Moving somewhere new

The first night in my new flat I couldn't sleep because there was a noise I couldn't identify — turned out to be the boiler, which apparently made a low clicking sound every twenty minutes or so. The second night I didn't notice it. I'm not sure exactly when it stopped being a noise and started just being part of the flat, but it did.

That's more or less what moving somewhere new is like. Things that feel strange become normal, usually faster than you'd expect.

The practical stuff is fine, mostly. You find the nearest supermarket (mine was a fifteen-minute walk, which felt like a lot until it didn't). You work out the bus. You figure out which of the local places is actually good and which just looks it from the outside. That part takes a few weeks and it's honestly fine, just slightly time-consuming.

The harder part is the people. Or the absence of them, specifically. I'd moved knowing one person in the city, vaguely, from university. We met for a drink once and then kind of lost touch again. So for a while it was just — quiet. Not bad, exactly, but a particular kind of quiet that comes from there being no one who knows you nearby.

That takes longer to fix and there's no clever way around it. You just have to be somewhere consistently enough that you start to become a face people recognise. The office helped. The Sunday football team helped more. It was six or seven months before it stopped feeling like I was visiting and started feeling like I lived there.

I've spoken to other people who've done the same thing and the timeline varies but the shape of it seems pretty consistent. The first month is disorienting. By month three you're functional. By month six something starts to feel genuinely yours.