Hannah Betts: I am the bloated late Elvis of stuff

I had intended writing a proper column about a proper subject today, with research and opinions, and everything. But, alas, I finished moving house but five hours ago (let's have that again: but five hours ago). And as I sit in the dispiritingly thin light of 8.39am, I am experiencing what is known in the trade as a Demi Moore moment, only less artfully wind-machined. Unless Emilio Estevez and friends stage an intervention pronto – ideally bearing a large vat of Marmite – the morning isn't going to pan out too well.

(NB: I realise that only women and gay men aged 371/2 will get this reference, but there is none more apposite, I assure you. And, yes, I know that my life might be more successful were my frame of reference to extend beyond the principle: "What would Molly Ringwald do?" but I just moved house, so cut me a little slack, OK?)

That's the thing about moving: all platitudes apply. One of the most stressful events of one's life, blah, blah, blah, up there with divorce, James Blunt concerts, and death. Well give me death over moving any day of the week, particularly if it could be my own.

I should be feeling chipper as the weekend yielded proof that, although the general tenor of my gene pool might be summarised as "lawless bastards", there are moments when even lawless bastards can do the right thing. Both my brothers rallied manfully to the cause: Gay Porn Brother in all his steroidal beefcakery and Lady Chatterley's Lover Brother with his wiry countryman brawn. Each was weaned on a diet of World's Strongest Man contests, meaning that my modus operandi could be to play them off against each other à la Godzilla versus Mechagodzilla. "George just lifted six chairs and a dining room table!" "Bim can carry my entire collection of Nineties post-feminist diatribes plus me on one bicep!"

LCL Bro saluted me with the news that I look like our mother, which I took to mean not, "Resemblance will out", but "You could pass for 63". My decision to leave British teeth behind me via fanatical flossing has fallen by the wayside, with the consequence that I appear to have developed scurvy. I am cut and bruised in a manner suggestive of someone who failed to establish an S&M breakout word early enough in proceedings. And my industrial revolutionary moving diet of white bread, chips and steaming tea means that it is not so much a detox as an exorcism that is required.

And still the trauma continues. I am pretty gung-ho about most crises, but here the crisis I am forced to confront is myself, expressed via a lifetime of kleptomania. I used to rather enjoy Homeric catalogues and medieval blazons of arms: the various spangly accoutrements by which heroism was made manifest. For some, possessions are fragments shored against ruins.

For me, they are parts the sum of which I fail to be greater than. For I am the bloated late Elvis of stuff, my grotesque superfluity of things a form of self-harm. A lavender marriage seems the only solution: some winning homosexual to pimp my entire being.

I have been endeavouring to console myself with Harry Mount's rather brilliant book A Lust for Window Sills, reckoning that an ability to distinguish my Doric from my Ionic might distract from my festering pile. It is damn fine stuff, but the temptation to use it to beat myself senseless about the head proves great. My own architectural taste is too resolutely Birmingham to be trusted (I must be the sole student ever to rock up at the dreaming spires and think: "Oh, but Keble is beautiful!").

Psychogeography is more where I am at, agreeing with Peter Ackroyd that some areas acquire an intrinsic character: the radicalism of New Fetter Lane, the quirky barkingness of Clerkenwell.

My new abode marks a return to my spiritual home of Pimlico; a locale that Ackers deems "mournful". Perhaps it is because my previous domicile was situated in the morgue of a children's hospital, causing cab drivers to avert their eyes lest wan-faced nippers accost them from windows, but mournful works for me. Aubrey Beardsley and Barbara Pym were former residents, which is exactly the sort of spinster kink I intend to muster. I once arrived home in the small hours to discover a flaxen-haired maiden leading along the pavement a snowy pony which she po-facedly informed me was a unicorn that had lost its horn. My landlady asked me what drew me to the flat: she had me at Pimlico.