It must border on mental illness, our crippling mania for keeping things.

I say this because I’ve noticed over the last few years more ads and more opportunities for self-storage.

It starts with the house hunters. Extra bedrooms are no longer enough. They want a bedroom (sometimes two) a loft and a garage for storage.

People in their mid-thirties have amassed so much stuff they’re looking at warehousing their personal possessions.

I’m curious to know what they have. What is it that ordinary people fill warehouses with?

One company cites a pool table which they won’t have space for when they move. A pool table! Imagine one of those in the average UK house (or flat).

Other items featured in these ads are furniture and gifts from family.

As it’s nearing that time of year, there’s some sense to this. Christmas storage. Who, apart from children and Argos, looks forward to it?

Argos themselves could offer a new service: gift storage solutions. A giant warehouse… In fact, go one better.

Let people into their own warehouses, tell them to choose a present, once they have, tell them it’ll be there for £2 a month until they have room for it. You could have a clause in your will about your things in storage…

I’m baffled. If your things are in storage, you can’t use them. If you can’t use them, are they as good as non-existent? Or are they really just the equivalent of inheritance cryogenics? Frozen assets… (sorry.)

Wealth, but out of sight.

Will Time Team excavate these units in 5000 years and conclude that this was a way of taking our valuables with us to the other world? To reserve a better spot in the afterlife. (In transit separately of course.)

Yes, I have too many things. But the biggest things I have are shoes and belts. Maybe a few hats too many… NOT furniture to fill another home!

I wonder what this all means.

As a civilising nation, is this the reverse? Do we now not know how to dispose of waste?

Or are we all hoping that our offspring will find cash in the attic/storage unit one day? Are we incapable of deciding what to keep? Have we just been bamboozled by the companies and sold storage space when we really should have binned the lot?

There’ll be ads in ten years’ time: ‘Mis-sold storage space? You could be eligible for compensation…’

And then I wonder whether people go and visit their stuff regularly? Take it out of boxes, pull away the cellophane, remove each squiggle of polystyrene carefully and look at their things? ‘Ahhh, the phone I was carrying when I met my first husband… Look, still works!’

Another thought occurs to me. We’re meant to be recycling things. There are dozens of ways to dispose of things ecologically. When the owners have deceased, who will see to all their junk?

Taking a more analytical stance, I could ask whether this hoarding is latent greed. Squirrels do it, yes. For survival.

We just bury our things in ugly units for no good reason. It could be that even if we don’t want it, we don’t want anyone else to have it either. “Mine, all mine…”

Did Palaeolithic man store in this way. Did Hordman take his surplus armchair and oil painting and LPs to Storman two miles away and pay him to put them away? Maybe for life?

Not a chance. Though that would have been worth doing. Quality tools and things made by hand by ancient people would have been fascinating to find.

The flip side is our own trash which we keep buying. Lilos, cheap pans, cheap settees, pianos and guitars, scratched Bros CDs, non-working PCs, belts, hats… things that probably never had much value.

And of course, you can’t easily sell this stuff anyway. Even ebay is overloaded.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood the importance of storage. Maybe someone will put me right.

I’m curious more than anything. Do people see it as temporary and then just leave it there for a decade? Do they actually take it out of storage ever?

Maybe as I write, architects are thinking about designing homes with storage. Entire house clusters built on industrial estates. ‘Home with own storage unit.’

When I leave my current home, I’ll eat my hat if I even consider self-storage. I’ll be hard on myself and throw away/recycle. It’ll be a sense of achievement to only take with me what I use. I wish myself luck.