For a few blissful days I became ensconced in a room at the Premier Inn, with no fixed abode. I was not a property owner. I had no responsibilities. I was free. This wondrous state of near-vagrancy was only until the purchase of my house in Ireland went through, but I enjoyed it all the same.

I got the better end of the deal, taking the king-sized bed in the budget hotel room while the builder boyfriend slept in his pick-up truck with the dogs, or next to the truck in a pop-up tent. Obviously, I let him come by for a shower in the morning, and some breakfast.

He was so happy to be on his way to Ireland that he declared camping in a friend’s field the most minor inconvenience.

We did interview for some dog-friendly Airbnbs in Surrey but the owners, who all demanded we turn up and introduce ourselves and our dogs first, were so weird and had so many ridiculously unkeepable rules that we decided it was motel or bust.

We were so tired by the time the house was packed up and vacated that we would have slept in the horses’ field shelter.

The contents of our cottage was loaded into a 30ft container lorry, bound for a storage depot in the north of Ireland. Every last square inch was crammed with boxes by the time the lads declared it full. Some stray items from the shed and the cellar  had to go in the back of the builder boyfriend’s truck, and be taken to his builder’s yard.

How we ever crammed this much stuff into a three-bedroom Victorian mid-terrace I have no idea. After four hours of loading, the HGV was so full to bursting with possessions – most of which seemed to have come out of the under eaves storage in the loft – that I no longer cared what we left behind. It had taken us a week to pack.

‘What is this?’ we kept asking each other, as the BB and I threw items into boxes. I took as much as I could to charity shops but even so, the laundry bags and suitcases full of clothes I had never worn filled an entire bedroom. The boxes of books were like a mountain. Every article I have ever written appeared to be in scrapbooks, together with stacks of hard copies of newspapers and magazines going back decades.

As I peeped into boxes, dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan mingled with articles about dating and horses. Acres and acres of newspaper columns from parliament and the Northern Ireland peace process squashed together with silly centrespreads, such as one in which I posed in a pair of pink silk pyjamas with my beloved spaniel Cydney, who all but wore a pout on her face. It seemed a shame to throw any of it out.

The builder b ended up taking charge of the loft and spent days up there, banging and clattering about. ‘What is this?’ He thrust an rusted weighing scale with a white basket at me. ‘It’s the thing they weighed me on when I was a baby. I don’t know why I still have it.’

‘And this?’ A superb vintage typewriter of my father’s, just like the one Angela Lansbury used in the opening credits of Murder, She Wrote.

‘What about this?’ A jagged piece of signage. ‘Oh that’s a piece of an old army barracks in Belfast. Keep that, definitely.’

With the house empty, and the lorry full, at 1.30 p.m. the money hit my account. Not until then, sitting on the bare boards of the floor of my former home, did I look up the pound to euro rate. It had bizarrely spiked. I shouted at the BB to do the rest. I was off.

I raced to the bank. There, a girl with a ‘computer says no’ expression laboriously typed in the Iban destination for the six-figure sum I wanted to transfer to my solicitor in Ireland, ready for my purchase a few days’ later. ‘What’s the rate?’ I asked her, breathlessly. ‘The rate changes every 60 seconds,’ she said, in a drawl.

So slowly I could scream, she wrote out the cost in pounds. ‘Put it through!’ I said. At that moment, a woman walked up to the table we were sitting at in a private area and said: ‘Excuse me, can you help me with this?’ And she held out her phone.

‘Please,’ I gasped to the bank clerk. ‘Please, can you put this through first?’

Thankfully, the spike in the pound kept going until the money went across. And I’m so happy in my budget hotel room.