Storage
[ Trigger Warning: Contains mention of politics ]
I came into the kitchen this morning to find that all of the seeds I carefully sowed last night have been tossed about by mice.
I was feeling particularly pleased with myself for being so organised, and for starting off another round of seeds to ensure the fulfilment of my planned annuals scheme. Mice - as has so often been the case since they moved in with me - have humbled me.
The trouble is - I thought - that there isn’t enough space in my tiny cold frame. Perhaps I need another.
I found my little, square cold frame at Wilstone two years ago. I adore it. Ever since I bought mine in June 2024 it has been sold out. Periodically I check in, always unsuccessfully… UNTIL NOW.
Imagine my surprise and delight just now when I typed ‘glass tent cloche’ into google and MY elusive little cloche was the first search result - now being stocked and sold by John Lewis!
Now, in the interim, the price has soared from the £165 I paid two years ago to £250 on Wilstone and to £265 on John Lewis! But, I must say, it still seems like a decent price for this invaluable bit of kit.
In addition to this considerable inflation there is also the awkward reality that even one of this lovely cloche is really too big for my London garden.
But I bought a second anyway. For storage.
Storage.
I haven’t actually arranged it yet, but I have identified a very well-priced storage facility near the Barn where I intent to store certain items with a view to one day having a bigger - or just a different - house.
This is silly, really. I have no immediately plans to sell and move. Who would want to in this market? The one-time ‘Leader of the Free World’ is now just a crazy old man threatening to wipe out whole, ancient civilisations overnight, the west’s oil supply is stuck behind a crypto-currency paywall, everything is shooting up in price and the crazy old man is so erratic and unstable that we’re all just clinging on for dear life.
Our fates are tied together, whether we like it or not. Whether we are one of the small number of Americans in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who make a substantive difference to Presidential elections results or not. Whether we would rather self-immolate than see such a man in a position of supreme, nuclear, unchecked, congressionally-sanctioned, Supreme Court-approved power or not.
I find it triggering. His actions with women - grabbing, forcing, raping - is exactly how he acts always. Violating the sovereignty of a woman’s body, and violating the sovereign borders of a nation state - these actions are all of a piece. Smashing down the East Wing of the White House, taking one of the most powerful countries in the world to war without the consent of congress, joking about violating women, grabbing them by the pussy, being BFFs with a prolific sex trafficker.
I cannot watch the footage of January 6 rioters smashing at the doors of the Capitol - smashing, pushing, heaving against the closed doors, refusing to be kept out, dominating, forcing - without feeling a primal sense of violation. A body. A body politic. Wheezing, unwell men, taking what they want - at gun point. Sick and entitled and mad. Determinedly ill-informed. Craving dominance, dominance, dominance.
I digress. What was I talking about? Oh, yes, the shitty global economy.
This shitty economy feels particularly unfair to me. After all, I graduate University into the Great Recession (it wasn’t great, it was terrible) and the Tory’s terrible, class-enforcing austerity measures, then Brexit (the single greatest act of financial self-harm ever committed, anywhere) then COVID, and now this shit show.
Will I ever know a period of financial prosperity? I fear not.
But now definitely is not the time to make big financial decisions. Selling my treasured home (and more importantly, garden) in London to move somewhere as yet identified will have to wait for a better time.
But I can have storage.
Storage has become - in my mind only - a magical place. A place where the sets and props for a different life wait in the wings. The Lorford loveseat I bought at auction for a song (meaning, as with every chair in my possession, to get it re-covered in nicer fabric. One day.), the precious armchair that has moved from my childhood home to my aunt and uncle’s home and now to me, covered in the profoundly ‘90s ‘Indian Summer’ fabric from Jane Churchill. It is horribly uncomfortable but that is so not the point.
Spare lamps and spare colliders, extra bins and plant pots and bedding and bowls and cutlery - and now a second cold frame - can all be kept in this magical place called storage where dreams are safely stowed away to be dusted off and enjoy when things are better.
There is a brilliant documentary about Iris Apfel, called ‘Iris’. It tells the story of this iconic woman, her beautiful marriage, and her life full of whimsical, colourful stuff.
The scene that has stuck in my mind since watching the film when it was released back in 2014 follows Iris from her Manhattan apartment to her ‘storage loft’ on Long Island. Over a lifetime of travelling, buying, collecting, shopping, acquiring, this magical chaos takes up a space the size of an aircraft hangar.
Aladdin’s Cave has got nothing - NOTHING - on Iris Apfel’s storage loft.
“Every piece has a memory”, she says. Twice a year she would travel to Europe for the auctions and estate sales, each time taking “at least a 40ft container”. She bought for clients who “didn’t want to have things that everyone else had”. But many, many treasures are piled up still in this long-neglected, towering, dusty paradise.
In the scene, aged 92, Iris is going through her vast collection, identifying pieces to be sold. “It wasn’t easy to part with these things… [but] frankly I could use a few more sheckles”.
She says: “My accountant said to me, 'just think of all the money you would have saved if you had done this years ago’. Well, but, I wasn’t ready.”
I am not ready to let go of my pink, floral covered Lorford loveseat. Nor of the dream of one day knowing where I should be, and putting my roots - and the roots of at least two dozen plum trees - down.
After my father died and we moved to live with my aunt and uncle, everything went into storage. Storage became a mythical place. A place we referred to for 15 years, not knowing whether this or that precious childhood item or piece of furniture would be found there.
Once we were all grown and living in homes of our own we finally went to storage. In fact it was not magical. It was a concrete lot somewhere outside Banbury. I remember it as a freezing cold day, the rain barely holding off.
As soon as we began to unpack things I could tell my older brother - who has never processed any of what he (we) experienced - wouldn’t cope. His way of dealing with difficult emotions is to not deal with them.
Things were throw on to piles to be sold, or thrown away. My distress was immense. Stop! No! I want to go through the piles of books! What could help me - after 15 years - know my parents better than knowing what they loved to read? I wanted to go through everything. I grabbed up some of Dad’s Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh novels - I knew he loved them. Books of my own from childhood went away. What other precious, irreplaceable memories were being written off as rubbish?
I will never know. In the end, there was (and is) no point arguing with my big brother. You might as well try to teach an elephant to roll over.
After 15 years of waiting, we ripped through the accumulated lives of our parents in a single afternoon. The indignity of their precious things scattered around. Thier lives - their tangible lives - given no value.
I didn’t say anything then, and I don’t have regrets. After all, what does it matter? It is only their stuff. It makes no material difference to me not to know what was lost. I have my mother’s incredible hair, and my father’s eyes. I have my precious memories of them, and that is the only really important thing.
The only things I still wonder about were three bronze sculptures of ballet dancers that my father bought - one of his first big purchases after selling his company. They were never found.
But my storage room will be like a Room of Requirements. A hidden room where the things I might need one day to furnish a rural life can wait in the wings. A padlocked place of promise.
Or, like Iris, perhaps I am just not ready to let go of them yet. Perhaps my accountant will say ‘think of the money you could have saved’ as a monthly storage payment drips out of my account, keeping alive some idea, some stuff, some desire, some future self, some imagined time of prosperity and plum trees.
Brilliant, as ever Lucy, on the politics of home & abroad xx
It’s probably a silly question but can the London home not be rented out for a while to give you some more time for rural adventures? I’ve so enjoyed reading your writing on Substack - it feels so honest, interesting and moving - and I’m just really hoping that something good comes along for you.