Project for an essay

Prompted this morning to think about our various kinds of possessions.

My starting point was the allegation that Germans do not, on the whole, buy their houses, being content to rent. And I have a memory that my maternal grandfather, for some part of the thirty or more years that he spent in Montreal, used to move every year.

Do such people, in consequence, tend to invest more in moveable property?

So us suburban types, in our own houses (neglecting that fact that they are usually part owned by the mortgage company for a good part of our lives), are apt to spend a lot of time and effort prettifying our houses, prettifications which we cannot take with us when we move and which are regularly being rubbed out in favour of new prettifications. All very wasteful from one point of view, but good at generating employment for white van men from another.

While inner city types in their rented apartments are much less apt for that sort of prettification. In so far as it gets done at all, that is down to the landlord. So perhaps instead they invest their dosh in fancy furniture or fancy appurtenances to dinner parties. Gypsies, we are told, invest a lot of dosh in fancy pots (preferably Crown Derby) and gold bling. Some West Indians are into gold bling too. But one way or another, we all seem to need to invest our environment with something of ourselves, a something which is reasonably permanent. Think of all the graffiti scratched into the stone walls of dungeons. How many people are there who are truly self sufficient, that would be comfortable if, on a regular basis, you moved them to an entirely new space, without previous possessions and without internet connection?

There is an element of this about going on holiday to a rented cottage, as we ourselves have done very recently. A whole new space to learn about, fit into and then leave, all in rather short order. A new space, on this particular occasion, without an internet connection, other than that provided occasionally by Cortana (see reference 1) and the telephone. Not the same thing at all.

Or is it more to do with personality. Some people like to invest in stuff while other people like to invest in other people, with the in-betweeners doing cats. So in the olden days, when most people could afford neither stuff nor pets, investing in nearby people was all that they had and exile amounted to death. Or did they invest in the soil which they tilled, year after year?

Then, changing tack slightly, there is the small number of people who like to have a complete change from time to time. To throw all their stuff out and start over, with changing partner and changing address being optional extras to such a project. Being prompted here by the memory of reading about a television personality of the arty variety explaining how it was all so refreshing and invigorating.

Is there a perpetual tension between the need to possess something permanent and the need to start over? With the balance struck between the two being a matter of personality?

At which point I set off for the car booter. From which you may attempt to deduce where I fit into this tension.

PS 1: half way down the ramp at St Margaret's at Cliffe, Cortana thought she had got to France. The lady in the tea shed at the bottom said that all the telephones were the same in that regard.

PS 2: in the foregoing there is the implicit suggestion that relations with people are higher status than relations with things. But on the way to the car booter, I remembered that for most of recorded history people could own and relate to people in much the same way as they owned and related to things. An odd business for which there is little evolutionary precedent, apart from the odd mammal which goes in for harems. And the odd ant which goes in for colonies of aphids.

PS 3: and on the way back from the car booter, the first sighting for some while, in the passage between the St. Ebba's and Longmead estates, of a wren.

Reference 1: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/mobile/experiences/campaign-cortana/.