ROSA LYSTER

Very tiny spaces have a special charm, writes ROSA LYSTER, but that doesn't mean you want to live in one permanently.

All that ORDER, that FORETHOUGHT, the sense of of things being where and ASTHEY SHOULDBE.

In Stranger on a Train, Jenny Diski’s extraordinary and uncategorisable book about, as the subtitle has it, “daydreaming and smoking around America with interruptions”, the author spends a lot of time squeezed up into a variety of small spaces: cubicles, ship’s cabins, sleeping compartments on trains, smoking sections, mobile homes, dining booths, etc. It’s not necessarily part of some wider plan she has, this business of wriggling into one cramped space after another, but rather an inevitable side-effect of sustained periods of transit. If you are going to travel by freighter ship from Hamburg to Tampa, and then all the way around the perimeter of the US by train, the chances are that you will spend a lot of time lying in a tiny bed for a mouse, or eating your dinner on a tiny fold-out tray with your tiny knife and fork, or pressing your back against the wall as one more smoker muscles his way into the hellish room designated for those outcasts who have not yet managed to pull themselves together and stop being addicted to cigarettes. Diski is a great fan of these sorts of spaces, as am I: she talks with passionate fondness about a sleeping compartment on a train that is “essentially a lofty coffin, an enclosure almost exactly the width of the bed with head room but no standing room”, and about the doll’s house-esque mobile home she spends a few days in, this “small, highly ordered, ship-shape living space, where everything could be done that needed to be done, life could be lived, but with not an inch of space to spare”. She gets a massive kick out of the whole thing, as I do just from reading about it. All that order, that forethought, the sense of things being where and as they should be. Lovely. My own experiences of being squeezed into tiny spaces are just as happy: a compartment on a train going from Varkala to Hampi, a night spent in the cabin of a creaking wooden sailboat in Southampton, a houseboat in Kerala. I have a great time in places like this, and part of what I love about them is that they allow me to entertain the totally implausible fantasy of myself as the kind of person who could live like that permanently. I am not that kind of person. I don’t need a lot of space – I have lived in smallish flats for the vast majority of my adult life, and find myself at a bit of a loss when given the run of an entire house. I do need some, though. Just a little bit of space where I can pile up my books, and leave my coat in a heap on a chair that does not have a particular purpose other than being a place to leave a coat. It would make me insane, having to put my shoes in the same place every single day at the risk of chaos being unleashed and the whole carefully planned ship-shape living space falling into madness. Impossible. Unsustainable for anything longer than a very long train journey. I understand, of course, that for literally billions of people around the world, living in a very small space is not a cute lifestyle choice, but the only option available. What I do not understand is the people who seek this out deliberately. Tiny bed, tiny table, tiny knife and fork. One spot for the shoes, one spot for the one dress that can fit into your one tiny wardrobe cubicle that doubles as a desk. Unthinkable. I cannot speak for Jenny Diski, but I feel sure that she would have agreed with me that one of the very best things about being squeezed into teeny-tiny spaces is the fact that you are able to leave them, at some point, and to return to the smallish flat you call your home, and throw your coat on the coat-throwing chair with a powerful sigh of relief.