STUFF JAIL

I’m not really coping with the world today. I think it’s because everything’s still in motion and we’re living out of suitcases.

We’re going to to have to go to the storage unit later to get a kettle.

That’s always a disconcerting trip: it’s like visiting your own possessions in prison. Stuff Jail!

There are complicated codes in Stuff Jail: big clanking shutters, sliding electronic doors, padlocked cells. And I always walk through those echoing corridors with squeaky trainers. It’s ‘left, right, straight, right, left’ to get to where my things have been locked up. Cell after cell of quietly incarcerated possessions.

And then you unbolt your padlock and squeal open the cell door to reveal… well, in our case, our entire flat - all higgledy-piggledy as though everything’s sort of in the wrong place - the Fancy Samsung, the upside-down coffee table, the bed in bits at the back, packed in with towers of cardboard boxes. The wardrobe peeps a mournful corner over plastic crates, topped with a bongo drum, and the bags and bags of hastily packed papers and clothes and electricals are stuffed around everything like packing.

‘We shouldn’t be here!’ they all seem to cry together. ‘We ain’t done nothing wrong! How come the kettle gets freedom?’

Anyway, I guess we’ll clank it shut and bolt the padlock on our way out of Stuff Jail, then take the kettle home for a cup of tea… and hope it hasn’t been institutionalised by its time in the clink.

I don’t much like being so unsettled. This houseless interlude is making me feel emotionally unstable and I’m going to need to dig deep to get some strength over these next few weeks. In a way, the occupants of Stuff Jail have it a little easier; all they have to do is sit in the dark and wait for their parole to come through.