Rowan Pelling: That's not old rubbish - that's me

Why do we hoarders marry minimalists? And why can't they leave our important 'stuff' alone?

Are you a discarder or a hoarder? Or put it like this: can you march briskly down your hallway if the doorbell rings, or do you take 10 minutes to slalom round vast piles of books, a tailor's dummy, a stuffed heron, a Bath chair and every National Geographic since 1964?

Of course, if you're a hoarder married to a discarder your mags will have been "disappeared", old paperbacks repatriated to Oxfam and you'll have been forced to choose between the dummy, the chair and the heron in an anguished scene reminiscent of Sophie's Choice.

People call this "compromise" but it's actually mental torture to those of us afflicted by acute hoarditis. Although I am occasionally reminded about where my affliction, if left untrammelled, might take me. Usually it's when some reclusive eccentric passes away and is found entombed in a century's musty newspapers. Filmmaker Jonathan Gili's end wasn't that lonesome, but he had nevertheless managed to accumulate an eye-boggling amount of ephemera - what some experts might term "a load of old crap". His three-storey terraced house and lock-up garage in north London were crammed to bursting with meticulously catalogued examples of commercial design and packaging (crisp packets, bus tickets, old cola cans) and more peculiar items (a lobster-claw harmonica, snow globes, fake noses). His wife Phillida explained in a newspaper interview this week: "I had to mountaineer to get into bed."

I felt strangely soothed as I read Phillida Gili's words, as though I were a model of restraint because my husband can still weave his way to the bedstead - albeit past our two-year-old's cot. The designated nursery is jam-packed with my "archive": miscellaneous and malignant piles of "stuff", the diseased spores and tendrils of which blight the attic, my office, the hall, the dining room and the shed. "It's not a bloody archive," rages my husband, "it's a heap of unspeakable, effing junk."

He's right, of course. We stashers have an infuriating tendency to aggrandise our hoards. Gili's domestic flotsam was known reverently as The Collection. Other accumulators of mould-ridden debris talk of their "museum". And many an acquirer talks of leaving their detritus "to the nation", while the nation resolutely clings to visions of a skip. The suggestion that you're doing your bit for posterity is just one way the compulsive hoarder excuses their pathological disorder. Other feeble justifications include the notion that you're accumulating a treasure trove for your offspring. Really? Then how come the first thing they do on your death is flog the lot? (Yes, Jonathan Gili's "Collection" is currently up for sale and "four van-loads of boxes" have already been ousted.)

The following phrases and words fill me with terror: "Use it or lose it", "pruning", "sorting", "paper-free office", "spring clean" and my spouse's personal favourite, "rationalising". When he "rationalises", a skip-load of books, CDs and underpants can leave the house in one burst of frenzied activity. Although my husband worked on the NME in its glory years, he no longer harbours LPs or any copies of the mag. Long gone too are such novels as Gravity's Rainbow and The Magic Mountain. His favourite mantra is: "That was then, this is now."

I recognise my hoarding poses anarchy to someone of his monastic sensibility. So I sanction a degree of "rationalisation", but monitor his clearances like a UN observer. There are few things more terrifying to hoarders than the life coaches and makeover experts called in by TV shows to purge some poor sap's life of clutter. "Don't do it!" I shout at the TV screen, "You'll be miserable without the fondue set."

I feel my personal happiness utterly depends upon the retention of my upper fourth exercise books, all my old Advent calendars, two school dresses, a Play Away card signed by Brian Cant, every piece of written correspondence I have received since my birth, six vintage wedding dresses and a 1970s Swedish porno mag I was bequeathed by an elderly reader of the Erotic Review.

I even rescue other people's junk. I have my former next-door neighbour's Danish loving chair (an unusable S-shaped thing with a broken leg) because I couldn't bear the thought that he might sell something that once belonged to his grandparents. I have my mother's scrapbooks, her hideous Parker Knoll chair, and my friend Anne Billson's large, framed hologram of Christ on the cross.

What fuels this manic urge to hoard? The impulse to discard has a clear rationale in its Zen-like striving for calm, or the Puritanical urge for order and control. But hoarding is all about wrapping a vast security blanket of stuff around you. When you discard goods, you shed identity and become a sparkling, reinvented version of yourself.

Those who accumulate don't want to slough their past. They like the paper trail that leads back to infancy, the ancestral journals that transcend the grave.

My uncle Malcolm, a hoarder of the most impressive kind (old cars, fairground rides, pianolas, antique surgeon's tools), declares that what you accumulate on this planet could legitimately be described as "the magic of your possessions". And then there's superstition: a lock of my mother's hair travels with me wherever I go as a form of protective voodoo, I suppose. But the obsessive hoarder clings to one final piece of lunacy: that their collection of beer mats and Mandy annuals may be worth something one day. So it's heartening news that Jonathan Gili's stash has just been valued at £100,000 - and terribly bad tidings for my husband.