Sussex columnist: Cleaning out my 'Tardis' cupboard revealed many 'treasures'

​I had that very experience this week when I made the error of deciding to clear out my understairs cupboard.

It’s been one of those jobs on my to-do list for months, probably years, but I’ve never quite got around to it. More important things always seemed to take precedence and, when it came down to it, well, I usually couldn’t be bothered.

But then my husband said something last week that spurred me into action… He said most of the ‘junk’ in the cupboard was mine, rather than his, and that I was ‘hoarding stuff’.

Challenge accepted, dear hubby, challenge accepted.

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Never one to look an ‘I can prove you wrong’ gift horse in the mouth, I set about my tidying challenge with gusto.

But minutes in, with a hallway full of random items collected over two decades (yes, we are old enough to have been together for more than 20 years) of a life together and the task suddenly felt a bit overwhelming.

Do I really need a kite we haven’t used since we bought it circa 2008? Will I ever use the shiatsu home massager that has been gathering dust for years? Can I really throw away my National Record of Achievement, provided as an extremely important document in the late 1990s but in reality never used or looked at since?!

These were weighty questions for a Thursday morning, and as a chronic indecisive I began to fear I’d bitten off way more than I could chew.

But then a golden opportunity presented itself. It was too good to miss and spurred me on to complete the task in hand.

What had I discovered? It was an old pair of my husband’s shoes, and once I’d taken out the first, they just kept coming.

Shoe after shoe came out of that cupboard, as if it was a Tardis or Mary Poppins’ bag. In total, I extracted 36 pairs. Yes, you read that right, 36 pairs! Women usually get the flack for having too many shoes – not in this house!

And that doesn’t include the pairs ‘floating’ in the hallway, in his wardrobe or on the shoe rack in the coat cupboard. I texted him asking what he wanted me to do with his collection to rival even the most ardent fashionista, and he said he’d sort them out when he got home.

Later discussions revealed he thought I had been exaggerating about the amount, and there was no possible way he had that many.

Like I wouldn’t count them to win the Battle of the Cupboard! Does he not know me at all?!

Four of his old backpacks also revealed themselves (as well as a couple of mine, admittedly) along with a handheld car vacuum, a not-as-yet-used picnic set and several pairs of slippers for guests who get cold feet (considerate, I thought – well, it would be if we ever remembered we had them!).

And then there were the bags for life. We had 41 of them.

Seems to somewhat negate the point of a ‘bag for life’ when you have more than you could possibly ever use or need in a lifetime.

But such was the disarray of the cupboard most of them had been shoved in there on return from a shopping trip and then almost swallowed whole by a collection of memorabilia from my childhood.

They’ve been streamlined now, but it was inexplicable how much stuff could fit into a relatively small space.

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After much sorting, trips to the charity shop, the dumping of rubbish in the bin, offloading some things to friends and family and saying goodbye to a wedge of letters from my secondary school that was more than three decades old, the cupboard was finally sorted.

And what did we do next? Why, we filled it with yet more stuff to be rediscovered in the future, of course! See you for another exciting episode of The Cupboard Diaries in about 2034.