Use it or lose it

Okay, enough of the doom and gloom. Time for something more positive. Something that'll cheer you all up. Ah, I know just the thing. De-cluttering.

One thing Jenny and I wholly agree on is decluttering - or better still, permanent non-cluttering. We've always had a horror of homes packed with useless junk and dust-gathering knick-knacks, homes so awash with assorted stuff that you have to fight your way through the rooms and clear a ton of rubbish off the chair seats before you can sit down.

Our house couldn't be more different. If there's something we don't want or need, it's thrown out pretty quickly. Just about everything in the house is in regular use, apart from a few ornaments and bits of pottery that we love and remind us of the holidays they stem from. Oh and apart from a large number of books. The local charity shops must have made plenty of money out of our frequent throw-outs.

In fact our house is so bereft of superfluous items one visitor likened it to a guest house. I think some visitors actually feel slightly uncomfortable without the usual agglomeration of cosy bits and pieces they're expecting.

But our house is a palace of junk compared to a house I stayed in many years back, belonging to my friend Chris's aunt. She was fiercely religious and believed there should be nothing in the house that wasn't strictly necessary for everyday living. There were tables, chairs, beds and cupboards and that was about it. The idea of an ornament would have given her conniptions.

My mum, as you may remember, was a compulsive hoarder, and after a move to a care home, her flat had to be cleared of umpteen years' accumulation of unworn clothes, old newspapers, holiday brochures, rotting chocolates and very variety of pointless rubbish imaginable.

An image so vivid and unforgettable I vow never to repeat it.

Junk male

We all have a tendency to hoard stuff we don't really need. But the story of Welshman John Jones is a caution to us all to keep the hoarding instinct under control.

Mr Jones had squirrelled away so much rubbish over 20 years he could only move around his Aberystwyth house through a series of specially built tunnels.

And after he was found dead under bags of rubbish, the coroner concluded he had probably died of asphyxiation, crushed by all the junk.

As it was impossible to remove the body through the solid mass of garbage, he had to be brought out through a window by firefighters.

The rubbish was piled high not just in the house but in the garden shed, the garden and several garages rented from the local council.

Let that be a lesson to all you knick-knack collectors out there. Start clearing it all out before you meet a grisly end.

Hoarding is one of the most common obsessive compulsive disorders, alongside hygiene mania and irrational double checking (like returning home to check the gas is off).

Many sufferers go to great lengths to hide their obsessions for fear of social ridicule and ostracism. Fortunately I've never been one of them, though I do tend to double check things like plane tickets and flight times rather too often.

Mind you, my mum's a bit of a hoarder. But I think she's safe - she hasn't had to build any tunnels yet.