Confessions of a lifelong hoarder

My wallet is s strange place. It’s hard, if not virtually impossible, to find any money in it. Do I have all my money tied up in tech stocks and commodities, I hear you ask. Have I moved completely to using Bitcoin? Not quite.

The wallet, a small, black, leather number that was a present from my parents when I was in my 20s, is bulging with lots of useless items, making it difficult to find what meagre drawings I take from the current account at the start of each month. There are many, many receipts for small, everyday purchases. You never know when I might have to return that Mars bar to Centra.

In the card compartment, there's my credit card, debit card, old debit card, social welfare card I don't use, an out-of-date Louth County Council library membership card, a Leap card, an Irish Times security pass and a shopping list from April 2012. There are about 23 business cards I have collected over the years from people I have never contacted again.

In the very darkest corner of my wallet is a newspaper clipping from a local rag. It contains a court report from a year gone by when somebody I knew was up for something or other. For some reason I cut it out and kept it. So the thing that is designed to hold money doesn’t have a whole lot in it. Or, at least, I can’t find it.

The world in a bag

The list of useless items does not end with the wallet. There’s a bag I carry to and from work every day, ostensibly to hold my laptop and lunch. On closer examination it seems to hold items I never use, yet carry around every day of my life. There are about 17 pens, some of them in full working order.

There are some notebooks with scribbling so crucial to my everyday existence I cannot bare to put them in a drawer or, heaven forbid, the bin. There's a folder of random A4 printouts and newsdesk rosters dating back as far as 2009. There are batteries that have run out and a small green contacts book, which I started filling while studying journalism in Dublin City University in 1996. It contains handwritten phone and fax (yes, fax) numbers for people who are now retired, dead or irrelevant to me and numbers for newspapers such as the Cork Examiner. Quaint.

As I take the bag out of the car in the train station car park, I discover that my hoarding habits have polluted the boot also. There is a small, unopened mirror I bought in Ikea and a bag of coats and curtains that are due to go to the launderette for about seven months. There's a bottle of Cillit Bang cleaner in there, a rag, a child's plastic bowling ball, an empty tin of Roses sweets, a shirt I was due to get mended but then grew out of and a "just in case I get a puncture in the middle of the night" coat.

The boot has become an overflow area for my garden shed. On a trip to the shed recently I found plenty of interesting items that I may need in the future. You never know when I might need 23 brass door handles that I removed in 2007. Then there’s the door knocker I took off a previous house when we got a new front door that might become useful if I get another front door without a knocker. Then there’s the cone that stops the dog licking himself, the 75 nearly empty tins of paint, spare tiles that didn’t get used when the bathroom was being done, an air pump from a bouncy castle that ripped and got thrown out, a poster from Michael D Higgins’s presidential election campaign that my son used for a school project, five bikes, a bike rack, a goldfish tank and fish tank accoutrements and not forgetting a kite, an inflatable swimming pool, a selection of rusting garden forks, a strimmer, a lawnmower, an empty packet of weedkiller, an old dog’s bed and a roll of carpet.

It feels good to share

It’s no wonder really, as I ran out of room in the attic years ago. There’s limited space up there, especially when the following items are fit in: bags of clothes, labelled per age and season, waiting to be re-used; an unused television stand still in its original box; a mop bucket; a single bed; a mattress; a box of used school books and school projects that have come home over the years; and a rather elaborate light fitting bought in Urban Outfitters that hung so low when it was installed that we kept bumping into it. We might get a house with higher ceilings some day. You never know. My name is Paddy and I’m a serial hoarder. It feels good to share.

@paddylogue

• Michael Harding is on leave