Taking apart a bookcase? What could be simpler

I came to regret the folly of those words.

As I said them to my wife I noticed her eyes widen in a mixture of contempt for my hubris and horror that the damage was now done.

For in that moment I had jinxed us. It was as though I had spoken the name of the devil and she was looking into my eyes to see if he had appeared there to possess me.

Due to long and complicated reasons to do with conveyancing and the intricacies of having to deal with other human beings, we lost the house we wanted to buy and have had to arrange to move in with relatives while we sort ourselves out.

So in order to avoid yet more expense following a wasted survey and lawyers' fees for an abandoned house purchase, we decided to forgo the removal costs, borrow a van and shift everything to a lock up by ourselves.

Until that point I had always believed that moving all our worldly possessions would be simple and nothing like the trials we have already endured.

After all, my wife has been through childbirth and I have had to live through a trip to Ikea on a Sunday to buy old Billy in the first place.

Between us we have experienced the trauma of pushing the human body beyond its normal threshold of endurance to achieve a life-defining miracle – such as when we got an entire 6ft 7in tall flat pack cabinet into a Vauxhall Corsa, drove along the M6 and got home without dying.

Surely, I thought naïvely, there is no task more arduous than having to stride around the aisles of flat packs. Then have to try and negotiate your way back through the throngs of elbow-wielding people angry that you are upsetting the Swedish-engineered one way system to re-measure that piece of furniture because you wrote the size down in inches and the cabinet itself in centimetres.

Well it turns out there is. This stuff isn't built to be taken apart again when you move house. Or rather, it isn't built to be taken apart by me.

Do you know what the other name is for an allen key, the little things you get from Ikea to tighten your shelves?

A hex key.

I don't believe for a second it has anything to do with the fact that it's shaped as a hexagon.

'Hex' here is meant in the same way as a spell or curse cast by a withered and wicked old witch so that stuff you thought you could dismantle easily to get into the car has ended up a mess of splinters and sheered screws.

Poor old Billy bookcase has gone to the great wood chipper in the sky. Or to some commercial waste recycling plant used by the local council.

Then we had the whole problem of getting things that I hadn't destroyed packed into the right boxes.

It turns out having a box big enough to take all your books and DVDs isn't the be all and end all of it. There's the little matter of being able to lift them all off the ground and get them into the van without slipping a disc (spinal, not compact).

Somewhere in the ether the ghost of Billy the bookcase is whispering 'don't be a hero, don't be a fool with your life' and suggesting that next time a removal firm might not be a bad idea.

I always thought this applied to money, but maybe it's true of furniture as well – you can't take it with you.

Keith Harrison returns in this weekend 's Star.