I’ve discovered that I am suffering from an inability to get rid of things

FROM the outset, the man in my life knew he was marrying the opposite of a domestic goddess. I told him, straight up, that I was a slob.

My mother told him he would have to climb over piles of discarded clothes, books and sweet wrappers in order to get into bed. He thought it was amusing exaggeration.

When he found out that it was no word of a lie, he coped using a variation of the way Treasa Drea coped when she had to share a desk with me in school. She got an extra big ruler and pushed all my encroaching stuff back over to my side of the desk with it. Several times a day, without rancour.

Much later, my husband behaved as if he had married an interesting case study in domestic derangement. So it was that yesterday he brought something downstairs at arms’ length.

“What the hell is that?” I asked. It was black and green, had tendrils and whiskers, released a faint cloud of powdered mould, and had (surprisingly) no smell at all. It was sitting on a dinner plate.

“I thought you might know,” he said mildly. “It was in the microwave in the bedroom. For a while, I imagine.”

I had a vague memory of putting something I was eating into the microwave to keep the cats away from it. Not having a submachine gun available that day.

“It’s interesting,” he added, “To have a microwave in the bedroom that’s only used to store putrefying food.”

“That wasn’t the original intention,” I said, huffily.

“It never is,” he said with serene resignation. “Tell me. What was the original intention?”

Well, of course, the original intention was not to throw away a perfectly good microwave. We have this built-in mocrowave of enormous needless sophistication in the kitchen which displaced the one we’d used up to then. When the old microwave became redundant, I thought I might sell it on one of those websites where you can, (acccording to the ads,) make a fortune out of unwanted items. Then I discovered you could buy a brand new microwave for about €25 and nobody would want to spend money on mine, so I kept it. Some day it would come in handy, I figured.

The same rationale is behind my keeping all plastic soup containers. Good for storage and microwaving, I think, even when I can’t get the drawer holding plastic containers to close because of a superfluity of oddly-shaped containers.

I realised on Friday that I now have six crates filled with electrical fittings. Each of these is the size of a small car boot and each is stuffed to the gunwales with neatly rolled up flexes, phone leads, power adapters for computers, adaptors that plug into the cigarette lighter socket in a car, headphone holders, headphones, battery powered gadgets that scream when a cat lands on the dining room table, devices for removing nose hair and a yoke that’s supposed to stir sauce for you so it doesn’t burn. Some of them have been in their crate for five years, but I’m still convinced that they’ll come in handy.

I have this fantasy that someone will be in desperate need of a particular computer power lead in order to retrieve a crucially important document, and I will lead them to one of my five containers and suggest they look through its contents. The sound of their yelled delight will bring me back into the room and I will smile in a self-deprecating way as they dance with relief.

THIS establishes that I am part of that demographic that lives semi-permanently in cloud cuckoo land. I was reasonably happy there until I discovered, in the last few days, that according to the latest edition of America’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM, I am suffering from hoarding disorder. One of the 3% of the population that suffers from an inability to get rid of things.

The defining and tragic case of hoarding disorder, of course, is that of the Collyer brothers in Manhattan in the 1940s who kept every book they ever bought, every magazine, every carton, every letter, storing them in cupboards, on shelves, in piles until their apartment became so crowded that they created extra floor-to-ceiling walls of the material they couldn’t bear to part with, which was fine up to the point at which the brother who used a wheelchair couldn’t get through the narrow tunnels between the walls of rubbish and took to his bed instead. This again was fine up to the point that the other brother destabilised one of the garbage walls, which fell on him and squashed him, leaving the crippled brother marooned in the bed where he later died of starvation.

When outsiders eventually decided to investigate the fact that nobody had seen the mobile Collyer brother in weeks, they had to come in through the window because piles of collapsed rubbish blocked the door. It took them 18 days of excavation to find the brother on whom the wall of rubbish had collapsed. There was no rhyme or reason to them storing all the stuff they stored, but — like me, the brothers believed that some day it would come in handy.

None of my hoarded stuff is stored in a dangerous way, although, now that I think about it, three big hatboxes containing something I haven’t looked at in years sit on the top of a wardrobe and the last time Dino, the cat who thinks he’s a Sherpa, climbed up and knocked one of them down on his sister Specs, for several minutes we thought Specs was going to shuffle off her mortal fur, she was so stunned.

Now I know I have a disorder, I find myself collecting evidence in every room. In the bathroom, I have alternative medicines that went out of date half a decade back. In the kitchen, I have a Black Magic box filled with metal fasteners hoarded by my father. In a little box in the bedroom, I have a ha’penny from 1953, a threepenny bit from 1962 and a series of other unusable coins. I was convinced would one day get me out of debt until I checked their collective value on the internet.

Less than a tenner, the whole lot is worth. I have hundreds of pens nobody ever uses, all of them sadly standing to permanent attention in old mugs. I have Kilner jars full of buttons — thousands and thousands of buttons, all awaiting their big day. I have drawers full of Christmas and birthday cards and not a clue who sent any of them, sitting beside banded envelopes of flower food.

I was totally happy with all of this until the Americans decided it was a mental disorder. Now, I want to prove how integrated I am by getting rid of the whole lot. Maybe I’ll give it a couple of weeks, though.

Sudden sanity might be a bit hard to adapt to.