It's an oddly emotional experience, saying goodbye to a Flat you've lived in for five years – and one that's seen your life change in momentous ways.

From relatively early on, it was in the abstract future plan for The Writer and I to leave London at some point in our lives. But with the impending arrival of a miniature, somewhere around Christmas the abstract crystallised, and by March the flat was covered in boxes.

And even though I'd always known that we were going to outgrow a first-floor, one-bedroom flat in central Brixton, the reality of leaving brought just how much that little home meant.

We signed the lease on a cold January night five years ago in something of a flurry. It was more than we wanted to pay, but the Victorian ceilings meant that TW would never feel claustrophobic; the shelves in the alcoves by the chimney breast could be home to hundreds of mutually acquired books; and the kitchen screamed 'parties'. We outstayed the other couples looking round on the same evening, and took it then and there.

One spring evening two years later, back from an anniversary dinner at Polpetto, TW got down on one knee while my back was turned, leaving me to come face to face with an enormous surprise and even bigger sapphire. The following winter, tanned and newly married, he carried me over the threshold as we returned from our honeymoon.

It saw friends turn up late at night after break ups and panic attacks to stay on the sofa for a week. It saw new, better jobs that have taken us both to interesting places with even more interesting (in all senses) people. It saw annual Christmas parties that became the highlight of our advent seasons – both with and without coke all over the bathroom, and guests setting fire to their hair.

There were dinners and celebrations featuring round after round of birthday guest-themed Just A Minute; post-hen party celebrations of Taylor Swift and Bollinger; squabbles and debates; the discovery first of moths and later of mice – one dispatched cleanly with a single thwack of a chopping board, the other hopefully left behind, sated by cashmere of fond memory.

But change blows through like a fierce January wind, and all of a sudden we were faced not with a cosy home full of tchotchkes, but an echoey and empty house that was left with little but the imprints of memories and fun.

I'll always have extreme fondness for our first home together, and in 20 years when we're walking down the road which will have changed beyond all measure, the purview only of the very rich, we'll remember where we started, and be grateful for our time there.