LAUREN BRAVO: How bigs is this hatbox?

“Fixed rate mortgage”, “irritable bowel syndrome” and “making good time” on a car journey are among the ones in which I thankfully have yet to be initiated.

Ditto making people take their shoes off in your house (It’s a FLOOR, what did you think people were going to be doing on it?) and dismissing desserts as “too rich”, but there are plenty that I have begun to find myself caring about.

This month’s newly-grasped concept is “storage solution”. There was a time when it worked the other way round – I bought bits of furniture and attractive boxes and whatnot because I liked them, and then set about acquiring things to put in them. But not now. Now I feel like I’m in a crazed ’90s platform game, where I have to run around with a container trying to catch rapidly multiplying accoutrements as they fall from the sky and bury me. It was a defeating moment, on moving day, after I’d decanted everything that I could into my new room’s wardrobe and chest of drawers, to stand in a massive heap of tat and realise, like a dunce trying to solve a math’s equation, that I had too much stuff and not enough wood to house it.

So I needed storage solutions. A sensible person might have interpreted this as “buy some furniture” – go to Ikea, choose a sturdy receptacle, put things in it. Only in my head did this translate as, “buy a hatbox, an ornamental birdcage and a steamer trunk on eBay”.

“Um,” said my flatmate, looking at my pile of stuff. “How big is this hatbox?”

“Average hatbox size?”

“So… designed to hold one hat? One.”

“Well. Yes. But I expect it’ll be one of those Tardis hatboxes the Victorians were so famed for.”

The trouble with buying quaint antique nik-naks as storage solutions is they didn’t just need storage solutions in the olden days. You were either rich, in which case you had plenty of mahogany dressers and roll-top desks to house all of your Ming vases and Fabergé eggs, or you were poor in which case you were terribly chic and minimalist with no Ming vases or Fabergé eggs to speak of. Nobody back then, as far as I can tell, needed eight box files to store all the council tax bills and payslips they know they’re not meant to throw away but aren’t sure exactly why.

“What you need,” said my mum, “is a mess basket.” And, thus, I uncovered the secret weapon of every lazy homemaker. A mess basket is a massive, aesthetically-pleasing basket you fill with every ugly, awkwardly-shaped thing you own, then put a lid on and pretend it’s just decorative. Pandora’s box was, I’m pretty sure, actually just the mess basket to end all mess baskets.

And what a revelation it is. I’m a convert. There’s a danger I’m taking the concept a little too far, though – I’ve found myself looking round the rest of the flat and assessing every item as potential basket fodder. In fact, I’m basically looking a mess myself – would I not be better off in there, too, to avoid cluttering up the place? So, I will leave you, with the immortal words – if anybody wants me, I’ll be in my mess basket.