I think the best part was spending an entire Saturday, slightly hung over from a till-dawn farewell party the night before, packing all my possessions into a growing pile of luggage, boxes, bags and more boxes. I slept surrounded by a forest of packages, and slept incredibly well.

The next morning I take a shopping list to IKEA and order my wardrobe, desk, bed, mattress and a shoe cabinet. Then I pick up some cutlery, a mattress pad, new pillow and comforter.

T was appointed as my moving man due to reasons of (1) closeness, (2) physically being in Hong Kong and (3) consisting of about 85% muscle. The assignment was tricky, but what finally worked was pinning him down and threatening bloody murder until he pledged his services. Keeping his promise though, on Sunday he turned up ready to work (slight delay due to a hangover), and true to his straight-to-the-point Kiwi nature, he makes a beeline for my room, plonks himself down on the bed and takes in the scene.

“That’s a lot of shit,” he says matter of factly, as though he’d expected worse.

My smile turns sheepish. “There’s more.”

I throw the closet doors open, revealing stacks and stacks of overstuffed paper bags.

T swears under his breath, drifts into the living room and plops onto a couch.

“Which ones should be the first to go?” I ask.

“Luggage and the big ones.”

I bring out the biggest items, he picks up an impressive load, and we’re off.

This led to three rounds of huffing and hoisting things through my troublesome narrow corridor with a door so wide it barely opens into said narrow corridor, then into the tiny lift where you need to, again, swing a large door open in a confined space, hail a cab to the less-occupied side of the road (i.e. it takes forever), zip to my new flat in North Point, at which point door-to-corridor size ratios become much more bearable and the dropoff is basically a breeze.

T immediately bounces around the place, checking tap fixtures and paint cracks. My furniture won’t be delivered for a few days, so we unwrap the mattress pad, pillow and comforter, slap on fresh bedding, and wrap ourselves up for a while in the surprisingly comfortable makeshift bed and stare at the inside of my new box.

“What do you think?” I ask as he tries to scrape a rogue drop of paint off the windowsill.

“It’s shit,” he grins.

Kiwi code for ‘all good.’