T minus four hours... ooh, tea...

Tonight is the night. My entire life will reach a brand new level – 37th floor, to be precise. Not that much of a jump, I guess, seeing as I've lived on the 26th for the last six years, but you know. Change. And yes, I may only be moving to the next-door tower, a fact which has caused much mirth amongst my friends –especially those who have spent the last few years moving from the peninsular to the island and back again, maybe stopping for a stint with the parents before heading out again –but it's a big deal! Tonight, the moving men come.

Apparently in Hong Kong, moving men will do EVERYTHING –literally. If you want them to empty your wardrobe and hang everything up again, they will. And most people get them to do that. But I've been trying to make their lives as easy as possible. I've cleared the stuff from in front of the Big Items so that when they arrive, they don't have to work to get to the sofa/bed/wardrobe. I've unpacked all my bathroom stuff (I have a LOT. I mean, I dumped a lot, but I still have loads, filling the cupboards, overflowing the shelves; I'm going to have to look into Storage Systems at Ikea, or whatever they call it, as though it's a science). I took over several amah bags of stuff last night so that they have less to do – I was "that person" in the lift that you really don't want to stand next to. (Those bags are HEAVY and I'm unfit! Rexona only works so well... ) And I'm more than willing to step up and continue the manual labour tonight, if that's the way they want things to roll. It's like cleaning before the cleaner arrives.

Ideally, of course, they'll be HAPPY to let me (and potentially my kind work friend) just sit on the sofa (obviously that's the first thing that needs to be moved, closely followed by the TV, natch...) and oversee them. But I think I'd get itchy feet. And worry that it was all going to go horribly wrong. Maybe I'll just accompany them on every round, getting totally in their way and getting them utterly annoyed. Until one of them turns round and swears at me. Luckily (and unusually for a non-speaker) my limited Cantonese doesn't extend to much cursing, so I'll probably smile back and offer him a beer.

Which reminds me: you're supposed to always have things like beers and Coke to offer workmen, aren't you? I am such a child in this respect. I'm no good at tipping bellhops, feel really uncomfortable when I get a cleaner or a workman in, and don't know how to address awkward subject matters. (How do you say "So did he dump you?" less bluntly? It's not a nice thing to ask, however you couch it!)

I think it's partly our generation - in our rush to grow up, we failed to learn some of the basic adult skills. I had a bit of a sniffle at work on Tuesday - I got through a box of 150 tissues in the office - so went straight home and straight to bed. At 6.45pm. Then began the dilemma: I was running a fever, or so I thought, and knew you have to rehydrate the system. But I wasn't sure whether you're supposed to sweat the fever out or keep lightly covered in loose-fitting clothes in a temperate climate.

As it was, I felt freezing cold, so I wrapped up in my duvet, despite the 30 degree weather outside and fell into an unsettled and unsettling sleep. I dreamt in a random south Asian-sounding language that I definitely do not speak in real life, nobody spoke English, yet I knew what was going on; I was reading a book in the dream, but I couldn't understand what it was about, not because I didn't get the storyline nor solely because it wasn't in English (naturally), but because, it later transpired, nobody could understand it until they fully came to terms with the traditional Indian system of castes. And to do that you had to be on a higher spiritual plain.

Yes, I think I was mildly delirious: another dream was about the debate whether it is humanly possible to be loved when you are stricken with fever, not in some self-pitying, lonely spinster way (I'm not!), but in a philosophical Kantian (do I mean Kant? I doubt it) way. Truly bizarre. And what's more bizarre is that I KNEW in my dreams that they were bizarre and nonsensical! Anyway. I digress.

So, in a move I thought late-20ers were supposed to have grown out of, I called my mum for advice. Apparently she'd taught me well, and I did everything by the book. She also recommended I do a steam over a bowl of boiling water and "anything, darling, do you have any essential oils? Eucalyptus or lavender? Or even just salt works". That really helped unblock my bunged-up nostrils.

And it's funny: you can be nearly 30, you can have lived alone for years and done whatever you've done that you'd never tell your parents. But sometimes, a girl just has to call home and speak to her mum. Just to check that your interpretation of "adulthood" is OK in her book.