How do you achieve a cashless society? Start hoarding

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/26/geoff-dyer-cashless-society-start-hoarding

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A distinct and intense pleasure: to need something and know that some time in the past you squirrelled away exactly such a thing with the thought in mind that it might one day come in handy. But what a horrible frustration to know that you did this and then be unable to remember where the thing in question was stashed.

What the thing is – big, valuable, small or cheap – doesn’t matter. To buy a book of stamps and use one every time you need to send a letter is a satisfaction so routine as to barely register – until you find that your spouse has used the last stamp so that you have to go to the post office.

A pleasing side-effect of taking long-haul flights is the chance to add to my already impressive collection of eye masks and toothbrushes. So if a friend comes to dinner and decides he’s had too much to drink and can’t face the journey home I can offer not just a sofa for the night but a Virgin toothbrush. That’s hospitality on the grand scale. Eye masks are essential if you’re camping during the short nights of summer, as I did last weekend. But where were they? I spent an hour rummaging in the obvious places, including a box of S&M accessories, but the eye masks had hidden themselves from sight: a severe if petty kind of misery. But is pettiness ever anything other than a source of misery? Yes: when you know exactly where you put your camping torch.

I inherited this rainy-day tendency from my parents. My father was a great hoarder, of things and cash. My mother had her own stash of money that she kept secret from my father, hidden under the carpet in the corner of the bedroom. Every time I visited she would ask me to help myself to £20 from it. I loved seeing those £10 and £20 notes in the manila envelope that passed for a safe. So when she died it was terrible to find that it was gone. Clearly one of the nurses or carers had stolen it. That was the only possible explanation. Until it turned out that my dad, in spite of being almost totally blind, had somehow discovered this domestic treasure of the Sierra Madre, had excavated it in case anyone else got their hands on it – and added it to his stash, the location of which he revealed to me only on his deathbed.

Cash has obvious and immediate utility. You take it to shops in exchange for goods and services. But can you truly be said to hoard it? In a sense no, because the purpose of hoarding is to try to do away with the need for cash, to build a refuge from the claims of the transactional and achieve, ideally, a state of self-sufficiency.

Having to buy something because you can’t remember where you stashed that thing is therefore a kind of double nullification. You hoard things which will be useful even when cash has become worthless. The bleakness of the world through which father and son trudge in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road enhances the joy of their discovering a stash of life-saving essentials that someone diligently laid in store.

On the rare occasions when my father discarded a piece of electrical equipment – or, more accurately, came across a piece of equipment thrown out by a neighbour – he would cut off the lead and plug. From these he would make extension leads. Useless in McCarthy’s electricity-less world, an extension lead is a marvellous thing to have in the pre-apocalyptic present.

I took the longest of these leads – made from 20 feet of dirty-looking industrial cable – and stored it in a cupboard in the hallway of our building. Of limited aesthetic appeal its utility was, I am tempted to say, measureless. Hitherto unreachable, the middle flight of stairs in the common parts suddenly became accessible to hoovering. And then it went missing. I emailed people in the other flats but it had gone. And with it, by extension, an umbilical connection to my dad and the frugal habits ingrained in him from the 1930s.

My own hoarding is informed by a culture of consumption rather than homespun production. Several years ago I laid in three pairs of vintage Emerica Reynolds 3 skateboarding shoes. I’ve got just one pair left now and they are, so to speak, on their last legs. Why didn’t I buy 10 pairs? Because tastes and fashion change. All very well to load up with multiple pairs of your favourite jeans. But what if waistbands suddenly climb higher again, as happens in the not-so-distant future of Spike Jonze’s Her? You never know when something might come in handy. But you never know when an item of timeless value might suddenly acquire a stylistic sell-by date.

My parents’ house was stuffed full of stuff. After they died I skimmed off all the best things including multiple boxes of staples. Whatever uncertainties life holds the Earth will run out of paper before I have to buy another staple. Even after I’d taken my pick there was still a ton of stuff left so it was disappointing to hear the house-clearance guy quote a figure of just 300 quid for everything.

I thought it might be more than that, I whined, after a pause. After a longer pause he explained that I had misunderstood: that was what he would charge me. The whirring in the background, I realised, was not just the washing machine; it was my dad spinning in his grave. Eventually another house clearer offered to pay me something. I was in profit. Briefly. Then, when the house was being sold, the buyer’s solicitor raised an outstanding issue. In the garage were sheets of corrugated asbestos sheeting which the clearer had been unable to touch. Years earlier someone must have offered these to my dad who had dutifully stashed them in the dim hope that they might one day come in handy. (To ask “for what?” is to miss the point – of life – entirely.) It cost £800 to have them safely removed.

Granted, the asbestos was a disastrous investment by any standards. But yesterday, when I needed a padlock (to secure a storage unit, naturally) and knew exactly where I’d put one four years previously – well, that resulted in a highly emotional reunion. I could almost feel this insensate object declaring, with a kind of dumb loyalty, “You remembered me!”

The longer an item spends in the jail of hibernation the greater the joy occasioned by its eventual exhumation and release. It’s a homely equivalent of the bliss the pharaohs must have felt when they woke up in their golden tombs to discover that they had everything they would ever need for a comfortable afterlife.

Geoff Dyer’s new book Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? will be published next spring by Canongate