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Time to move house again.

We've been looking for three or four months. There's only so many times you can tread barefoot on a Smurf at three in the morning before deciding your daughter needs her own room. I can't quite decide which is my favourite. The Pirate Smurf's cutlass is quite bendy, although not quite bendy enough. Not as bad as the drones on the Scottish Smurf's bagpipes. Not, of course, that putting her in her own room will make any difference. Smurfs are probably fairly invasive, like lice.

Sweden has all kinds of helpful laws for people who rent houses, as we do. Veronica has been renting from the same company for seventeen years or so, and it's a first-hand contract. Whatever that means, I'm a little vague about the legal ramifications, but it's clearly a good thing. People arch their eyebrows and emit low whistles when she says we have one.

One of the things it means is that you can swap your existing flat for another one in the same company. The longer you've been with them, the higher up the waiting list you go. V had her heart set on the Haga district, a very calm and family-friendly part of the centre of town. It used to be a warehouse district, and was almost pulled down in the eighties to make room for something with more glass, steel and potential profit for business in it. Luckily forward-thinking hippies occupied it and got the demolitions cancelled. Now it's full of cobbles, antique shops and vegetarian coffee houses.

And, from November, us.

We've got a place at the foot of the hill with Skansen Kronen on it, an old artillery fort. Our balcony looks straight out on its foresty flanks. I can already see F running up and down them, skinning her knees and discovering nettles. And I can already see me struggling to keep up whilst attempting to pluck Smurfs out of my soles.

There's a mild downside, of course, which is that we have to move in under a month. On a day where V is closing one show and opening another the day after. And the day before I go back to the UK for three months, to work on a Christmas play in Keswick. V is already champing at the bit to throw everything into moving boxes immediately. I'm trying to resign myself quietly to not knowing where anything is when I get back, as well as steeling myself for three months of not being at home.

Time to stay changeable within a changing element, to borrow Captain Nemo's motto. Although he generally seemed to find things like moving house and spending time away from family fairly easy to bear. Perhaps I should invest in an incredible submarine, it could solve a lot of problems. Although there's no parking at the new place, so perhaps I shouldn't.