We lived in Brookline this morning... now we don't. I felt exhausted just watching the move going on, even though we'd hired movers to prevent any exertion ourselves.

At 8:30 this morning, three men from the removals place came in and looked around the flat to see what needed to be taken up, we provided them with some drinks from the fridge, and then the pile of boxes that had built up over the last month quickly vanished upstairs into their van. I thought that they were going to finish in record time and that our lift to the house would be nowhere near arriving by the time they finished, but the furniture took a bit longer - the biggest difficulty was undoubtedly the three-seater sofa, which needed to go around a tight corner and then up a flight of stairs due to not fitting in the lift, but they managed the manoeuvre without even breaking the landing light (an achievement which instantly makes them much better than the people who moved it in).

We dashed over to the new house getting a sandwich and more juice on the way, and arrived five seconds before the van did - they managed to back a removals lorry into our car parking space at the front of the house in a very airport-like procedure. After that, I was impressed at their speed while running in and out with all the layers of boxes that had built up inside it - even the heaviest ones filled with books - one of them came in and asked Whitney "Where do you want ze box of cement?". Our agent, who is one of the most wonderful people in the world, even came around with a bag of groceries from a family-run shop around the corner to start us off in the new house. The movers were only around for about three hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, a miraculously fast transformation of our lives.

The only sticking point during the whole move was when the moving people's leader decided that it looked impossible to get the smallest sofa into the basement, saying of the awkward route through the kitchen "It doesn't really look like it was designed for the space to be used". But after declaring it impossible, they decided to try it anyway - and after accidentally wrenching the hood off the stove as they passed by (saying "That's fixable!" and then very quickly doing so) they managed to gently Tetris it down the stairs... and now we have an office with my brother-in-law's sofa in it.

If he ever wants it back, he's going to have to pay for the movers to get it out again, or he's getting it delivered in two separate bits.