I am a sentimental old fool.  I know this from experience, and from the observations of friends. It's certainly true. I have wept over sad films with happy endings, wasted precious years worrying about things that never were and will never be.

And yet.

I've just moved home.  Only my fourth time, so hardly a veteran of the process. I was in my last home for seven years; in the one before that for fifteen.  I'm predisposed to be a stayer-put, a putter-down of roots, a grower-into-places.  So you'd expect, wouldn't you (I certainly did) that I'd feel something of a wrench at leaving the place I'd been happy in for so many years?  Wouldn't you?

Very much to my surprise, no. Not a bit of it.

Maybe it's because of the immensity of the effort involved in moving house, especially when one is such an inveterate hoarder as I am.  So many boxes of utter shite lugged down those stairs.  And I was good - over thirty bags of actual rubbish (I know how many bin liners there are on a roll - and I bought two rolls), and many, many trips to the local recycling centre - yet my new (smaller) flat is still shoulder high in boxes and crates. I might also mention the sterling efforts of a couple of my friends who broke their backs manhandling my furniture down the five flights of stairs at the old flat, and the one, shorter, steeper, narrower flight at the new.  And who kindly didn't actually say that the larger of the two sofas wouldn't fit, but nevertheless, helped carry it to the lockup where it now resides, awaiting some other fate.

So is it that? The physical stress of leaving defeats the emotional longing of whatever?

Or do I just not actually get sentimental about places?  No.. I clearly do.  A trip to Walton-on-the-Naze, where I spent my childhood summers, invokes all kinds of emotions.  A walk down the High Street in Chipping Ongar, where I grew up, ditto.  But the flat in Romford, the house in Harold Hill, the flat before that, in Chadwell Heath...  there's a sort of vague wistfulness, but no more than that.

Maybe I've just grown callous in my old age.