Boxing clever with the clutter may be the saving grace for hoarders

SO there I was, searching for a good storage container, when I came upon an old Black Magic box.

One of those Christmas specials, three layers deep with a hinged lid and a red tassel. From the old days before they mucked with the assortment. Affixed to the lid was a label in my father’s neat handwriting. “Bits”, it said helpfully. Inside were neatly segregated large matchboxes, each containing items as diverse as fuses, metal retainers designed to hold a picture in its frame, and those hooks used to herd flexes up against the skirting board.

It’s been there for years and my father would have had it for decades before he died. Nobody has ever felt the need for any of its contents. And you know what? I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. I found another receptacle in which to keep the defunct keys I wanted to store — the keys I retain on the basis that if metal is currently so valuable, maybe I should build up a collection for sale to a scrap merchant.

I don’t know any scrap merchants but I’m saving those keys anyway. Same as I’m saving copper coins in jars, newspapers in piles and rubber bands wound around each other into tennis-ball lookalikes.

The bottom line is that I’m a hoarder.

I suspect that the recession has made hoarders of thousands of people who, pre-meltdown, happily tossed unused items into their wheelie bin but now throw nothing out, because the ability to throw things out marks you as rich, and nobody wants to look rich any more.

Paul Salkovskis, who, as a professor of psychology at the University of Bath researches obsessions, maintains that the catalyst for compulsive hoarding in roughly half of those who can’t throw anything out is the experience of deprivation. In other words, those who have gone through a period of extreme or unexpected poverty tend to hoard as a form of insurance; if they keep enough stuff, it will in some way buttress them against further losses.

In theory then, we’re breeding a new generation of hoarders among those floored by the new poverty administered by the Great Recession. They will be added to the group called “sentimental hoarders”, whose childhood was chaotic and who prefer to be surrounded by familiar possessions than take the risk of being surrounded by fickle people.

Increasingly, hoarding is regarded as a serious problem deserving professional intervention. And before you do a Vincent Brown snort and talk about the medicalisation of mild eccentricity, let me point out to you that the city of Vancouver is trying to work out ways of identifying hoarders, because one of them died in a fire which was greatly accelerated by piles of combustibles stored in their home.

Nor should we forget the case of the two brothers, one a wheelchair user, who many decades ago hoarded newspapers in their Manhattan apartment. This was seriously committed hoarding. The newspapers were neatly stacked into internal walls which, over time, impinged more and more on their living space, so that progress throughout was achieved through narrow canyons between floor-to-ceiling stacks. One day, one of the stacks collapsed on the able- bodied brother, killing him, and the wheelchair user, unable to get past him to the phone, starved to death.

While the two New York brothers are clearly at the extreme end of the hoarder spectrum, BBC1 will soon screen a documentary entitled Hoarder in the Family which suggests many others fall into the same category. The documentary arose from an earlier programme made by TV presenter Jasmine Harman whose mother, Vasoulla, has been described as a hoarder of pathological proportions. Her lifelong obsession with keeping toys, furniture, pictures, ornaments, and worn-out clothing turned her large house into a disorderly storage facility her children went to endless trouble to prevent any of their school pals visiting. Their mother’s hoarding dominated their lives. Negatively.

“It was the only topic of conversation between me and my siblings,” says Jasmine. “The house was piled higher and higher with stuff because, as well as never throwing anything out, my mum was always at the shops buying more.”

This seems to be a pattern for some, although not all, hoarders: constant purchasing of unneeded items. The home of a compulsive buyer-hoarder is filled with bags from department stores, sometimes serving as a form of social record. The bags exemplify changes in branding and design over several decades and sometimes act as mute reminders of chains long gone out of business.

Some hoarding is a logical response to emerging situations. That’s my excuse for the plastic crates in my house containing every power unit for every computer ever manufactured, and the matching crates containing instructions and DVDs for computers long since gone to their reward.

Hoarding electrical leads is normal, but my DVD-saving was a reaction to computer technicians who said they could do nothing without the enabler disc. Even though those technicians now download anything they need from the internet, I cling to the idea that one of them will find me especially praiseworthy when I produce the right DVD to obviate their having to do a download.

Professor Paul Salovskis says that hoarding has become a serious problem when hanging on to stuff makes living in the house impossible or very difficult — at least for the family of the hoarder. Extreme hoarders themselves are apparently blind to the piles of grot they create. They happily negotiate their way around and through detritus piled high enough to force partners and offspring to abandon the premises and go live somewhere else.

Hoarders are not necessarily mean or miserly. I’ll give you the shirt off my back. Just don’t ask me to give you any of the unmatched pop socks scrunched together in a white shoe bag at the back of the wardrobe. I couldn’t manage without the monthly ritual of taking them all out, lining them up and seeing if any of them has acquired a mate of roughly the same hue.

Once you examine your own hoarding tendencies, an almost audible “click” happens as you wonder at what point collecting turns into hoarding. My house, for example, is home to 15,000 books. No first editions. Just books. Then, there’s the shoes. The main difference between me and Imelda Marcos is that there’s not a Laboutin or a Jimmy Choo among mine and the dominant material is plastic. But in long-kept quantities of footwear, we’re sisters. I suspect His Nibs of sending me a broad hint when he handed over two bags of old socks last week. He was done with them, he declared. He may want me to follow his anti-hoarding example. Maybe the plastic boxes in every room have tipped him over the edge.

And he doesn’t even know about the waist-high carton of loose styrofoam packing — ghost turds, they call them in the US — I’ve been hanging on to for five years, feeling that it will definitely come in handy. Some day.