I have enough shirts, socks and shoes in my wardrobes to last a year. And that’s just the stuff I don’t wear!

FIFTY-THREE shirts, eight pairs of shoes, four pairs of trainers, 12 jumpers, five suits, 12 sports jackets and 14 pairs of trousers.

No, that’s not Kanye West’s wardrobe for a day in LA: that’s all the clothes in my own wardrobe… the ones that I don’t wear.

And that’s why I’m prepared to admit that my wardrobe is a disgrace. (Well, I use the singular rather loosely, because I have four of them.)

To say they’re crammed also would be to significantly underplay the extent of the problem. If the portal to Narnia were behind any of them, Aslan, Mr Tumnus and their friends would long since have assumed that the Pevensie children were in a bit of a huff and couldn’t be bothered popping round for tea.

Every time I open them to look for anything specific (and fortunately, that’s seldom enough – whatever comes to hand usually suffices), I face what amounts to a gruelling workout, trying to force to either side whatever surrounds the shirt I actually need.

There are coiled spring devices designed to build the biceps and pectoral muscles that offer less resistance.

Damage

Indeed, when I had an MRI scan around two years ago after tearing the rotator cuff in my left shoulder, the consultant rang me up afterwards and said: ‘There’s some damage to your biceps too – do you lift a lot of weights?’

I don’t, and I was tempted to reply to him: ‘No, I was just trying to extract a pair of jeans.’

The problem I have is a simple one that, as we will see, is shared by millions. Over the past few years, my weight has fluctuated. Forced into action by a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, I went on a strict diet. From a 44-inch waist, I dropped to 34, and a bout of unrelated illness saw my weight drop below ten stone in old money. My waist shrank to 30 inches, the skinniest I’ve been since I was 15.

As for shirts and tops, well, I dropped three-and-a-half collar sizes and went from 2XL to Small.

For a time, I seemed to have dispensed with the need to exist in three dimensions; when I turned sideways, I half disappeared.

To be fair, that wasn’t a very good look, and counting my ribs while I shaved didn’t add much to my daily entertainment, so I started to eat a little more liberally again.

Of course, I forgot to stop, which is something that I need to address now that the last of the Christmas pudding has been wolfed down.

At every junction on this journey, new clothes had to be bought, but I was reluctant to throw any of the others out. I learned my lesson three years ago, when I gave 97 shirts to charity shops, many of them very good quality indeed, and it broke my heart to see them being sold for a tiny fraction of what they cost, even though they were in perfect nick.

Many of them would fit me again now, but instead I had to buy new, though I seldom do so anywhere except Penneys, Heatons, F&F in Tesco, and even Lidl when it dedicates the centre aisle to something more than fishing rods, ski equipment and power tools.

The result is a mess. Half my clothes fit me, and half don’t. I’m an impulsive shopper. If I see something I like, I buy it, because I’m not one of those people who trawls 20 shops then returns to buy the first thing he tried on, seven hours beforehand.

Disorder

I’m also something of a hoarder – I still have the boarding pass for my first flight, the 40th anniversary of which I’ll celebrate this coming June – and so the problem is compounded.

I get sentimentally attached to the inanimate, and realised this actually might be some sort of deep-seated psychological disorder when I once found myself apologising out loud to a shirt because it wasn’t coming on holiday.

So you can imagine my delight when I read yesterday of a Weight Watchers survey in the UK that revealed there is £10billion worth of clothes that are never worn stashed in wardrobes in that country.

For women, the No.1 item is evening dresses, followed by jeans, tops, jackets and skirts. For men, it’s T-shirts, jeans, jackets, jumpers and work shirts.

The reasons for hanging on to these items are simple: we either think we’ll fit back into them someday, or that they’ll come back into fashion.

There is some merit in the latter argument, I have to say, because one shirt that escaped the cull three years ago and now fits me again is a high-quality cotton, short-sleeved Gant shirt I remember buying in Filene’s Basement in Boston in March 1996. Twenty-two years on, it’s as good as new and wouldn’t look out of place on a rail in H&M.

As for fitting into clothes again, well, perhaps that’s a little more delusional. I have two pairs of 30-inch waist jeans I bought three years ago and the only way I will ever get into them again is if someone uses them to protect the urn containing my ashes.

So why are they still in the wardrobe? The truth is, I really do find it hard to throw anything out. Maybe it’s because I grew up at a time when we had a lot less than we do nowadays, but there always was someone – a sibling, a cousin, a family friend – who would gratefully accept hand-me-downs, and not frown on them as we would do nowadays.

It’s like I have a mental muscle memory that slams the door shut just as I finally get to thinking the time has come.

And that’s why, at my sister’s kitchen island over the Christmas period, I finally put my hand up and asked for help, because I’m just not strong enough to do this alone. I need a dispassionate eye and a mind uncontaminated by sentiment to force me into acceptance of the truth.

Malleable

So the plan was that she and my other sister would come to my place this evening and we would spend the weekend going through all the clutter, not just in the wardrobes but everywhere in the property, and fillet my house like a Japanese steak.

Do I really need four pulley bags for weekend breaks when I go on only one at a time? What about the thousands of CDs taking up shelf space when they’ve long since been uploaded to cloud storage, and when in any case I pay almost a tenner a month to Spotify to stream almost every song ever recorded?

I own 187 pairs of socks – it’s an illness. I have three drawers full of toiletries, er, liberated from hotels in case guests need them. At this stage, short of a coach party checking in, they’ll still be there long after I’ve joined the Choir Eternal.

So, to be honest, I was looking forward to this clearout and dreading it in equal measure.

Then yesterday, one of my sisters, the proper, grown-up, sensible one, rang to say tell me that she had the flu and wouldn’t be able to make it. The other is much more malleable, and already I’m preparing adversarial arguments for the retention of almost everything.

That really can’t happen though. The die has been cast and what has to be done will be done.

Many will have to go, but I hope I’m allowed a final few minutes to apologise to them, and say a proper goodbye.