Our gruesome fascination with the lives of hoarders

THERE is to be a conference later this year in Edinburgh on hoarding, newly recognised as a mental health condition.

Last weekend I read an interview with Susannah Walker who has written a book called The Life Of Stuff about her labour of love – clearing up the home of her mother who died in a house full of rubbish. She writes: “Every flat surface and the floor is stacked with paper and bags and boxes, and I can’t see and don’t want to imagine what else as well, but underneath I can still see the lines of the place I knew, the house that my mother used to live in.”

We all, I think, find hoarding horribly fascinating. There have been many TV series about it and grisly news stories of sad people dying in an avalanche of their own rubbish. As Susannah Walker says: “We’re all stuck with things and we’re all trying to negotiate a truce with them in some way.”

It’s true. We have too many things which is why we’re suckers for articles on how decluttering will transform our lives and why storage facilities are big business. We live in a throwaway society and yet we cannot bear to throw things away. I curate… you collect… he hoards.

Dickens wrote one of literature’s most memorable hoarders: Krook in Bleak House who meets his death by spontaneous combustion. Illiterate, he nevertheless accumulates thousands of worthless legal documents.

Yet in the end the plot turns on one of Krook’s scraps of paper. That’s why we don’t throw things away. Just in case.