Pack up your bubbles and smile, smile, smile

"You know they'll come in with a racehorse-sized roll of bubble wrap and pack absolutely everything in your house," my aunty said the other day while she and I were knee-deep in the detritus of paper, bottles and old usb-cable cords which had once made up my office.
"Everything," I asked, turfing another manila folder into the bin.
"Yep, they'll even pack an ashtray with ash in it or a wine glass containing the dregs of last night's chardonnay," she said, "all wrapped up and ready to go."
She knew. She'd been a policewoman.
"But I kind of feel like I should tidy things up, you know, organise things for the packers." I shrugged. "You're a Womble," she said. "You're just making more work for yourself and besides, anything the mover's haven't packed themselves won't be insured."
Whether that's true or not, it made me pause. My wines would probably have a greater chance of survival if they were packed professionally.
Maybe I should relax more. Truth is I felt weird leaving all of our family's bits and bobs just lying about in the house.
What if someone from the moving company posted something on Facebook about how I didn't have my pot cupboards stacked properly or my crockery arranged in colour-coded order?
Or how I have a million rubber bands, corks, bottletops and old bread-bag ties clogging up the cling film and tinfoil drawer, or that (heaven forbid) my cutlery wasn't organised in clearly defined baking, dining and accessories categories like my mother's. Although my mother (bless her) used to clean her house before her cleaning lady arrived.
The last time we moved house my husband and I did everything ourselves. It wasn't a big deal and only a couple of kilometres lay between the old house and the new.
I was heavily pregnant and it was actually exciting. I busied myself making the house pretty and practical. It was that blissful time before our children actually grew up and filled the house with "artwork" from school, mountains of Lego, untold amounts of plastic Polly Pocket accessories and secret stockpiles of half-eaten muesli bars, Chupa Chups and stale Marmite sandwiches strategically placed behind pot plants, underneath beds and inside their school shoes. A time before I had to fortify myself with massive quantities of merlot in order to cope with cleaning out their wardrobes.