My response to the prospect of ten days off work without a Mediterranean holiday to divert me – which is how I like to waste valuable household chore time in the summer – is Pavlovian.

This time, I say to myself, every single time, I really will convert our house back into a normal abode.

A place where family members can get away from each other to mutter irritably to their hearts’ content, rather than opening the door to a supposedly unoccupied room and finding it impenetrable because it’s stacked wall to wall with rubbish.

By rubbish, I don’t mean that we store our wheelie bins indoors. Though it’s a thought, especially in the winter months, when one of us – or I, as I’m better known – gets up before seven to present our latest offering of food scraps and wet kitchen roll to those good men, the refuse collectors.

No, I mean the rest of the detritus that contaminates our family members’ domestic lives.

About ten years ago, we realised that our house was too small for our stuff. Everywhere was stacked with books and electrical equipment that was obsolete or missing a plug, and vases with cracks and bank statements and fliers with offers on pizzas or colonic irrigation (and not necessarily mutually exclusive offers, at that).

There were two possible approaches to that problem. Grow up or grow out. We took the second one, which involved signing up architects and builders and eager mortgage advisors, and grew the house out to almost twice its original size, adding an extra living room and bedroom and a large loft.

In retrospect, given that we all appear to share much of our genetic material with magpies, maybe we should have taken the other, less expensive option, and been adult about it. Maybe we should have just got rid of some of the useless stuff instead. Because now what has happened is the stuff has grown to fit the house.

The pizza offers and the bank statements didn’t stop coming. They just never made it as far as the shredder or the bin. The reason that the bin men round here like us is because we make their lives easy. We don’t burden them with the extra weight of loads of mashed up trees. Oh no. We keep all the paper stuff safely at home. For years.

And we can’t accept that video players won’t make a come back. Or that the Inland Revenue won’t suddenly want to see our current account statement number 138 from 1996 at some point in the future. Which is why, some day, I plan to sort out two decades’ worth of bank statements into numerical order and file them. With ten days’ holiday on my hands, what better time than now?

My husband recognises the signs and rolls his eyes. You’re not going to have a clear-out, are you, he sighs as I pass him in the hall carrying two dead printers and pushing a collapsed wicker wastepaper bin with my foot.

We have to get rid of this rubbish, I say, as he tries to wrestle a printer from my grip. They don’t make cartridges for these any more, I tell him, wrestling it back.

I add it to the collection of late 20th century memorabilia that’s accumulating near the front door. There are some tell-tale spaces on the floor where he has been surreptitiously retrieving items while I’ve been in the loft gathering more. When I realise that he’s rescued all the paperback books I’ve earmarked for the boot I stop for breath.

You are not helping things, I say. Books are not like relatives. You’ve read it. You’re not planning to read it again. Therefore, it’s taking up valuable airspace. We can’t keep on adding to our pile for ever.

He puts the kettle on. Funny you should talk about our pile, he says.

I’ve been wondering whether this house is really big enough for us.