A house is just a suitcase

I’m in the long-ish process of selling off all my music kit. The big things are easy to be rid of, the mixer, the audio interface, speakers, synthesisers, sound modules.

Some guy in Oakwood is enjoying those now.

Anyway, yesterday I opened a drawer and found a bunch of things I forgot I had:

• A charger for a phone that no longer exists.
• A paperback copy of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.
• A few old train tickets from Seville.
• A print out of a guitar tab I was learning over covid.
• A couple of letters written to me by various people.

We tend to speak about buying a house as though we’ve finally arrived somewhere permanent. “Getting on the property ladder.” “Putting down roots.” The kind of language that suggests we’ve reached the end of one journey, ready to start another.

I don’t think that’s always true. Sometimes I feel this strong urge to throw everything out, except perhaps my cameras, a guitar and a few records. My house feels a bit like a suitcase, full of stuff I’ve forgotten about, I guess I’ll eventually have to unpack.

When I travel, I become much more decisive. I’ve got this Patagonia top-loader backpack my sister bought me. It holds an ungodly amount of stuff, but crucially, not everything. It forces a kind of honesty and that is freeing. Two jumpers? Probably unnecessary. That book can wait, I’ll bring the short stories, and take just the point-and-shoot this time.

Houses allow a different kind of thing. Drawers are annoyingly infinitely patient, they forgive my indecisions. They feel a bit like museums for intentions and memories we forgot we ever had. I guess the backpack forces you to keep on deciding what’s worth carrying, and the house lets you put off those decisions for another time.

Maybe that’s why coming back from travelling often feels so strange and disorienting for a while. You come home, flop the bag onto the bed, lie next to it and kind of melancholically discover you’ve been living perfectly happily from a fraction of what you own back at home.

I’m not making a basic argument for minimalism by the way. Some of the homeliest houses I’ve visited have books piled on every surface, records balanced in impossible towers, old posters slipped into the corners of mirrors. Specifically, a favourite of mine, a 101 dalmatians mug that somehow survived years and years all while having a crack in the handle. I love it, even though I personally like my records orderly and photographs positioned neatly on the pin-board on the wall.

None of that feels excessive to me. What feels excessive is forgetting that the container isn’t the thing that matters. Really, it’s what you keep, and what you get rid of, that’s what matters.

My parents are buying a new house, hopefully that will go through this year. I have a really distinct memory of their airing cupboard from when I was a kid, maybe when I was 4 or 5. I’d stare up at the top shelf and wonder what was up there, and I remember how it smelled of fresh laundry, and the faint heat of the water-boiler keeping the clothes dry.

I should probably photograph it before they go.

I remember a break-up I had years ago and I deleted so much stuff from my phone, and threw out a bunch of stuff, I got rid of call records, texts, lists, and letters, a couple plants and even a fridge magnet. But I wouldn’t dare delete the photos.

A photograph is such an odd object. It’s simultaneously another possession to add to the pile, and an escape from possession. Instead of owning the chair by the window, you own a sense of the afternoon. Instead of keeping the house, you keep the light that fell through its windows. In that sense, it’s kind of a far lighter way to remember than stuff is.

One day, somebody else will have my house. They’ll paint over the walls and wonder why on earth anyone put a bookshelf there. They’ll pull forgotten things out from under the floorboards and invent stories about the people who left them behind.

And they’ll be right to. We just get to borrow a space for a little while, fill it with people we love, make a few meals, argue about nothing, laugh far too loudly, and then hand the empty suitcase on to the next traveller.

Maybe I’ll leave them a photobook so they can see what it looked like before they go on and fill it with their lives.