Who knew vegans could be so cruel?

Ican totally believe that the women of Britain are hoarding £10billion worth of clothes we never wear. Although my idea of upmarket is Zara, and that Coast dress is reserved for weddings alone, I have to be realistic. I’ve had a look and I reckon I can maybe cash in all my Gap shirts, my Germoline-pink H&M sweater and that Mango “What were you thinking?” yellow furry coat for something around the £5 billion mark. If I throw in the pansy-patterned vintage top I wore on my first-ever date with my husband, back in 1989, that would be – a little bit heartbreaking, actually.

According to a new survey from Weight Watchers, women don’t wear 55 per cent of their clothes and hoard 365 million unworn items in their wardrobe. But so what? My sitting-room bookshelves are groaning with titles like Rome and Persia at War 502-532 and Lasco: Ars Sacra 8001200, and I’m pretty sure my husband doesn’t regularly read 55 per cent of them either. That’s mostly because he’s memorised every last desiccated fact, which is strange as he can barely recall the month of my birthday.

Anyway, nobody reproaches him, apart from me, about the fact that we have run out of wall space. By contrast, my frocks, heels and jeans are blamelessly rammed into the wardrobe for years, decades, until they come back into fashion. And even if they don’t, that’s OK, too.

For women clothes are more than garments. They are bound up with who we are and, like that pansy top from the Eighties, they speak to us and us alone about the life we have lived. If unworn, they are symbols of our aspirations; I bought that just before I got pregnant, I was going to wear this to that job interview, I got dumped before I’d even taken these out of the bag.

We nostalgically keep our babies’ tiny shoes, wedding dresses that never did get dyed, shortened and worn again, and our late mother’s favourite scarf. Each is precious in itself, and together they form a repository of all our memories.