I’VE been having a root through my drawers. No, not those ones and don’t be so rude… The ones which are a household dumping ground for all manner of things that for some inexplicable reason can't or won’t be thrown away.

Stuff like old phone chargers from when mobiles were house bricks. Keys for I know not where. Ball point pens that don’t work because the refills have disappeared and all that’s left are the plastic sheaths. Hair ribbons but I know not how – the last time I wore one was when I was about four.

Numerous elastic bands that have been there so long the rubber has perished. Hair grips belonging to whom I've no idea – I've never worn them and my son and other ’alf certainly don’t.

Toothpicks – big yuk. A lobster pick – not quite so bad. A tube of glue adorned with a pre-decimalisation price tag. Enough buttons to keep the Buttons and Bows shop in town supplied for a week. Two coffee beans (what?) A pair of tights in American tan – shows how old they are. And so it goes on.

Forget about car boot sales – I'm all for having a drawer sale on the drive. Or donating all my interesting artefacts and enticing trinkets of family life to the Castle Museum to boost its visitor numbers. I reckon people would pay oodles to see that. Not.

However, I'm not alone – far from it. According to one of those tongue-in-cheek surveys so beloved by newspapers on a quiet news day, three-quarters of us Brits admit to having a miscellaneous junk drawer with a further 35 per cent confessing to having a junk cupboard to hold all their knick-knackery.

The probe into the views of 1,000 homeowners by an online tradesmen-recommendation company found that the study or home office is the most likely to attract unwanted mess, with out-dated paperwork clogging up almost half of all domestic in-trays. And given that I’ve got old mobile phone chargers spewing out of my drawers I'm among the 43 per cent of us who admit to having at least one of them.

Yet nearly half of us complain that we don’t have enough storage space in our homes. I know we don’t. So much so that we’ve split our garage in half, put in a dividing wall and a door and gaily filled it up with household overspill.

My half contains three fridges and shelving for all sorts of kitchen crockery and equipment that wouldn’t look out of place serving a restaurant with 30 covers. That’s so I can attempt to do justice to the 1,200 cookery books currently housed in the kitchen.

The other half is for the other ’alf who gets banished in there to tidy it up when he’s being a nuisance. Or he self-banishes himself when I am.

I suppose it’s the equivalent of escaping to a shed at the bottom of the garden except his bit doesn’t have curtains, a rickety old armchair with sprouting stuffing and a little camping stove to keep himself warm while shutting out the carping and harping world.

It’s home to plastic cartons of his lovingly collected aircraft magazines – in date order, if you please – going back to 1961 in readiness for him writing his long-dreamed of book on the definitive history of British airlines. Well, somebody has to.

But it’s also the repository for our household recycling station with its separate cartons for paper, cardboard, plastic, glass and tin.

Then there’s the shelves groaning under the Christmas decorations, paint going back nearly 20 years, cleaning stuff, an old jam pan, about 100 old dishcloths for household cleaning, and several pairs of old shoes. Not to mention three bikes, the lawnmower, about 40 candles, a stationery cupboard for our business, the ironing board and iron and a pair of stepladders.

Oh, and the boy’s stuff from university that he won’t be needing again until September.

No wonder there’s no room in there for the old armchair and camping stove.

But none of this is as bad as my nan who kept my granddad in her junk drawer in an old lozenge tin.

I only found out when I opened him up one day and had to brush him off my frock. She could at least have put him on the mantelpiece.