I’m an unhappy shopaholic

When I was a child I had a dream, as most kids do, of entering a toyshop and being told I could carry away with me as much as would fit in a large shopping trolley. In would go every kind of Action Man, every game of Buckaroo or Operation, and enough Star Wars figurines to people a small planet. There would be no discriminating and no sense of moderation – just a great tottering tower of swag.

Later though, as I got into my thirties, I took a more spartan approach. I wished for a slimmed down, uncluttered life in which everything counted. Without necessarily knowing it, I agreed with William Morris’s adage: ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’ I gave things away and had regular dematerialisation sessions, in which clothes I never wore and books I never read would go straight to the charity shop, shops I half-felt should be charging me a fee for freeing up my shelf and floor space. I never wanted to be one of those people with an attic full of stuff I couldn’t let go of but would never look at or enjoy again. Besides, life kept me on a knife-edge of austerity and there was never enough money to buy the things I wanted.

But moving into my own flat recently (I haven’t been a homeowner since 1999, so it feels like it’s for the first time) the habits have changed overnight. After the flat purchase, I had just enough to equip and furnish it, and there was everything to be bought. My internet acquisitions over the past month (curtains, a cordless vacuum cleaner, tables, chairs, shelves, hooks, towels navy blue and burnt orange, bath mats, loo-roll dispensers, extension leads, rugs, a futon, an armchair, cat caves, Farrow and Ball paints, Dulux Undercoats, even a can-crusher for my fizzy drink habit – I could go on) now run into so many pages I’ve started to archive them just so I can locate the things that haven’t turned up.

This consumerist frenzy, novelty in the first days – I can finally design the bed of my dreams! – has revealed one thing. It hasn’t been nearly as much fun as I thought. On the plus side, I’ve wasted no money nor bought anything I didn’t need. Certainly, there have been mistakes – bits of dud self-assembly furniture, one of those lovely chrome Edwardian tap and shower arrangements which a plumber told me I’d need to demolish my bath-surround to install, and which had, with great regret, to be returned. The point, though, about waiting so long to buy a flat (I’m 54 and have been renting for decades) is that you have it pretty clear in your mind what you do and don’t like.

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But you can only press the ‘buy now’ button so many times in one day without starting to feel a kind of self-disgust, as though your internal ledger of earnings and rewards were getting way out of balance. Perhaps this is why rich people often look so glum. ‘You’re feeling flat and listless, poor fellow,’ a little djinn inside you says. ‘Go on – buy the bespoke cup-hooks on an oak plank and a blue blind for the attic window. Maybe that will make you feel better. You know you want to.’ You follow the djinn’s command, clicking the mouse with eyes only half-alive, and despite the royal blue of that window-blind, the world seems greyer than ever. You impose cold turkey periods of a few days on yourself where you’re not allowed to buy anything, and feel better, clearer inside. But once the holiday ends, you’re back to clicking away doggedly again. It’s a surplus of self-indulgence, a bit like having the heating on too high.

This is to say nothing of the house-arrest constant deliveries impose on you. I’m new in this area, and there are only so many times I can have parcels left with my neighbours before their welcoming smiles grow rictus or wan. Three times makes a tiger, say the Chinese, and after it happened on a couple of occasions I decided to sit tight. My longing to explore Shropshire (the unvisited Ludlow, in my fantasies, is beginning to seem like Las Vegas to a widow from the American Midwest, the hills of Clun like the Himalayas) has had to give way to the desire to establish my new presence discreetly in this village. To have too many deliveries is to announce your luck too loudly to the world. We all know where that ends.

In the end though, after weeks of knocks at the door (sometimes four or five times a day), after all that wrapping and packaging, you grow ever so slightly mutinous. The delivery men (and they are all men) are unfailingly pleasant – I know some of their Christian names now – but are a group of underpaid people trying to do a stressful job as efficiently and genially as possible. That said, I felt the unmistakable glee of someone outwitting a pursuer if I popped out for milk and got a note telling me they’d found me and my neighbours absent and would deliver another day. ‘You didn’t get me,’ I thought triumphantly. ‘Ha-bloody-ha!’ When you’re living under the tyranny of an eight-hour delivery slot, even running to Asda feels like the first day of parole.

In racing terms, I’m now moving into the home straight. There are some shelves to be put up, a bedroom to be painted, the odd picture to frame, and that’s about it. I’m grateful of course to have had this experience – chance is a fine thing for most people – and can’t imagine what it would have been like had I moved into this flat and not had the funds to furnish it. I’m equally glad it’s coming to an end. That the delivery men will soon forget this place ever existed and move on to better climes. I’m most glad of all that I can soon leave the house and finally walk the Shropshire Hills.

The irony is, I’ve so often envied people who can do this. Why weren’t they cartwheeling round the new house with their Habitat charge-cards and accounts at Farrow and Ball? Now I look at large properties in estate agents’ windows with a kind of horror. If doing up a one-bed flat has been this gruelling, what the hell’s it like furnishing a rectory? Reader, I no longer wish to find out.