The downside of living in our luxurious new apartment is the fact that it's not quite finished.

Oh, it's perfectly habitable if you like using boxes as furniture, if you like the fact that there are no curtains, and if you like the fact that the floor is not quite finished. It's got heating and hot water and lots of potential. And it's vaguely fit for human life.

The living room is empty, apart from the sofa and the television. It looks pretty good like that.

The main bedroom contains a lot of boxes. Some of these are builder's leftovers, some are furniture, some are architecture books and some are empty. The floor is varnished woodwork and needs cleaned.

The second bedroom is probably the most homely at the moment - it's the one I am sleeping in. On a matress. On the floor. The floor is varnished wood - and is probably the nicest floor in the flat at the moment.

The third bedroom is floored in underlay and contains boxes, boxes and boxes.

But now, within the next week or so, the carpets will arrive. The furniture can start to be assembled. Comfort can be created. Finally.

All I need to do first is move all the boxes.

It seems that every day, I smell fresh paint.

I went to site this morning, wondering what new delights would await me. After all, I was very good yesterday - I did nothing, didn't go to site to check up on the guys, but just waited. I thought they'd be doing something. But what they've done is repainted the white bits. They're now white.

In some ways this is a good thing - after all, we want the white bits to be a pure, brilliant white and they do certainly seem to be pure and brilliant now. On the other hand, so are some bits of the skirting board, and the floor. So there's going to be some more painting. Fortunately, the guys doing the work for us are painters, so painting is what they do.

On the downside, this means that the changes that are being made are small and un-noticeable. The white gets a little more pure, a little more brilliant. A single power socket, discovered abandoned behind a radiator is exposed, and covered over. Some plaster dust settles. There is more cleaning to be done.

By the end of the week, I'm told, all this will be over. I can get my deliveries on Thursday, I can probably walk in some of the rooms without my boots on by Saturday. I'm spending the weekend cleaning. Maybe, by Monday, it will be fit for a queen to see.

I get the keys tomorrow - four sets.

The last ten weeks have been somewhat chaotic, really. Any attempts to impose order on the many, many lists of things to do have been somewhat futile - I've missed things left, right and centre and in many ways it is a miracle that it's all ended up going so relatively smoothly.

The next couple of weeks will be the real test - redecoration, buying and building furniture, accepting delivery of a huge number of boxes and generally moving in. There will be some days where military precision is needed, and on most days a good stiff drink both for myself and for Mr Twinky (without whom none of this would be possible, despite the fact that he is, of course, a cat). Hopefully there will be no more surprises, though.

The latest curve ball arrived today. Apparently a search against my name has come up with some issues. I don't know what sort of search, precisely, but it threw up problems; something to do with owning a pub in East Kilbride and owing money to the child support agency. As a result, at some point I have to prove that this isn't really me, and I obviously don't have any bits of paper to prove that it's not me.

I do, however, have a huge amount of paper. I don't think I've ever generated quite so much paper in such a short period of time. I will be sellotaping it all together on Saturday to make temporary curtains.

My life is ruled by lists.

I've got lists of work, lists of stuff to sort out with banks, lists of stuff to sort out about buying the flat, about redecorating, and about moving in to it. Mr Twinky has the same - we swap lists sometimes, just for the amusement of it all.

I now just want it all to be over - not because I am hating it, far from it. Because I can visualise what the end result is, and from here it looks very enticing.

I can't wait to start ticking off some final items. Yes, the flat is decorated and everyone is paid. Yes, we have sofas and curtains and knives and plates. Yes, I have my computer back, my study set out, my telephone connected.

I know there will always be plans for what to do next, but at this stage, I'm starting to think that maybe, by August, things will have settled down and started being the way I thought they would be when I started all of this madness.

Of course, the chap who is sorting out my mortgage thinks I'm mad. Brave and crazy, but mad. The chap I met at lunch time today thinks I am setting myself up for a lifetime of pain. I think of it as keeping busy.

Plan A was, of course, to write about it as I was doing it. I was going to turn this site in to a useful guide to how to move from Foreign to Here, with a useful list of tips and contact numbers. Plan A was, of course, nonsense.

Of course.

Let's just say that things are moving along nicely, and I am managing to stay one step ahead of disaster.

My ever-increasing number of to-do-lists fall nicely in to a number of categories.

There's the stuff to do with money, which is my current worry. Not the costs involved, but the fun business of moving it from one account to another, and making sure that nobody thinks that I am an international money launderer.

There's the legal stuff, which is happily burbling along and under control.

As is the insurance stuff.

Then there's the tax stuff - trying to sort out my taxes Here and in Foreign, where both tax authorities owe me money, money which I intend to blow on sweeties.

Once we get the keys to the flat, we'll be getting it redecorated. This is Mr Twinky's main area of expertise, and he's organising it remotely with minimal chunks of help as required from his army of foot soldiers on the ground. By which I mean my long-suffering parents, who are both being fantastic although they probably don't think they're doing much apart from keeping me sane and keeping me company.

I'm whiling away my idle hours by planning what electronic gizmos I am going to buy, and working out the order of various calls that I have to make two weeks from now (in order - electric, gas, phone and broadband, ordering electronics, getting a television licence, getting satellite television).

And only after that do I think about getting a regular vegetable box delivered, or those lessons I've been talking about for years, or sorting out my National Insurance.

Through a combination of luck and more luck, I've not managed to screw anything up yet, but I know I'm just keeping one step ahead of disaster and I couldn't do it any other way.

A few months ago, I was scared and nervous about the Big Move(tm). After all, it meant a change of job, a change of country, a complete lifestyle overhaul - and all of this is not good. But it brought with it opportunity, excitement, and an escape from the increasingly toxic environment where I had found myself working. As ever, the reality proved smooth and straightforward, and I am now four weeks in to regular commuting between here and there with no ill effects except two days a week of feeling dislocated and jet lagged.

One of the features of Big Move(tm) has been living with my parents again. This is how living with my parents goes.

- I get up in the morning, shower and shave, leave the house, check my e-mail, get dressed, go downstairs, brush my teeth, have breakfast. Not in that order. Sometimes I'll see my mum, sometimes I won't. This morning, she worried that I would be late for work. I wasn't.

- I take a bus in to work. It takes about 20 minutes, and I've got enough in the way of podcasts and audio books to keep me going and keep me awake so I don't fall asleep and end up in Glasgow. Then I do a full day's work.

- I call up a solicitor and arrange a viewing for a property or two. I trudge around the properties and get another bus home.

- I have dinner with my parents, and we then do whatever it is we're doing that evening. Often it's simply watching television. Last night we played cards. Wine was involved. I call Mr Twinky to hear him purr and thereby assuage any feelings of homesickness.

- I go to bed, fall asleep, check my e-mail and brush my teeth. Again, not in that order.

This is all very pleasant, actually. So, obviously it has to change.

I have stopped traipsing around other people's houses, and in about six weeks I will move in to one of them.

There is a secret war going on in the streets of Scotland.

This isn't the obvious war, the one between the evil forces of roadworks and the evil forces of trying to get from a to b in a bus. This is a war for the hearts and minds of the Scottish people. A war that, perhaps can never be won. This is the secret war between estate agents and their mortal enemies - solicitors.

On the one hand, estate agents will sell your property for you. They'll do you a glossy brochure, and they will hire an attractive young philosophy post-grad to go and stand in it for a couple of hours on demand, louching against the split level grill and twiddling the knobs on the combi until the numbering wears off. You can have an interesting conversation with these people, like "the carpets aren't really my taste", or "how much do you think it's going to sell for" or "it's a bit handy for the knocking shop, isn't it?". On the other hand, they don't know who cleans the communal stairs or when the recycling day is or how long ago the roof was replaced. Estate agents are great if you're trying to sell a property that you don't live in, particularly if you live a long way away from it.

In the other corner, however, are the cut price cousins. Solicitors. Solicitors will tell you that you don't need an estate agent, because they are the spawn of the devil. They'll undercut their costs, and they won't send out a hot rugby player to stand in the property and do things with knobs like an estate agent will - you're expected to provide that service yourself. It changes the conversations you have. "Have you enjoyed living here?" or "What are the neighbours like" or "Is the knocking shop any good?". In general, they don't have anything like the numbers of staff behind them that the estate agents do, and they handle fewer properties.

However, solicitors have struck upon a genius plan, and seem to be winning the war at the moment. By joining forces, they present a united front - in Edinburgh this is called "ESPC", which stands for something. Like a cat, ESPC lets solicitors get their hackles up and look really big. They've got a shop and a website and a magazine and to be honest you could be forgiven for thinking that they're the only place to buy property from in Edinburgh.

But they're not.

And bizarrely, this makes estate agents the bloated underdogs, waddling slowly, lumbered with high costs and fees, and a lower visibility, fading into the shadow of solicitors with their fancy wigs and quills and stuff. I almost feel sorry for them.

So, I came out of the rotten job and I have left Foreign and I'm now working up to starting a new job in a new country.

I've left Mr Twinky behind in Foreign - not because I wanted to, you understand. We did talk about smuggling him out of the country in my luggage, but it would have been easier to buy him a ticket. Someone has to stay in Foreign to manage our diverse and random interests in business and property. Someone has to make sure that any evil plans are set out correctly and submitted on time to the Evil Planning Department for approval. So he's doing valuable and stalwart work.

I, on the other hand, have the equally tough job of finding a place to stay, getting my finances back in order, getting my bank to stop giving me a ring every time I try to spend money, and learning a whole new way of working. Ideally a better one than I had back in rotten.

Seems like a fair division of labour.

The tough part is the sleeping arrangements, obviously. I'm back in my parents' home for a few weeks - on the one hand that's great, as it means I'm comfortable. On the other hand, it would be very easy to get too comfortable here and not make enough effort to move on. I'm well known for that in our family, it seems.

In the mean time, as my sister and her kids are here too, I'm in the sparest of the spare bedrooms. I'm living out of my suitcase until this evening when I move in to the room which will be "mine" in the longer term. But for now I'm in a single bed. It's a nice transition - I don't have to pick a side to sleep on, I can sleep on both sides.

Somewhere overseas, I suspect that Mr Twinky is doing the same.

I left work early yesterday.

At four o'clock in the afternoon, I was walking home. The sky was clear, it was nice and warm and there was a definite feeling that spring was in the air. But there was more - it felt like a weight had been lifted from me. I felt like I was seventeen again, finishing my exams and never having to worry about them again. After all, I'd left my pass at security, given my laptop and my credit card back, and I'd handed over my last file of work to one of my colleagues.

I've worked for the same company for most of my adult life, and now I am changing company, changing career and moving to work in a different country again. It's going to be an interesting few months - but today I am taking it easy, knowing that I won't be back there on Monday.

Only got four days left at the job, and today was marked by a power cut which left us without computers all afternoon. So we went home.

It's a good start to the last week, and certainly better than the faint disappointment of my leaving present and card. Someone I've known for eighteen years gave me "best wishes" and the daughter of Satan left "I'm sure we'll meet again" written in her own dark blood. At least she called to ruin my night out by suggesting we meet for a drink this week. Like that's going to happen. Given that the sick atmosphere in our office is largely due to her, the reasons for me to spend any time with her are rapidly diminishing.

I have thirty hours left. Thirty hours of working for this company which has been wonderful and hellish in roughly equal measures at different times.

Shortly after the power went down, I heard that the project I had been working on for most of the last year and finally passed on to someone else three weeks ago had been - pretty much - canned. A great result, I think, and not before time. The week's started well. Only thirty hours left to avoid the daughter of Satan with her cold dead heart.