A word from the Editor: I am a hoarder of stuff and, it seems, I am not alone

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It is impossible to part with books

The towering stacks of unwashed plates and dishes that always seem to loom out of their sinks are particularly mesmerising.

How many weeks ago were the lower levels of that shard of lethargy first installed?

A few minutes into one of those documentaries and I'm already, in my mind, breaking open the Brillo pads and unpeeling the black plastic bags for a full-frontal assault on that column of grease and old bacon rinds.

I'm not by any means obsessed with cleanliness but I can't function anywhere near the kitchen if there are dirty plates on the draining board.

Like the perfect McDonald's operative, I like to clean as I go.

Having said that, I am a bit of a hoarder of stuff myself and, it seems, I am not alone.

A poll in the papers last week conducted by a company called Big Yellow Self Storage, revealed that half of the 2,000 couples spoken to regularly row about the amount of clutter in their homes, typically quarrelling about 32 times a year on the subject.

That's a lot of arguments: you'd almost think they were hoarding them.

My weakness is for books, CDs and, in particular, vinyl records.

Regular readers of this column will know I can resist almost anything except a car boot sale and it is a rare Sunday morning when I return empty-handed.

My brother says the rule for buying second-hand vinyl should be "a pound or walk away" but I rarely walk away and I don't always pay a pound.

As a result, my wife, fed up to the back teeth with all those new arrivals flooding into our living space, has instigated a strict deportation policy: for every item that comes in, another has to be escorted to the charity shop.

I am happy(ish) to do this with the odd record or CD but I find it almost impossible to part with a book.

Books, especially older ones, are like puppies: certainly not just for Christmas and fully deserving to be looked after and treated with respect.

After all, you can never quite own a book, can you?

You are merely taking care of it for future readers.

Anything on the floor that isn't a carpet, furniture or the dog is definitely clutter

Unfortunately my wife, who has heard this argument once too often, now uses it against me.

"You've read it, now let someone else have the chance," she will argue, wrestling the dusty volume from my fingers.

The great American writer John Updike had a big "overspill" bookcase in his garage or den or whatever our US cousins call those spaces.

Into this he'd cram all the books he ran out of space for in the rest of his home.

I have a similar system but, ironically, the bookcase in my garage was itself kicked out of the house many years ago when I first got married, on the grounds it was a bit big for the room.

Into its Narnia-like interior I have stuffed countless tomes that would otherwise be Oxfam-bound, with the result that sometimes, if I'm searching for a new book to read, I can find something quite unexpected lurking in its depths.

This is surely one of the great delights of obsessive book-buying: that you can surprise yourself with something you bought earlier and completely forgot about.

I found a novel by Noël Coward in there just the other day which I don't remember buying at all, so perhaps some books are now actually sneaking into my house independently...

I'd like to think our deportation system has saved us from having anywhere near 32 arguments about clutter but we have had a few disagreements, largely about the precise definition of the term.

Anything on the floor that isn't a carpet, furniture or the dog is definitely clutter.

We both agree on that.

But precisely how long does something have to be sitting on a shelf or cupboard top before it is thus defined?

When is a pair of socks laid out for the morning recategorised as a dirty pair of socks and chucked in the washing basket? (After about five minutes, usually).

The poll which I referred to earlier also revealed that in the first year they live together, couples throw away around £240-worth of possessions they would rather keep and I can certainly vouch for that.

In my mid-20s, about the time Brideshead Revisited was on the TV, I developed a taste for buying old bits and bobs from antique fairs: candlesticks, ashtrays, ink stands, that sort of thing.

I fancied myself as a bit of a would-be "lord of the manor" as I'm sure others do now after half an episode of Downton.

None of these items remained for long after I got married and I can't say I'm really sorry.

What on earth was I doing, for instance, buying a small wooden figurine of Don Quixote? I don't even like the book very much.

"Ornaments," my wife declared very early on, "are just clutter."

Don't expect to see us on Antiques Roadshow any time soon.

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