Everything I Own Now Rents Itself Back to Me Monthly
It was raining the kind of rain that has opinions — flat, grey, persistent, the sort that makes you feel personally addressed by the weather — when I decided, at half past eight on a Tuesday that had no business demanding anything of me, to print off three months of bank statements and find out where my money was actually going.
I had a red pen.
I want that on record.
I did not go into this lightly.
A man doesn't reach for a red pen unless he's prepared for what the red pen might reveal.
What the red pen revealed, over the course of a pot of tea that went cold twice because I kept getting up to check something on my phone, was that I own almost nothing any more.
Not in the dramatic sense — nobody's repossessing the house, calm down — but in the smaller, stranger sense that most of what I use every day, I don't actually possess.
I rent it back to myself, monthly, in instalments so modest that individually none of them ever felt worth questioning.
Which is, I suspect, rather the point.
I circled the first one almost fondly.
Photo storage — some cloud service I signed up for years ago in a fit of responsible grandfatherly foresight, so that pictures of family occasions wouldn't vanish if my laptop ever fell in the harbour. Fine. Sensible. Except I sat there doing the arithmetic and realised the photographs are mine — I took them, on my phone, of things that happened to me — and yet I am paying a company in California a monthly fee for the privilege of being allowed to look at them.
If I stop paying, I don't lose access gradually or get a polite warning. I just lose them. My own memories, on a lease, with a landlord who can raise the rent whenever he fancies.
Next to that, a crossword app. I want to defend this one and I can't, not really, because I already own several actual books of crosswords, printed on actual paper, which I bought with actual money and which will still exist in a fire, a flood, or the heat death of the universe. And yet here I am, paying £4.99 a month for a version that lives inside a rectangle of glass and occasionally interrupts my Tuesday with a notification telling me I've broken my "streak," as though I've personally let down a small anxious digital creature that lives in my pocket and needs me more than it's willing to say.
Then a recipe website — I couldn't for the life of me picture what I'd used it for until I remembered a fish pie in April, a single fish pie, for which I have been paying £3.99 a month ever since, quietly, like a standing order to a restaurant I visited once and never went back to but still somehow owe loyalty payments to.
Then the music streaming, which I use every single day and have no complaints about whatsoever — that one I circled and then, immediately, uncircled, because some subscriptions earn their keep and this is one of them. Ten pounds ninety-nine for what feels, genuinely, like an entire orchestra on permanent standby. I'm not made of stone.
And then there was the one that made me put the red pen down and just look at it for a while.
A mattress subscription. Not a mattress — I already have a mattress, I sleep on it, it's a perfectly good mattress — but a subscription, £24.99 a month, attached to a mattress I apparently signed up to lease rather than buy, at some point I genuinely cannot reconstruct, for reasons that have entirely evaporated.
I've started calling it Chelsea.
In my head, obviously — I'm not going round introducing people to my mattress — but somewhere between the third statement and the fourth, it stopped being a line item and became a presence. A lodger I never agreed to take on, who costs more than the crossword and the fish pie website combined, and who I have, if I'm honest, developed a sort of grudging affection for, the way you do for a cat that isn't yours but keeps turning up.
I added the whole lot up twice because the first total seemed implausible.
Eighty-one pounds and forty pence a month.
Not catastrophic.
Not the kind of figure that changes a life. But the kind of figure that, multiplied by twelve, multiplied by however many years I've been quietly not-owning things, amounts to a small, steady, entirely voluntary erosion — the financial equivalent of damp getting into a wall you never check because it's behind the wardrobe.
Paying subscribers get the rest: what Chelsea actually turned out to be, the number that very nearly had me spraying tea across my own kitchen table, and what thirty years at sea taught me about owning nothing that only just occurred to me applies here too.
Subscribe if you want the whole of it. — this is the part you shouldn’t miss.⬇️
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