My life in storage

I’m off to South Italy for a few months having recently sold my late mother’s house and, if I can find a nice immigration lawyer, perhaps longer. This means my home is now full of cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, marker pens and panic. It’s a feeling I’m perfectly familiar with, having changed my living space (and country) more times in life than I care to count. The boxes won’t be going with me abroad. Instead, I’ll be renting local accommodation for my worldly goods: a storage space.

The buildings that house storage spaces are nearly always the same. They’re plonked down in industrial estates and look faintly like car-showrooms without cars or windows. There’s usually an office selling boxes and parcel tape at severely whacked up prices, and little attempts at jollity (at the latest the receptionist’s kitted out in the same royal blue as the storage space doors and there’s a teddy bear on the counter, albeit with padlock dangling weirdly off its arm). Banks of CCTV cameras are everywhere and, near the industrial lift are the trolleys – huge, unwieldly things which have a mind of their own and are hell to steer. There are signs forbidding you from keeping all sorts of items in your locker (food, gelignite, Kalashnikovs etc.), and, surreally, from using said trolleys for the transportation of people (dead bodies clearly aren’t welcome here either). Once you’ve made your way upstairs, you find yourself in long, strip-lit corridors lined with numbered and padlocked spaces, each with its mesh ceiling and corrugated walls. They make you think of communist jails.

Why do people use storage spaces? Doubtless there are happy stories, winners who have snaffled the dream job in Dubai or are off to backpack for a year round South East Asia. Yet you can’t help feeling these places are more often for people vaguely on the skids – those for the moment of no-fixed-abode or who can’t get their house sale to dovetail with their purchase, or have attachment issues openly at war with their wish to downsize. Though you’re usually alone in storage centres – they echo and are oddly calming – you’ll occasionally see customers coming to visit their things, to retrieve a driving iron or just move their stuff about a bit. They’re like people working on an allotment or visiting a loved one’s grave.

Nearly everything I own will be going into storage, but thankfully there isn’t much of it. Over the years and numerous house-moves, I’ve whittled it down to essentials. There will be almost no furniture – that’s going to house clearance – just some rugs and paintings, and the odd chair or coffee table to remind me of the home I’m leaving. Most of the cargo, as ever, is books. Though I’ve given shelf-loads away to charity shops, I still have a dozen alphabetised boxes of them, their heavy freight straining at the parcel tape (I can almost hear it screaming) as I pick them up. There are mementoes of past travels, old letters, silk ties which are things of beauty but pretty useless in 2024. With each move I’ve told myself it won’t be the same next time around and that I’ve finally learnt the folly of owning things. I’ve jettisoned plenty over time but have never achieved the aerodynamic jump-jet of a life I’ve envisaged. Who has? Bruce Chatwin described a man in Songlines who owned nothing more in the world than a trunk and referred to it as his ‘home’, but such austerity’s strictly for saints or lunatics, and most of us don’t make the grade as either.

But I nearly always travel light. Though I quite admire people who carry lots of luggage – all those demands made on life, that arrogant imposition on their new environment – I’m not one of them. Flying frequently with a budget airline where you’re penalised for taking more than a tiny cabin bag has schooled me in self-denial. Books, for the moment, can be found online, films downloaded, music streamed through a speaker. In southern Italy, with the spring coming, you barely need a jacket. The journalist Jeffrey Bernard, late of this parish, said a writer needed little more than a bed, a typewriter, and a corkscrew. But reason not the need etc. – my Beyerdynamic Pro headphones, chunky as they are, will be going with me.

There will be other things I’ll miss – I’ll resent not having access to a sandwich toaster or decent printer – but leaving all your possessions behind you gives life a certain pizzazz. Having at a formative age seen the French film Betty Blue – in which a spirited, sexy girl marches into a man’s life, torches his home and possessions and sets him free for rebirth – I’ve always half-dreamt of the same thing happening to me. Of course, I’m relieved it’s stayed a fantasy but storage spaces at least give you the chance to play with this idea in a low-risk, safety-netted way. You float free for a while and your belongings – sofa throws, the Roberts CD-Radio, the expensive Chelsea boots you never wear but cannot part with – wait placidly for your return. One of the surprises of living out of a suitcase is finding out how little of what you’ve left behind you actually miss or need – even if, sooner or later, you’re glad to be reunited.  Christ’s command to his followers to give up all their earthly possessions and follow him might have held more weight had he simply advised them to take out a space at the Big Yellow Storage down the road.  

Of course, what I can’t put in mothballs are my two cats. They’ll be accompanying me, along with some dry food, a litter tray and a bag of pet-litter. None of these can be bought quickly enough at the other end, and there are few things more pitiful than seeing your pets released from their carry case in a hotel room, only for them to find there’s food and a lavatory for everyone but them. Travelling with animals is harder than travelling with children – the feeding and watering, the documents, the stress of handing them over to strangers in uniform as freight. But getting them into Italy should be a cinch compared to bringing them back from Russia in 2022, just after war broke out – a bureaucratic nightmare that took several months, vicious vet-bills and nearly every type of transport along the way. But that of course is a separate tale – an international saga in itself – and one best kept in storage for another time.