Yesterday, after living in the same barely-furnished flat for nearly three years, I finally caved and bought an extra dining chair, two bedside tables and one coffee table. They don’t match, they’re as cheap as I could find from IKEA’s online store (the really cheap stuff demands a car and a personal visit) and I will happily leave them behind when I next move. Nevertheless, the decision to buy was one I agonised over for about a year.

I have issues with furniture. Every stick of furniture to me represents not merely something to sit on, lean against, eat off of or collect stuff in but something more than that: every table, every chair, ever chest of drawers is a weight around my neck, tying me more and more down to the same space. I think to myself “Perhaps what I need here is a TV unit”, and then am quietly aghast. Is this what it all comes down to now? Is that my life? Filling a flat with objects and then having to move to a larger flat because I have too many objects?

It may help to understand my stance by quoting from Breakfast at Tiffany’s:

“I don’t want to own anything until I know I’ve found the place where me and things belong together. I’m not quite sure where that is just yet.”
—Holly Golightly

Though I’m about as far away from Holly Golightly in spirit and manner as it’s possible to get before you start coming back, I do empathise with that statement. The buying of furniture is settling down and I don’t like thinking that I’ve settled down yet; certainly not where I am now in a rented flat with walls made of paper and no space for growing root vegetables or puppies or bees. I once had a panic attack buying a bathroom mat. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Is this it now, then? Is this where it all ends? Buying bathroom mats? I went to university and now here I am buying a bathroom mat?

I don’t want to have an emotional attachment to a nice sofa from Habitat or a lovely chest of drawers with a realistic sliding action from MUJI. I want to be able to appraise these bulky items in a second and have the appraisal always be “I don’t mind abandoning this”. The same thinking is what prevents me from spending the extra money on pots and pans from Le Crueset, and also what led to a friend forcibly buying me extra teaspoons after I’d stubbornly owned just two all my life, defeating her after she tried to stir her third cup of tea.

So I end up buying the cheapest, one-use bits of tat I can find, and if it stands up without wobbling and doesn’t spontaneously combust when I look at it then I think it’s doing its job admirably.

Moving, just keep moving

Moving house isn’t something I’ve ever done without parental supervision, but this year it finally sunk in: I’m in my thirties now and I ought to be able to move house like an adult and not a student. Last time I moved it was only about a five minute drive between houses but it took most of a day and four car trips and I don’t think I even had that much stuff, it’s just that one chair and an ironing board later and you’ve already filled that journey’s boot quota.

(I realise this means at some point I’ll have to rent a man with a van to do my heavy lifting for me but that’s unavoidable; I’ll just have to brush up a few bare facts about football and, I don’t know, Keeley Hawes or whoever’s on the front cover of Nuts these days.)

Throughout 2009 I’d been preparing to move. I had no actual plans to move but I thought that, in the face of the economic collapse of the Western world, it wouldn’t hurt to maybe get rid of a lot of the crap I’d been carting around with me to make an unexpected move a bit swifter and easier. So the games consoles, the Jaguar, the GameCube, the PS2, even my beloved Dreamcast — all gone now. Much as I liked having them around, they were eventually just ornaments, and any visitor that might have been impressed had already been impressed, so they’d served their purpose.

The DVDs: gone. From now on it’s digital-only for me, which mirrors what I’ve been doing with my music for years anyway. Books: pruned mercilessly and periodically. If it was a book I hadn’t enjoyed, it was an easy target for dismissal. If it was a book I’d enjoyed but didn’t think I’d read again, it was on its way out. These were all cheap, mass-market paperbacks anyway: it wasn’t as if I was chucking out rarities and first-editions, leather-bound, signed by the author and hand-rolled on the thighs of virgins – I was chucking out Everything is Illuminated and The Time Traveller’s Wife.

I had had no idea I had so much crap. It wasn’t even interesting crap, it was just bits and pieces, the detritus collected along the way from Canterbury to London via Oxford. Things that at one point in my life I must have wanted but couldn’t now imagine why. There are still a few dregs left, such as a bag full of candles — thick yellow church candles, that sort of thing — that I bought a literal decade ago and can’t get rid of because, you know, what if I needed them in a power cut? How many power cuts have I lived through in the last decade? I think maybe one, last year. Did I use the candles? No. I went to Pizza Express until the lights came back on. Ho hum.

I begrudgingly kept my GCSE and A-level certificates, though I don’t think they have any use any more — I can’t imagine many thirtysomethings get asked to prove they got a B in maths 15 years ago. I suppose if I ever suffer amnesia they’ll come in handy to remind me what I can and can’t do (English and Woodwork, respectively). There’s also a limited edition Blue Peter mug that I’m itching to put on ebay but haven’t quite got around to it yet. Its time will come though.

Justify yourself

So why three tables and a chair? Well, I’m having more than one guest at a time this new year and last year I had to perch on my sofa to eat dinner when there were three other people eating at the table, which felt absurd (though luckily that absurdity was superceded by the absurdity of having to eat my food with a spoon as I only found out at the last second that I owned three forks, not four). The bedside tables are now needed because the boxed espresso machine I’d been using had been sold on (I’m trying to ignore the fact that I’ve spent as much on bedside tables as I gained from selling the coffee maker) and the coffee table is because recently I’ve spilt one drink too many on the floor, having been forced to put my glass down by my feet.

So: three tables and one extra chair and no more than that. Everything in the flat must serve a purpose: anything else is a luxury.