratchets. Whoever invented ratchets deserves a death by them. As the Engineer cursed and tugged at bungee straps, my mind free-associated with evil psychiatric nurses, my pressure rose, and my tongue loosened.

The desk may not fit on the rack, the Engineer worried. Oh dear, we will have to torch it after all, I winked.

Everyone laughed except the Engineer, whose face had turned the shade of raw lamb’s liver as she struggled in the heat.

“We need something else, this strap is not secure, the wood is not secure,” the Engineer worried.

“How about a pair of scissors?” I quipped.

Finally, she snapped. (Rather her than the bungee cord on the M25, I thought.)

“It’s not funny!!!!!!” she bellowed. “Nobody’s helping me, you all just stand around and laugh at me!!!!!!!!!” A few choice swear words followed. Thankfully Stella was tending to Teddy inside the car.

If I was nervous before, I was close to a breakdown now. And I was fuming. How dare she create a spectacle on the street?

Poor Fiona and Paul made soothing noises and rushed off to Homebase, ostensibly to find another bungee cord, but secretly, I suspect, to get away from the two mad ladies and their plank.

An unsuspecting man walked past with his infant grand-daughter in a pushchair.  With an amused smile, he looked over and said something in a foreign tongue. “Polska?” I asked hopefully. Don’t know why, I don’t speak a word of it.

He shook his head.

“Deutsch?”

No.

It turned out he was from the Czech Republic. I said “bitte” several times and indicated the wretched ratchet, jammed and immobile. Nadia began explaining in French, he spoke over us both in a volley of Czech, left his bemused grand-baby in her pram in the middle of the pavement and set to. In a few minutes he had disentangled and tightened the bungee cord around the roof rack.

“God bless you, you are a good man!” I shouted, after a calculated English-teacher assessment of the most comprehensible English words to use in this situation. He understood. Beaming and waving, he steered the baby off with a final thumbs-up as he turned the corner. 

God sends angels. And in this case, angels not just to fix bungee cords but  to loosen the taut cords of my unrelenting heart. I sat in sanctimonious anger for half an hour, stiff, shrugging away the Engineer’s apologetic hand as we raced down the A3 to Surrey.

Then just like that, in an instant, I realised the temerity of my attitude. We had a car packed with all my goodies. We had dined where I had wanted. We were going to see my cousin. All my boxes had been ticked this weekend. All the Engineer had wanted was to safeguard something she had poured effort into for several weeks of her life. Why had I not seen this before? Next year, we will have been partners for 25 years. Am I still learning about respecting her?

I apologised stoutly and unstintingly. As always, she was generous.

“I know it’s only a small house,” she said. “And I know it’s only a piece of plywood.

“My grandfather made furniture but my mother lost it all over the years and there’s only one chair left for me to remember him by.

“I made this desk for Stella,” she said. “Maybe one day, she will use the desk to do her homework on. I made the desk.

“I made it.”

I wish I were more like the Engineer, imbuing achivements with significance and getting joy from every accomplishment. Rather, as soon as I finish one project, I tend to diminish it, pick out its flaws, and pine for the next excitement, a sort of cursed Tantalus lashed onto a hamster wheel, spinning into an eternity of unmet goals.

At that very moment, I promised myself that I would raise our child to listen, wide-eyed, to the tale of Mama making her desk, to run her hands over the silky wood, and to be overwhelmed by the honest sastifaction that has eluded me all my life, but which I still yearn for in the stillness of a quiet moment. At that very moment, I allowed my hand to be patted as we sped toward the Eurotunnel terminal, and into the future.

I know I have laboured the point before, but too much home-making does my head in. And too little does the Engineer’s head in. So over the last quarter-century of our lives together, we have worked out an approach to housework we call the Critical Mass Strategy. As in, when we feel the house is clean enough, we stop and concentrate on distractions like books and Cabernet.

Of course, the word “enough” is operative. Our “enough” is lower than many others’  “enough”. My sister-in-law Sylvie, for example, swears by thin latex gloves so she can “feel the dirt” better than she would in rubber gloves. Last week we spoke on the telephone. “You poor thing,” she commiserated. “Having to wash all your dishes again before putting them away in your new cupboards in Belgium. Moving house is such a lot of work.”

Being a guilt-ridden coward, I agreed fervently with Sylvie that rewashing clean dishes was a royal pain.

But I digress. We have reached Critical Mass in our house in two ways.

1. We can now walk across the living and dining rooms without killing ourselves over boxes or power tools. We can make dinner by reaching for knives, graters and parers in their respective drawers. Okay, the movers buggered up my beautifully catalogued books by leaving boxes unmarked; the Engineer crammed them onto bookshelves willy-nilly and now How to be a Domestic Goddess is wedged next to We Have to Talk About Kevin. Which is perhaps just as well.

And, okay, our clothes are a mess. Jumpers and t-shirts jostle for space, trousers need ironing, the Engineer’s four shearling (four!) jackets have yet to find a spot. But I think it’s okay to reach for the corkscrew now.

2. Stella’s own critical mass was reached at precisely the same moment.   In the last week, Stella has been a model child, listening to audiobooks, drawing,  and applying sock-bandages to Teddy while the Engineer and I have burrowed in cupboards. But yesterday, she cracked.

“I’m lonely,” she wailed. ” Nobody can come for a playdate and I miss Deirdre and Emma and Megan and Teresa and…”

My heart did a kerflump. My child had been forcibly wrested from her best friends, and had no father. Whilst all her classmates were being stimulated in museums and doted on by attentive parents wielding spelling books, my daughter had no father and was deskilling on a diet of chocolate croissants and iPhone games. Plus, she had no father.

I called The Engineer at the office and howled on the phone. Luckily she wasn’t in a meeting. After 10 minutes of one-sided verbal extrudings, The Engineer suggested I take Stella to see a small bronze boy holding his willy aloft and peeing at bemused tourists. We hoped this would help change Stella’s perspective on life.

And so we went on the quest for Mannekin Pis.

Consider this: the bronze statue was cast in 1619 and is tiny.  All of 61 cm (24 inches) and nobody knows who or what it represents exactly. Half a dozen different stories exist about the boy who peed on a war, the most popular one being about a two-year-old duke hung aloft in a basket as a mascot. He promptly anointed the enemy with his piddle and they got nailed in battle.

Mannekin Pis occupies an obscure corner far from Brussels’ central square, Grand Place. For a great city’s mascot, he is underwhelming. Stella regarded his front bottom politely for a moment then asked, “Can we go to the Museum of Chocolate now please Mummy?”.

Which proved much more successful.  Belgium is the font of world’s most famous chocolate brands: Godiva, Côte d’Or, Leonidas, Callebout, etc.  The Belgians eat the second largest quantity* of chocolate, 12 kg a year per head.

Walking past lace shops, we stopped at a café for Stella’s first Croque Monsieur a toasted cheese and ham sandwich she very much enjoyed. We had stopped and asked for directions at least a dozen times to get to this point in the afternoon. Everyone had fallen over themselves to attempt English and give us help. I had always know Belgians as warm people, but it still surprised me to find the quite capital so friendly.

I think I’m going to like living here, Mummy,”  Stella says, spraying Leerdammer over my beaming face.

* Only the Swiss eat more.

Before you start thinking I have morphed into someone who actually likes homemaking, none of this could have been accomplished without Humphrey.

Humphrey’s not his real name, mind. Remember the energetic  Algerian guy who helped move our stuff last week? Well, we don’t know his name — he’s quite shy — and I don’t want to bestow a presumptuous culture-specific tag on him. So we will call him the colour-blind name of Humphrey.

Well, Humphrey has been extraordinarily kind. On Day Two, as the sun sank behind Mansard roofs all over Brussels, The Engineer and I had a corresponding sinking of the heart. We sat surrounded by 250 boxes, three Billy bookcases, a piecemeal treadmill and a fractious five-year-old demanding hot dogs and Sesame Street. The Engineer has been creaky of late — we think it is a combination of hereditary arthritis and the foot-fracture sustained last year. There is no way we could have settled in in under three months…

Humphrey offered to help us get settled in for the laughable sum of €10 an hour. One day, I will write him an ode. Or cut him a deal in which we sell Humphrey clones on eBay. Draft marketing material would run along these lines:

• Provides DIY services without whining that the football is on.
• Puts up pictures and pink unicorn decals without  criticising your fashion sense.
• Smokes outside.
• Eats salad with alacrity and knows where all the best organic markets are.
• Speaks only when spoken to

When we try to thank him, he says, “At least now you will have a happy memory of moving to our country.”

God sends angels.

The movers arrive in their clanking Darth Vader van. Huge redfaced Jim from Essex and his fine-boned Algerian sidekick would make a great music hall duo in another life — one blustering meatily,  the other with his polo shirt tucked into a trim waistband, darting around boxes like a silverfish.

We have a problem. The police, on our application,  cordoned off our section of pavement and declared it auto-free so the moving van could pull up under the windows of our two-story apartment. But a neighbour went on holiday the day before the parking ban, and his car is parked smack in the middle of the moving zone.

There is a knock on our door. Our first visitor — our neighbour Marie, who comes in with half a roast chicken and a wonderful salad in a Tupperware bowl.  The Engineer, Stella and I fall to it like ghouls.

A tow truck arrives and moves the hapless car while the movers drink coffee and smoke cigarettes.

Movers are special people, I have decided. We have a monster sofa 240 centimetres long which they have to jiggle, cajole and finally shove to get in through our second-storey window. Then comes the iron filing cabinet with approximately the same weight as Pluto.  And finally an endless parade of boxes containing our 2,000 books.  All that schlepping would have made me a tad …  irritable. Raised eyebrows, exaggerated sighs, tongue clicks, you know what I mean. But these men are stoic — they wear fixed masks for the entire 10 hours of heaving and wheezing.

Why, oh why, are we not one of those enlightened life laundry families with minimal possessions and organised paperwork files?

I had forgotten how raw one feels when moving house. At variance with one another are all of the following states; it is not an exhaustive list:

1. Shame. Oh my God, have I really left them to pack bags of quinoa which passed their sell-by date in 2007?
2. Remorse. I should have sorted bank statements instead of stuffing them in bin bags for the last 10 years
3. Outrage. Those are my granny knickers!
4. Anxiety. Have I hidden all my personal stuff in the suitcases accompanying me?
5. Compassion. These men are going to have heart attacks. I’ll put the kettle on.
6. Voices. They know we’re gay. Do they know we’re gay? I don’t think they know we’re gay. I don’t care what they think. I am a child of the universe. Do they know we’re gay?
7. Ineffective parenting. Wow, Stella look at all these boxes! Why don’t you pretend they are a magic land and you can find a secret path around them into your room and fall asleep for a hundred years until the enchanted dewdrops fall on your head? No, you cannot watch TV. Because I don’t know where it is. Get out of this room NOW.

At 8 p.m. we sit surrounded by 250 boxes. There is another knock on the door. Our second visitor: Marie from next door has come back for her dishes. The Engineer is in a panic. “Did you wash them?” she stage whispers to me. Marie is gracious. “Oh don’t worry, I’ll wash them at home.”

We hand back a saucepan caked with congealing chicken bits, some well-masticated. This is my second under-par experience with poultry in 24 hours.

Scarlett-like, I promise myself that tomorrow is another day: I will unpack all our boxes, hang pictures, bake thank-you brownies and get Stella to practise her phonics skills.

Change is terrifying for most of us. Even the most wanderlustful people in the world must find comfort in familiarity.

So when our bed is dismantled, when I say goodbye to my apple trees knowing this year I won’t be picking Egremont Russets, the panic hits me. What the hell am I DOING? Who, at the age of 46, wants to give up hard-earned friendships to start afresh in a different language with no friends?

And friends aside, I’ve fought damned hard to make a home in this country. The Engineer and I lobbied Parliament along with a handful of couples in the 90s to change same-sex immigration law, and we won. I got the right to remain in my beloved England as The Engineer’s partner. When civil partnerships were introduced, we got married in 2006. When same-sex couples were allowed to adopt, The Engineer made Stella her legal daughter. And we were the first couple in the 800-year history of our parish church to have our relationship blessed, back in 1996.

Needless to say, none of this would have happened had I stayed in Singapore, the country where I spent the first 19 years of my life.

I said goodbye to my car today; it was hard. I passed my driving test at the age of 44 and bought my first car — a rite of passage most people enjoy at in their 20s. It’s a VW Polo in a virulent green the manufacturers like to call Pistachio. It turns heads for all the wrong reasons, but my little Polo and I have accomplished great things, the noblest of which has been regularly getting Stella to school 15 seconds before the bell rings.

In moments like these, I call my mother in Chicago. She wears two hearing aids and officially has only 3 per cent hearing left but she always knows. The Engineer, Stella and I hold hands and put the phone on speaker. She prays for peace in our family and for a new house full of joy, open to everyone. She prays for new friendships and old friendships.

The M25 is backed up all the way to Junction Five. A van ploughed into two cars in a pile-up and emergency services had to cut passengers out of the smashed vehicles. We are late for our ferry and an hour early for the next one. The Engineer insists on getting dinner at a petrol station but I balk. Pre-packaged sandwiches just seem like a flabby end to a miserable day.

The Engineer returns. “I got ham for Stella and coronary chicken for you”.

Let it be said that English is one of The Engineer’s four languages, all of which she speaks resourcefully and fearlessly. When tired or stressed, rather than hesitate, she will lunge for the nearest word. For example, when a temporary doctor – a locum – attended to her at our GP’s office, she asked him if he was a locust. I know doctors’ fees can be a plague, but really.

In the end, I am glad of the coronation chicken because everything on the boat is shut. Knackered, we stop for a two-hour nap at a motorway parking lot and get home at 5:45 a.m. The movers are arriving at 10. I don’t know of a better reason for a coronary.

Failing to have spoken Flemish to Stella for the first three years of her life, Nadia suddenly decided her daughter needed Europeanizing and winkled out a French class from the Internet. Le Club Petit Pierrot meets in Chelsea every Saturday and Nadia braves size -2 yummy mummies and their beleaguered nannies.

Trying to encourage this scheme, I put on our bog-standard French music CD a few days ago. You know, educational white noise.

We got through Un Homme et Une Femme safely. Ditto Aznavour’s Toi.

Then came the infamous Je t’aime… moi non plus with Gainsbourg and Birkin, the one with the rude bedroom noises, you will remember. As I was trying to steam beetroot, pre-soak an orange juice stain and count Ryvita calories all at the time, I failed to stop and ponder the effects of Jane’s climactic respiration on a nosy three-year-old.

Mummy, why is that lady snorin’?

“What?”

Why is that lady snorin’?

Um, she’s very tired, darling.

What’s viens?

Er, it means “come”.

What’s maintenant?”

Oooooh, it means “now”…

Why is that lady snorin’, Mummy?

She’s not snoring anymore darling, the song is over. Marmite sandwich?

I thought the worst had passed.

An hour later Stella said to me, “Mummy, Leon wants to jump on the Thai Pro Bitch.”

WHAAAAT?

The Thai Pro Bitch, Mummy. Leon wants to jump on the Bitch.

Wh-Who’s Leon, Stella?

The Lion, Mummy. Rolled eyes, raised eyebrows.

The Lion?

Yes, Mummy — exaggerated patience now.

Where d-does Leon live, Stella?

He’s Dora the Splorer’s friend, Mummy.

Of course. Leon, Dora’s hapless friend. A circus wannabe in the screamy technicolor Dora the Explorer DVD. The bumbling lion had wanted to balance on the…

Tight. Rope. Bridge.

Of course, darling, I said weakly. Of course Leon does.

I’ll tell you who has to walk that flipping tight rope daily. I do.