It’s time to move house again, a depressingly familiar occurrence these days in London. Seems to happen about once a year now. Friends are getting married, having children, leaving the city or just earning more money. No one I know seems to want or need a lodger any more. So you get the tap on the shoulder and a month to pack up your things. Degrading, really, but always perfectly civil. Life moves on. What other choice is there?
I was woken up this week by the estate agent who is selling my friend’s flat. He had a viewing in five minutes, hardly enough time to get dressed and make the bed. I took a cup of tea out onto the street so the flat was empty for the woman who might want to buy it and he smiled at me as I passed. “Nice to get some fresh air.”
I leaned against the low wall and watched the neighbour charging his electric car. “Any luck?” I asked the estate agent 15 minutes later. “No, second bedroom too small for her.”
I’m downsizing this time, from a ground floor flat in Balham to a one-bed in Finsbury Park. I seem to collect London postcodes like cigarette cards. Battersea, Lewisham, Morden, South Woodford, Tooting, Clapham North. All briefly home. I remember someone telling me that Army wives, always on the move, say that once the sheets are on and the pictures up, anywhere can feel like home. But there isn’t a barracks above Paddy Power in Catford.
It’s boring having to load and unload your life this often. Hard to shake a feeling of failure when you’ve shoved the same duvet into a black bin bag a dozen times before your 36th birthday. My mother helped me move last time and there was a stain on the mattress when I took the sheets off. I told her, truthfully, that it was there when I arrived.
There’s no order to moving house in London. Not enough stuff to hire a van, too much for a single bag. So someone offers you their car for the afternoon – coat hangers and house plants tangle up on the back seat. It’s always a mess and never gets any easier.
So this time I’ve decided to get rid of stuff before the move. Sell it all. I signed up to an app called Vinted, where you can flog old clothes. I offer up some shirts, a pullover from Gap and a suede jacket with a leather collar, bought from Save the Children but never worn, at least not by me. It’s supposed to be a chance to have a clear out and make some extra money. But neither of those things has happened. Everything must go, but nothing actually sells.
Is anyone making money? I look at what other people are selling and discover a website that highlights some of the more bizarre listings. One woman is trying to sell the documents folder from her Renault. She has described it as a “vintage French clutch bag”. Yours for seven quid.
Eventually someone offers me a fiver for an old Pringle jumper. It’s from the Nick Faldo collection and the moth has got at the cuffs and collar but a woman in Stockport wants it regardless. So I pack it up, print off a postage label and head to the nearest drop-off point, by the trolley rack outside Sainsbury’s.
There is a network of these places in every town and city, unnoticed by anyone who isn’t selling old clothes. Massive grey metal depositaries, split up into little lockers and hidden behind supermarkets and dry cleaners or round the back of Londis. You scan your parcel and leave it in a locker. Someone then picks it up late at night and drives it to a warehouse for sorting.
It’s raining and I walk to four locations, guided by another app, InPost. All the lockers are full – you soon discover they always are – so now I’m on a bus to another part of town where the app tells me there might be space. The return journey will cost more than a fiver but if I don’t send this jumper, I’ll get a bad rating.
I meet a woman there, standing outside Tesco. She is also holding a parcel; no room for hers either. “This is pointless, isn’t it,” she says. It is. And so the Pringle jumper comes home with me again.
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