There’s nothing so exciting as someone else’s storage unit. And nothing so deadening as your own. The boxes and items of furniture you sensibly stack and squeeze into gaps seem inert and harmless enough when you put them there, swaddled with cardboard and brown tape and bubble wrap. But each box is a problem delayed, something to be solved, so that when you open the unit in six months time you are presented with a concentrated dose of potential, memories, trauma and bafflement. I’ve been having adventures in storage. In the space of four days I helped shift three people’s stuff in multiple trips between storage units in Sutton, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. I have seen storage.
The first lot was my own. When I moved from South London to Milton Keynes 18 months ago I needed somewhere to stick my things, because like a snake digesting a rabbit it was going to take a long time to break these items down to fit into my partner’s house. So I ended up with a massive shipping container on a farm on the outskirts of MK. What had looked like a lot of stuff in my flat before we loaded it into the van now sat meekly up one end of a space that was almost as big as the flat I had left. I’d never had storage before, and so wasn’t sure what to expect. When I started looking I hadn’t anticipated my things would end up in a shipping container on a farm near Bottledump Roundabout. I don’t know what I though was going to happen to them, both when I stored them, or when I took them out.
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