The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations Read Online Free Page A

to a hotel is like bringing your own salt to a restaurant.
    To make things even more interesting, and probably partly to send Kate further into meltdown, I’d decided that my cushions wouldn’t be the only thing I was leaving behind in London.
    My original plan had been to pack as much of my life as possible into a suitcase, and then to put all of my other possessions into storage for a year. I may not have been as attached to my stuff as Kate was to hers, but I still wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to get rid of it forever.
    Keeping at least my furniture in storage meant I could pick up my life from where I left off when I got back.
    Another hour of Internet research, though, showed me that even
the cheapest storage company in London wanted £100 a month in rental fees—$200 straight off my hotel budget, to rent a tiny little metal apartment for all of my possessions to live in while I was away. 8 It was at that point I determined that, if a ridiculous adventure is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.
    Heading back to the Internet—honestly, what did we do without it? 9 —I fired up the East Dulwich Forum, a site where people in my part of South London could sell their unwanted possessions. With my laptop balanced on one arm, I walked around my apartment listing everything in sight: my bed, my DVD collection, my sofa, my plates, even the contents of my kitchen drawers. “Spatula—hardly used—quick sale essential—no reasonable offer refused.”
    On hearing this, as I’d hoped, Kate lost her mind.
    “You can’t sell all of your stuff!” she screeched. “What about all of your books? And you’ve got those lovely brown suede cushions. You can’t sell them!”
    “I’m going to give the books to charity,” I replied. “You can have the cushions if you like.”
    “Really? OK!”
    Girls really like owning cushions.
    In the days that followed, half of South London came to my apartment. They came in cars, and vans and even bicycles. My sofa went to a man called Peter who had been kicked out by his wife and was starting again from scratch.
    “I’ll be needing a sturdy sofa for all the women I’m going to be bringing back,” he said, in no way creepily.
    My DVD collection—about a hundred discs that I never watched—went to a woman from some kind of local youth group who was hoping
they’d “keep the kids out of trouble,” in the way that only A Clockwork Orange and If … really can.
    It doesn’t matter how unattached you are to “stuff,” watching strangers coming and going, each visit leaving your apartment slightly more bare than before, is a freaky experience. Like being burgled in slow motion, in exchange for money.
    Less than a week after posting my first ad, all I had left was a sleeping bag, a couple of pillows, my clothes, a small pile of personal bits and pieces that I was planning on taking with me, a flat screen television and my guitar. The guitar and the television were the last—and the most heart-warming—things to go. During my first year at university I’d decided that I was going to learn to play the guitar in order to impress girls. I chose the most expensive guitar I could afford—a Fender Stratocaster—on the flawed justification that, having spent so much money on the damned thing, I’d have to learn to play it.
    Of course I never did. Instead, I carried it from house to house for almost a decade, never once so much as connecting it to the amplifier. It was the most expensive hat stand I’ve ever owned; not least because I don’t own a single hat. 10
    And then, less than a week before I was due to move out, a fifteen-year-old kid called Stuart turned up at my apartment. He’d brought his mom with him because—it soon became clear—he couldn’t understand why some guy would sell a Fender Stratocaster guitar and amp for fifty quid, and so assumed the advert was a trap.
    Still, after listening to my ridiculous explanation of why I had to get rid of everything I