I’ve left London. How will I ever work again

They say that moving house is the third most traumatic thing after death and divorce and they’re right about that, I reckon. For the past few weeks and months I’ve been treating our London house not like the beloved home where I’ve spent 12 happy years but more like an anonymous shell where I just happen to eat, sleep and work.

I used to enjoy having new friends round and hearing them wax lyrical about the niceness of the wallpaper or the size of the bedrooms or the delightfulness of the view over the park, but not this year.

I used to spend hours in the garden, but I’ve scarcely been out at all — not to weed, not to grow tomatoes, not even to smell the scent of my favourite Souvenir du Docteur Jamain. I used to play tennis in the park with mates down the road, but I haven’t done much of that either.

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Brendan O’Neill

The moment in the ‘grooming gangs’ debate that shamed Jess Phillips

This was all a cunning ruse, of course. What I was trying to achieve was to trick my brain into not being bothered by the fact that, after 25 years in the greatest city on earth, I’m quitting London for good. And it worked pretty well till right up to the last minute when suddenly — I suppose this can’t be avoided — the wobbles began.

My old insomnia made a brief, ugly reappearance. I vacillated between the moronically distrait, the morbidly gloomy and the intensely irritable. Worse, everywhere I went seemed to prompt cruel, mocking, madeleine-style flashbacks of significant moments past: the section of my office floor on which Girl was born; the colourful insects we’d painted one summer on the side of the Wendy house; the markings on the kitchen wall charting the kids’ growth from toddlers to teenagers; the place at the bottom where Beetle the cat was buried and also the guinea pigs Lily Scampers and Pickles Deathclaw — victims all of local devil-dogs which had leaped over our garden wall to savage them to death on our lawn… .