Deep down, there's a hoarder in every one of us

Hoarding tempts us all, whether as a luxurious, expensive and discriminating habit or merely rubbish-storing. Photo / iStock

We all have psychological reasons for hanging on to objects, and decluttering brings a host of emotions

Aerial photos, a horribly modern invasion, show Michael Legg of Stoke-sub-Hamdon as a less-than -ideal neighbour. His front and back gardens are full of the domestic fittings in which he used to trade: jumbled windows, doors, bits of cupboard. It is unsightly, maybe hazardous, making parts of the property inaccessible.

But it is Mr Legg's home, and four centuries ago, in The Institutes of the Laws of England, Sir Edward Coke defined a precious principle: "A man's house is his castle, and each man's home his safest refuge."

So when South Somerset council attempted an enforcement order because the owner's trading licence had expired, the planning inspector ruefully quashed it, since it isn't a business, and the householder is merely "a hoarder". He hoped - as all must - that something can be done for welfare reasons. But for now, the clutter stays.

Hoarding stories generally emerge when environmental health officers move in on grounds of safety (it helps their case if there is a smell or rats). Few can forget the moving documentary about Edmund Trebus, the Polish octogenarian whose London home was finally cleared when his living area was reduced to a tiny cavern on the ground floor.

We shudder at darker stories, such as this year's revelation of a San Francisco woman living in piles of junk beneath which lay the long-mummified body of her mother.

Children have been moved into care from crazily crammed homes; neighbours driven to distraction by some threatening accumulation and the defensive reclusiveness that often goes with it. Whether with secret shame or angry defiance, the hoarder feeds a desperate need not to let go of anything.

The stories always fascinate more deeply than any mere eccentricity. Extreme hoarding is a recognised psychological disorder, and, like most disorders, it finds a fainter echo in each of us. We may not creep towards a chaotic bed through tunnels of old newspapers and magazines, shoes, rags, useless utensils and broken appliances, empty plastic bottles and long-buried furniture. But who has not hung on too long to some accumulation? What house move, what wardrobe turnout has not revealed the edges of this compulsion?

The periodical modern mania for minimalism and "decluttering" probably acknowledges how much we fear it creeping up on us.

There are women who won't get rid of never-worn clothes and compulsively buy shoes they don't wear; men's sheds made smaller by tottering heaps of hobby magazines and sports equipment; teenage bedrooms awash with souvenir T-shirts and festival wristbands.

I have even visited donnish academic houses where only a zig-zag path between heaps of books and papers leads the owner to the favourite reading chair. (John Bayley famously wrote how he and Iris Murdoch once lost a very good pork pie in their living room, and never ever found it again beneath the literary detritus.)

We moved a month ago to a smaller house with less storage, and thought we had got rid of a lot of accumulated family possessions, our own and my parents'. But the boxes kept on coming, and this week's expeditions to still more charity shops and the council tip will wrench the heart - until there comes the cathartic moment of relief, clarity and space.

If something declares itself a "collection" but is not organised or listed, it may well be hoarding in disguise. At university, I had a fine assortment of several hundred beer mats, and it really hurt to let them go: I claimed they were important "ephemera" for future historians, but I lied.

Hoarding tempts us all, whether as a luxurious, expensive and discriminating habit or merely rubbish-storing.

It would be easy to excoriate it as a symptom of Western excessive materialism, except that many hoarders - like Mr Trebus - experienced wartime privations, then widowhood.

The hunter-gatherer compulsion for particular objects can meet a regret or ambition, too: Mr Legg used to trade, and now still wants to accumulate doors; my late mother-in-law sent off for bargain packets of dusters but never opened them, or dusted. I buy box files and folders in the vain belief that they will make me tidy my overflowing basketsful of paperwork.

Things become a substitute for actions: a reassurance of power. Letting go can bring panic, a sense of a sliding, vanishing world.

A moving subplot right now in Coronation Street has Melanie Hill as a widow, for whom her friends' tidying intervention brings on shivering, terrified panic, even at the loss of one old newspaper ("I might do the crossword..."). It is beautifully handled, and may save a few people from letting their home, "each man's safest refuge", become a choking, cluttered trap.