I am moving house – and being a lifelong hoarder has finally caught up with me | Zoe Williams

I’m trying to move house; so are more than one pair of friends. We spend a lot of time trying to get on the insurance for each others’ cars, because some can fit a sideboard, and others can’t fit a handbag. We swap recommendations for things like secondhand book exchangers, and avoid talking about fond memories of the home about to be departed, concentrating on all the brilliant things there are to be said about new pastures. The main thing we don’t talk about is that none of us know how to do anything and that all of us are hoarders.

There’s a reason not to know the big stuff – how to paint a skirting board, how to mend a bannister spindle – never doing a thing without landing in a place of pure ignorance. Probably if any of us were 25, we’d be no worse at painting than any other 25-year-old.

Other stuff is frankly embarrassing; I don’t know how to get the decorative cover off a light fitting; I don’t really know the difference between a knick-knack and some mess; I haven’t got the trace of a clue about when is the right time to throw away a pair of trainers – is it when the fabric is full of holes but they’re still watertight, or is it before then?

My friend, clearing out a chest of drawers, found one filled entirely with different-coloured ribbon of unusable length. I stare at old Christmas cards and can’t figure out whether they’re from a person I’ve tragically forgotten, or if I just found them on the street and decided the right thing to do was to file them. I have spices that are older than my youngest child (16), so I must have moved house with them twice already. I have more defunct appliances than I could name, and fair enough, it is hard to bin a soup maker or an air fryer when you have no clue why they stopped working – if it’s that random, who’s to say they won’t start working again? But there is no excuse for a MiniDisc player.

It’s a post-war hangover, hungover from our own parents: not being able to chuck anything that might go to a good home. This column has in fact all been an elaborate ruse, to find a new owner for some out-of-date galangal.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist