‘How did I get here?’ I think dazedly. I am sitting in the Big Yellow Self Storage in Balham being interviewed, there is no other word for it. The person interviewing me is a relentlessly cheerful girl who wants to know everything, there is no other word for it, about me before she rents me a storeroom. But not only that, she wants to know everything about something she is ominously calling ‘my storage needs’.
As I deliberate on the prices and options, she announces: ‘This is about making sure it’s the right decision for yourself.’
I want to store a piano for a month. I’m not choosing a pension plan. But I don’t say this. I just sit there thinking the world has gone mad and I wish I could get out of it all somehow.
I wish I didn’t have to witness this girl’s enthusiasm for storage, or storage solutions as she calls it. Her thoroughness is so exhausting that, after ten minutes, I feel I am being crushed by the very idea of extra space. And what does self-storage mean? I’m not going to store myself. I start sweating.
The girl smiles with her head on one side, leaving me in no doubt that she knows I’m in a mess. No one comes through the doors of the Big Yellow in Balham without being driven to it by chaos and despair, but we change all that, her face says. Do you? Do you really?
I find myself explaining that I am trying to sell my house but it’s not shifting, and I want to buy this cottage in the country, so I’ve changed agents, and the new agent says de-clutter, move the piano — in fact, he called it the keyboard, which only underlines the reasons why it will have to go — and all the books.
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