I’VE got an elderly copy of Vogue in each hand and if I move half a step to the right, I’ll knock over a teetering stack of winter coats.

Cardboard boxes stuffed with irretrievably tangled jewellery, broken CD cases and what appears to be somewhere in the region of 127,654 loose hair grips are everywhere, groaning worryingly at their Sellotaped seams.

I have been in the spare room for an hour and the situation seems unchanged, despite my efforts.

I’ve unearthed possessions which haven’t seen daylight in years: glass jam jars - mercifully empty, cords and cables connecting technology long since defunct, old notepads detailing projects abandoned.

It’s time to admit an unpalatable truth.

“When,” I say to myself furiously, “did I become such a hoarder?”

The fact is my mother has been afraid since I first began living alone that I’ll go the way of E. M. Forster’s Leonard Bast, crushed to death by a bookcase in Howards End.

I’m incapable of deciding what stays and what goes. While I love the idea of clean, Swedish-style minimalism, my own interior design aesthetic is more ‘second-year student with no idea where the communal bin is’.

I have always firmly believed everything I own will become cool or useful or fashionable again. However, as I’ve grown older - and watched kind friends lug crates of keepsakes from my university days from flat to flat - it has become increasingly clear something has to give.

And so I turned to tidying guru Marie Kondo, organising consultant and author of international bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organising.

Kondo’s method of keeping only those belongings which “spark joy” was (initially) appealing. She advises readers to begin with clothes, then books, then documents, then miscellany and - most difficult of all - photos and mementos.

Into black bags go dresses I’d loved when I was 20 but not worn for the best part of a decade. Books, too, are easy - many returned to the charity shops from whence they came. Cookbooks are, for some reason, harder to part with, although I can only successfully make three meals, none of which I need a recipe for.

Some of my possessions give me painful pause. I know I couldn’t be without a draughts set rediscovered at the bottom of a bag, but have no memory of who gave it to me in the first place. Other things unearthed tucked away in the corners of collapsible crates hold me for different reasons. I feel a visceral ache when I find a stash of birthday cards written in my late nan’s distinctive, tall handwriting. These will be coming with me to all of my future homes, against Kondo decree.

One of the hardest tasks, strangely enough, is sorting through my (much-mocked) stash of Vogue magazines dating from the early 2000s. For every easily-recycled copy, there’s one that feels like it’s built into the fabric of my personality. Eventually, I begin to see the floor again, which is lucky as I’m fast becoming tired of Kondo’s relentless serenity and cod psychology (“When we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future”).

There’s no doubt I feel hugely relieved to be rid of some of the clutter I’ve been carrying around with me for so long, but my archaeological dig through half a lifetime of possessions has left me feeling raw.

Marie’s right, though. You do have to learn to let these things go. That’s why The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying is on its way to a new home via a charity shop.