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).