Dear LPG,

I have just found out that I have a problem.  Well that is not strictly true, I have always had it but I thought that I was the only one.  Let me explain…

I moved into my home some 40 years ago now and although it is still relatively neat and tidy, there is a lot more stuff in it now than back then.  When I moved in it was brand new and completely empty.  I brought up a family there, and there is so much personal history within the walls.  I remember when everything had a place and it was all so neat and tidy and I can’t remember exactly when things changed, but a year and a half of lockdown has forced me to notice that they have.

Are you one of those people who spent lots of time locked up trying to sort out what to keep and what to get rid of?  I feel your pain if you went through boxes of stuff that you just can’t part with? That’s me!

I don’t think that I am describing anything that is unique, but when I found myself with the opportunity to experience days and days of having nothing else to look at but its contents, I became a lot more aware of how much more of my possessions there are than when I moved in, and just how much it has all grown over the years.  I have no doubt that there are many readers who know exactly what I am talking about.  They say that your home says a lot about you and I suppose that mine tells that I am a bit of a hoarder.

But the next question that you have to ask is why.  For many they have no problem with taking the less important items down to the charity shop, but it’s those things that have intrinsic value that get to us; the postcard you got from a friend who was on holiday in 1961, or the course notes from the night class that you took the year after you left school, the newspaper cutting about a relative, or the outfit you wore to your wedding. 

We know that we will never use them again and that no one in the family will have any interest, but still you can’t get rid especially if they are so used that they are now so tatty and not attractive enough to be used by someone else. 

Are you the person who is holding onto them because you know the alternative is the dust bin?  Are you the person who puts yourself in their place and can’t help feeling that you are condemning such precious items to ‘death’?  I think that is why I can’t part with such things. 

I know that there is a lot more stuff in my home than there should be, but I feel that I am making sure that those very personal things that anyone else would just throw away maintain the right to remain in their home.  I wonder how I would feel if I was thrown away just like one of those items.  I suppose my thinking is that if I were that old pair of shoes or useless video recorder I would like to think that the entity with the power to would not cast me out to the rubbish dump.

But ‘hoarder’ is such an unpopular and negative word, which is why when a friend told me that there is another word for my outlook on this aspect of life, it made me feel a lot better about the situation, although I know that I still need to do something about it.  I am a person who recognises the feelings of things, even though most of them have none.

 Walt Disney’s Donald duck, Reverend Wilbert Awdry’s Thomas the Tank Engine, Lewis Carroll’s  Cheshire cat, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit and even William Shakespeare’s introduction of a talking wall in his play ‘A midsummer's night dream’ are all guilty of getting me started down my road to my Anthropomorphism I think.  I suppose that I went from animals to things, and putting myself in their place.  Those authors have a lot to answer for.

 So I am a bit of a hoarder as I have said before, but I am also an anthropomorphist.  Which one are you, or are you a bit of both?

AJ, Lewisham.

AJ throws a little more on-line light on the subject …

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