I don’t have enough stuff in the house but I do have a storage unit off the M50

I’m worried I don’t have enough stuff. You sort of presume you do have enough stuff when you get to A Certain Age. But then you get new wardrobes and you fill them, worrying as you go that you haven’t included enough shelves and drawers — I drew the line at those unholy, holey wire racks as soon as I saw their nonsense in the showroom — and then you’re finished. And they’re only half full.

If I hadn’t recently borrowed a dress from The Best Friend for a do, this mightn’t seem like such a crisis. But in The Best Friend’s house, I’d noticed that all her long dresses were hanging in one of her son’s wardrobes because, she explained, all of hers were full to bursting and most of the other wardrobes in her big house are also coming down with her stuff. And now here I am with all my stuff put away and acres of empty shelves. If Marie Kondo were to come to my home to do her decluttering schtick, there’s every chance she would try to give me some of her own stuff, just to even things out a bit.

I’m not really sure how this has happened. I’ve never been a hoarder, so I probably set sentimental value at quite a high bar. When we moved into this house and lifted the kitchen floorboards, somebody who is not me found an old milk carton — probably belonged to the builders — and kept it because it didn’t have a barcode. I’d go so far as to say that if I were to list everything in the universe that it’s possible for a human being to do in the order I was likely to do it, keeping that milk carton might well have finished last on the list. But my lack of sentiment doesn’t end there. I know parents who have kept every scribble their children ever produced: we would long ago have had to move to another house if that had been the policy here. I cherry-picked from the preschool portfolios and at the end of every school year, when they brought their art and written work home, I went through it critically and only kept the best. Because, like, why sift through the substandard when you want to remind yourself in later years of unrealised suggestions of brilliance?

And of course, once life moved online, I didn’t see much point in keeping souvenirs of my own creative output either. I have a bag of letters and notebooks dating from my teens and 20s, and after that, pretty much nothing.

I have a programme and a poster from each of my plays — I’ll come back to those — but I didn’t keep the tattered, coffee stained rehearsal scripts because I have cleaner ones on my laptop and I have lovely memories of all of them that don’t require me fingering some gee-gaw or other in order to summon them up.

But in any event, the main stuff I don’t have isn’t of the personal memorabilia department. Just as I’m not a hoarder, I’ve never been much of a shopper either. Handbags bore me or shock me with their price tags, I have never browsed for shoes in my life, and since I rarely remember to wear jewellery, I don’t bother buying any. And I really only buy clothes when I need them — which isn’t very often as I work from home and live in tracksuit bottoms. To be honest, if I wasn’t so mean about turning on the central heating, I probably wouldn’t bother buying any clothes at all.

So what does the woman with empty wardrobes and no stuff to fill them get herself for Christmas? Yes, a small storage unit in a warehouse off the M50, obviously. Because those aforementioned theatre posters are framed and massive and have stared down at me for too long — and my one concession to collecting are the programmes of not just my own, but hundreds and hundreds of other plays and football matches that had nothing to do with me at all.

I put the programmes in my new wardrobe but they took up the whole top shelf and spilled over to appropriate the top shelf of the wardrobe of The Boy, who also has no stuff, as well.

So now I am paying for them to be stored somewhere else while I (and The Boy) have empty wardrobes in which I could store stuff for free, if only I had stuff to store.

In the absence of it, maybe I could just sublet my wardrobes to people with too much stuff.

I’m pretty sure that’s a microcosm of the free market right there.