The ragged bobble of my husband Colin’s black woolly hat caught my eye as I walked past the bookshelf in the lounge.

I grabbed hold of it and out spilled a small bottle of bicycle oil tucked behind it, some ancient DVLA paperwork and a couple of sports magazines dating back two or three years, which were still in their cling-film packaging.

After tutting, I gathered it all up and put everything in its rightful place: the oil in the toolbox in the cupboard under the stairs; the hat on the hall table; and the papers and magazines in the bin.

Lauren spends much of her time putting things back in their rightful place but her husband, Colin, is often irritated to find she has moved his belongings

But when Colin came home from work, it took him less than a minute to notice his stuff had been moved.

‘Where are my things?’ he demanded.

I told him I had put all the items exactly where they belonged, reminding him that a bookshelf was the place for books and not another receptacle for his mountain of clobber.

He huffed and puffed, stomped around the house and didn’t talk to me for the rest of the evening. But for me de-cluttering that bookshelf felt like a small victory in a battle I have been losing for years.

As I write this, I am sitting in the spare room at my desk next to a suitcase Colin has yet to unpack — even though we have been home from our holiday for nearly two weeks.

The double bed behind me is hidden under piles of clothes, some dirty, some clean, and bags containing goodness knows what.

Shoes and trainers form a ring around the bed and inside a vast wardrobe are shirts so old they could star in a remake of Saturday Night Fever, a broken TV, piles of old magazines and books, old travel tickets, loose change, plugs, wires, tech stuff from the days when phones were bricks and enough exercise aids to equip a gym.

I sometimes joke to friends that Colin, 44, a managing editor, has commandeered the room as his walk-in wardrobe, but I am not laughing. Inside, I am crying with desperation.

Lauren says Colin still has bikes in the shed which are covered in rust and 30-years-old (stock image)

I chose this man to be my husband. I did not choose to be married to his ever-growing pile of stuff.

Women, apparently, are obsessed with shoes. But the Imelda Marcus in our house doesn’t have a weakness for Jimmy Choo. He has a beard and an obsession with Nike.

And it’s not just shoes. He can’t throw away anything. In the shed, he has bike racks for his bike racks as well as cycles that are orange with rust and date back 30 years. He claims that he is keeping them for when our sons, aged seven and eight, are old enough to ride them.

He says this with his eyes misting over, no doubt sentimentally recalling his teenage adventures in the saddle, while I struggle not to shout: ‘Stop being so ridiculous and get rid of them!’

I should have picked up on the signs when he took me to meet his mother at her home in Kent 13 years ago when we were dating.

We stayed the night in his old bedroom, where — aged 31 — he still had a wardrobe packed with clothes and sports gear and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with music tapes, picture albums and American football annuals.

His mother ribbed him about redecorating and needing to empty a few cupboards to make more space, but instead of noting the determined glint in her eye, I kept thinking how cute it was they were still so close.

We have been married almost ten years and that wardrobe and bookshelf are still waiting to be emptied and my mother-in-law has a look of tired resignation.

It’s a look that petrifies and motivates me. As a result, Colin and I argue about his stuff at least once a week.

His clutter is the third person in our marriage, to the point that if it was a choice between me or his things, I believe he’d be happier throwing me, rather than his possessions, in a bin bag.

He claims everything is essential — yes, even those unread, still sealed magazines — and gets apoplectic if I dare to move anything without his permission.

I bought him Birkenstock sandals for his birthday, which he loved — but he left the empty box beside our bed for weeks, until I dumped it into the recycling bin to the sounds of his protests.

‘Why can’t I throw it?’ I asked. ‘It’s been sitting there for weeks.’

‘I’ll sort it when I’m ready,’ he said.

It’s the same with his coat. Every day he comes home from work and dumps it on a chair in the dining room, even though we have a perfectly good coat rack in the hall.

Colin claims that everything he keeps hold of is essential, even old, unread magazines that are still in their original wrapping (stock image)

It’s a small thing I know, but I feel he has turned our dining room into a dumping ground.

I’ve tried talking to Colin about this in a reasonable and, admittedly, non-reasonable manner. But he thinks what he’s doing is perfectly normal.

We are about to redecorate the upstairs of our four-bedroom house in North London — not to make it more aesthetically pleasing, but to create storage space for all Colin’s gubbins. If I can’t beat it, then at least bury it. I have never sought to label my husband’s propensity towards the accumulation of things, but a number of bells ring when I do some research.

Hoarding occurs more frequently in men than women, and the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual describes ‘hoarding disorder’ as characterised by extreme and enduring difficulties in parting with possessions, even if they have no tangible value (that shoebox!).

The afflicted also tend to have powerful urges to retain items and become upset about chucking them out. A 2009 study of 5,000 twins at King’s College, London, showed hoarding can be genetically influenced.

Possessions are an extension of our identity: if you’re not confident about who you are, maybe due to not being allowed to express yourself as a child, that anxiety can take the form of holding on to things. Linda Blair, clinical psychologist

Research in 2013 professed it to have evolutionary origins, with hoarders having an urge to stockpile resources for times of scarcity.

Perhaps my husband is keeping all his old magazines just in case there is a nuclear winter and we have nothing to read.

Linda Blair, clinical psychologist and author of Key To Calm, believes hoarding may mainly affect men because women are more socially aware and prefer not to unleash their anxieties in this way. Anxiety, she believes, is often the cause.

‘Hoarding can be a reaction to another situation,’ she says. ‘I once had a client who was a surgeon, a profession that is precise and exact, and hoarding became his release — a way to be messy and untidy and relieve the extreme pressures of his job.’

It may also be evidence of an identity crisis.

She says: ‘Possessions are an extension of our identity: if you’re not confident about who you are, maybe due to not being allowed to express yourself as a child, that anxiety can take the form of holding on to things.’

I can’t say my husband seems anxious and his job is busy but not super-pressured, but then his hoarding hasn’t reached epic ‘can’t get through the front door’ levels. Yet.

In the meantime, Blair has some advice that I plan on heeding. ‘First, try not to shout at him as this may make him more anxious and hoard more,’ she says.

‘If you can, give him a space that is his and his alone and let him do all the collecting and hoarding he wants in it. This way you’re setting clear boundaries, but also allowing him to indulge.’

Now I just have to mark out the allocated space. I wonder if a shoebox will do?