I won’t be publishing this until I get the news that contracts have been exchanged (because that’s the point everything is locked in, and I refuse to jinx it by saying we’re done in public until we are) but we’re a whisper away from that now. It was supposed to be today, but I just got the email telling me it’ll be tomorrow now.

And that’s been painfully characteristic of the last 3 months. A constant nagging sense of waiting for someone else to do something, that they’re nearly ready to do. Nearly, but not quite.

And now here we are at the end of the process. Or rather, the start of the next process. Frankly, the rather more daunting one: actually moving. Packing the accumulated detritus of 20 years in one place, and transferring it to somewhere it’ll spend the next couple of decades. I have a 30 item to-do list assembled, all of which is waiting on the final confirmed go date before I can do any of it. Some of it is mundae stuff like “cancel gym membership”. Some of is no less mundane, but is sufficiently new to me that it feels less mundane that I have to do it. (“Buy washing machine”.) And some of it is stuff I never thought I’d get to do in my life (“get quotes to re-do the double glazing”).

It still feels absolutely mad to me that we have shelled out close to seventy thousand pounds (and taken on more in debt obviously) to buy a house that we’ve been in for five minutes. I’ve spent longer deciding which pasta shape I want to buy in the supermarket before now.

But still: if all goes to plan, by the end of this week I’ll have life insurance, and a house. And I’m still not going to feel like a grown up.