Now that's what I call hoarding Vol.1

We've moved house, and the house we've moved to is smaller than our last one. Instead of getting rid of any of our furniture though, we've elected to squeeze it all into the new house and position each item carefully where it'll have the least impact on walkways. This has, for the most part, been successful, though if you want to pop to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, you've got to move about the place like Wayne Sleep. It was either that though or construct our flat-pack Ikea specials in the garden and strategically bolt them all together to create some form of chipboard annex, though this would have been unlikely to have been weather-proof.

A bit of clutter is absolutely fine; not mental chaos like there's been an explosion at a car boot sale, but organised chaos with interesting stuff everywhere. Unpacking all the boxes however, we're astonished at the amount of junk we're hoarding - original Mario Bros LCD games, disco balls, rabbit skin Russian army hats and other such unthrowawayable gems.

The question is - what do/can you do with them? They can't be thrown away, that would be a Dave Lee Travesty of Justice. They can't be sold, as I doubt even the most drunken Ebay splurger would bid for any of it, and they can't be given away as to inflict their uselessness on anybody else is just cruel. It seems they're destined to never leave the sanctuary of their cardboard tombs, and are doomed to a life of boxed-up solitude in the shed until such time as they are unceremoniously skipped.

I watched one of those Life of Grime programmes once where a elderly gent had filled his sizeable house literally to bursting (the walls were bowing and cracking) due to the amount of shit he kept. Bizarrely, this literally included shit as he couldn't even bring himself to throw his own faeces away. Now that's hoarding. Whether he scooped it out of the bowl before it swam round the U-bend, defecated into a suitable container where it couldn't escape or slide away was never investigated.

I reckon though that underneath the rancid piles of festering excrement and filth-encrusted keepsakes, I bet you could have heard the unmistakable "dit-dit-dit" of the moustachioed Marios, slavishly working in their flat screen bottle factory until their batteries ran silent forever. Maybe that's how it all starts.