Murder, rape, self-storage

In the case of a man who murdered a school teacher and stored her corpse in a unity he hired at a Big Yellow Self-Storage branch in Brighton, a court has handed down a sentence of life imprisonment. The victim's family are apparently demanding strict controls on porn sites after the revelation that the killer was obsessed by alleged snuff films and websites offering film of rape and strangulation. Without getting into the obvious cyber-freedom vs. censorship debate, I'll just say how weird it was back in 1999, when I moved to the south, to see for the first time these self storage firms. I had only read of this phenomenon before that, as a weird thing people did in Los Angeles. Since then, they have proliferated like weapons of mass destruction are meant to - huge robot sheds in Bright Friendly Colours next to motorways all over London and the South-East, with signs in insane sizes (We Sell Boxes, Tape and Bubble Wrap..). I always saw them as vaguely sinister, like blocks of flats for ghosts, and certainly fine places for crimes to be committed. Imagine my shock on seeing a Big Yellow shoot up in Leeds. Nowhere is safe, clearly.