Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal by Robin Ince

Author:Robin Ince [Ince, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2025-04-01T17:00:00+00:00

The rise of inaccessibility

The NHS defines hoarding as ‘where someone acquires an excessive number of items and stores them in a chaotic manner, usually resulting in unmanageable amounts of clutter. The items can be of little or no monetary value’. Fortunately, that can’t be me, as my vast pile of Man, Myth and Magic magazines from the early seventies are still worth their original cover price at the very least, and some may be worth even more than six pence.*

I am pretty certain that I am a chaotic collector. My tastes are wide but still too specific . . . or are they? What would my house look like if I lived alone?

The crossing point from having ‘too much stuff’ to hoarding is deemed to be having so much stuff that rooms, including possibly the bathroom or kitchen, become too full to be accessible (not there yet) and where ‘the clutter is causing significant distress or negatively affecting the quality of life of the person or their family – for example, they become upset if someone tries to clear the clutter and their relationship suffers’.6 I probably am pretty much teetering on that line now and sometimes falling over onto the other side of it.

I do battle to reduce the piles from time to time, especially when I can see it is causing anxiety and distress. The irony is that collecting things obsessively can be caused by anxiety and distress, and takes hold because it creates a certain form of order in a wild world of uncertainty, which is a common feeling in neurodivergence. But just as the collecting brings order, should you share your space with anyone else, you may be pushing them into the very condition you are trying to escape from.

Often thousands of books will leave the house in a year, though how many thousand new ones come in is debatable. So far today, I have purchased all twelve issues of Art in Focus from 1974 (bound); a biography of Chris Sievey, the creator of Frank Sidebottom, the helium-voiced pop legend with a papier mâché head; another book on the holographic universe principle; and three novels by Virginia Woolf.

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