As a Tai-Tai, you get very used to having people to do stuff for you. I’d temporarily forgotten that I most unfortunately don’t have a member of staff to write my blog for me. Standards are slipping around here.

Prompted by a packing box-buying spree this week, my thoughts once again turn to our upcoming move back to HK after our Guinness World Record-breaking summer holiday (4 months and counting! Beat THAT!)

Over the last 4 years I’ve thought of little else other than moving, having barely unpacked one set of boxes before organising shipping for the next. (As an aside, why do I never keep the damn boxes? So hard to get good strong boxes.)

Given the frequency that we tend to relocate it’s a wonder I haven’t ditched all our worldly possessions and gone for a zen minimalist type lifestyle. And yet here I am, scouring the internet from afar for furniture and other assorted bits and pieces for our new pad (as yet unseen by me – Mr T-T assures me he’s found a diamond in the considerable rough of Hong Kong real estate.)

So why not ditch it all and go lo-fi? Well, for most of us growing up, home equals the same old place throughout our childhoods. There’s comfort derived from your home always being there, and it seems highly unlikely that Baby T-T will have the constant of the familiar four walls throughout his youth.

Whilst he may not have the same house, I can give him the consistency of what’s inside it when we inevitably move on again. These are all the things that you remember fondly from childhood; the special mug with the picture of a cow, the clock with the loud tick, the table with the scratch from an art project mishap. They can act as anchors to attach you to a place, wherever that might be and hopefully make it home.

That’s why I choose to ship these boxes full of random things around the world and back again. For my son, for his memories of his home. And ok, perhaps a little bit for me too. (I can’t bear the idea of anyone else getting their mitts on my collection of vintage handbags.) But mostly for him.