Hoarding doesn’t pay

Toby Young’s Status Anxiety

I’m a pack rat. I can’t bring myself to throw anything away. When Caroline first moved in with me she couldn’t get from one end of our bedroom to the other because every inch of floor space was taken up with piles of old newspapers and magazines. I have lock-ups full of stuff, some of them in New York. At one point, I asked a friend if I could use the space under his stairs to store a cache of second-hand coats I’d bought at a jumble sale. When I wanted to retrieve one five years later, he gave me a blank look and told me he’d moved two years earlier. I haven’t spoken to him since.

Our present house is blessed with two large attics — or ‘storage spaces’, as I prefer to call them. (It was one of the reasons I bought it.) As you can imagine, they are stuffed to the gills with junk and a couple of weeks ago Caroline announced that she wanted me to clear one of them out so the children could use it as a ‘den’.

‘But what shall I do with all my stuff?’

‘Throw it away,’ she said.

‘Are you mad? There are heirlooms up there — some of them worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.’

‘In that case, why not sell them?’

With great reluctance, I agreed to a car boot sale and on Sunday we drove to a playground in Battersea and I set out my wares. Pride of place was given to an antique lamp that I’d inherited from my maternal grandmother.

‘’Ow much d’you want for that?’ asked a middle-aged man in a sheepskin coat.