They say that one of the most stressful times for any personal relationship is when you’re moving house. Next down the list is when you’re building a house. Right now my wife and I are attempting to move into the house I haven’t finished building yet. I don’t know why the architects don’t just chuck a set of divorce papers in with the house plans and be done with it.

It’s not all bad, of course. One of the advantages of relocating homes is the sudden, strong incentive to get rid of lots of accumulated junk – because you can’t be bothered packing and moving it, plus there is that cathartic, cleansing feeling of a fresh beginning… or maybe my desk is too close to the paint solvents. (I must open a window).

It can be heart-breaking, too. I’ve been pulling out bits of gear that cost me a hell of a lot of money a few years ago, but now (thanks to the advent of things like Windows 7 and HDMI) they’re both worthless and useless – not to mention the slow demise of Firewire ports on laptops, which I’ve grumbled about elsewhere this issue. Just about everything I bought was Firewire-connected, damn it.

STUFF ALL

As I’ve been cleaning out those cupboards, I decided there’s a sliding scale of the shelf-life of stuff.

• Stuff you’re using now
• Stuff you haven’t used for a while, but it’s still good stuff
• Stuff you haven’t used for ages, but that’s not to suggest it won’t come in handy sometime. You have to keep it
• Stuff that has developed a thin film of grime from having been in the cupboard too long (is that mouse pee?), but you’re not going to throw it away – no way. It could be useful
• Stuff you’d almost forgotten you had – it’s a bit like getting it new all over again (Hey! I’d forgotten I even had this thing! Wow, it could come in handy sometime…)
• Stuff you need to close your eyes, put it in the bin, turn around and don’t look back – no, don’t look back. It’s over

Sadly, there’s only one proper rule about stuff when you’re moving house. Do you really need to keep it? I mean, really? It helps, when you’re making that decision, to have a wife standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

CABLE CULL

It’s also an opportunity for a big connector cable clean-out. That’s not the bunch of cords hanging on the back of the door. No, we’re talking about the tangle of spaghetti behind your PC workstation. I’ve just gone though a rather alarming process. I carefully dismantled my computer and all its peripherals, put everything into a single, large box so there was no mistaking where it all could be found – then I subsequently rebuilt my computer in the new office and got it all working perfectly.

Except the box is still half-filled with cables.

How did that happen? What were all those other cables doing, that they’re not doing now? It’s like some weird, PC Twilight Zone where things mysteriously function even though you can’t possibly have connected them. I’m tempted to just jam all the remaining cables down behind the PC to make things look normal. Perhaps they’ll all reconnect themselves in the middle of the night, when no one’s looking.