‘Storage’ is very ‘now’ isn’t it. Everybody seems to be storing something and it’s obviously a boom business. There are all sorts of reasons for storing stuff, I suppose: you married fashionably late and neither of you can bear to throw away your precious stuff. You divorced and now you have to accommodate the crap accumulated over decades as a couple. You move house all the time and with each move you shed another skin of pointless possessions. Those giant sheds at motorway junctions labelled ‘self storage’ are actually melancholy graveyards of memories, of stuff abandoned and forgotten (and, I fantasise, thrillingly packed with contraband, alien artefacts and sacks of used fivers).
Anyway, we just emptied our storage unit in lovely Watford. Quite an exercise. So now we’re busy trying to reabsorb the thousands of inconsequential items we seem to need so badly even though we were able to do without them for years. Here’s a good one: three horrible blue shirts, still in the dry cleaner’s bags they were put in in 1989…