I have been sucked in by a Certain Homewares Store and its vacuum bags

Like all great love affairs, it grew from an inauspicious seed. An email from a production company suggested that because there wasn’t sufficient room outside their studio, I might consider parking around the corner outside a Certain Homewares Store instead. If I was writing a screenplay about this beautiful affair — and maybe one day I will — at this point, I’d write Roll Opening Credits.

I was aware of the Certain Homewares Store largely because of the slightly threatening tone of its adverts. I even wrote a radio sketch lampooning those ubiquitous ads a couple of years back (now that I think about it, I haven’t heard one of their ads for a while. I wonder if they’re gone or really gone.) But I’d never set foot inside one of their branches because I don’t like shopping, I don’t like shops, and I don’t like stuff.

But I had arrived 20 minutes early for the script read and with so much time to kill, it seemed churlish not to darken the doors of the Certain Homewares Store. Ten minutes later, I was trotting back towards that door in search of a basket. So much stuff I didn’t need! So many gadgets I didn’t know existed! It was like Ikea but without the marital disharmony!

I can’t accurately remember now what I bought that first day — even though it was only a few weeks ago — because what happened next rendered pretty much everything that has happened in my life prior to that point meaningless. But I think there may have been a fat candle in there. And then I saw them (in the screenplay, I’ll be writing ‘cue swirling strings’ here): the vacuum storage bags.

In my life before vacuum storage bags — if you can even call it a life — here’s what I knew about vacuum storage bags. My sister’s friend, whose home is reputedly the tidiest on the planet, swears by them. Vogue Williams, also something of a neat freak, sometimes tries to persuade her podcast partner and general hot mess Joanne McNally of their merit. And now here they were, in real life, right in front of me.

I may not have much stuff but it is impossible to rear three children to adulthood without at some point accruing spare duvets. I have a few of them and lately I’ve been giving them the stink eye every time I try to stuff clean bedclothes around their bulk in the hot press.

You can’t fold them and although they can be rolled up, they don’t stay rolled up and at a time when the population of my household is declining, they are taking up way more room than they merit. Charities won’t take them and although I could throw them out, I have a horror of dumping anything that isn’t technically a biohazard.

All of this was going through my mind as I tentatively added a large vacuum storage bag to my basket of other stuff of no importance any more. And later that afternoon, my world changed forever.

Oh I won’t pretend it’s all wine and roses. Stuffing the duvets into the bag in the first place was a pain in the hoop and closing it was much trickier than the diagram on the packet suggested. But as soon as I attached the hoover and pressed the on button, oh, it was so worth the pain. Reader, it was exquisite. It was so pleasurable that I immediately opened the bag again just so that I could remove the air once more, this time with a small and — I’m not going to lie — disappointingly underwhelmed invited audience.

A week later I bought three more bags and last week I bought one that has a hanger inside the bag. I have vacuum packed all the duvets, a stupid amount of spare pillows, my wedding dress (complete with the mud still on the hem), my summer clothes and all the coats nobody ever wears. I am thinking of buying more stuff, just so I can vacuum pack it. It is only a matter of time before I vacuum pack one of my children or the cat.

My hot press no longer resembles an argument in Mattress Mick’s — now, it looks like a bed linen library in which you can actually leaf through the contents.

Sometimes I open its door just so I can gaze on all the sucked in plastic while I try to remember why I went upstairs in the first place. I look at my handiwork and wonder what further vacuum packing adventures await me.

Under the circumstances, I am considering taking early retirement. Somebody please help me, I am going mad.