I don’t know if there is a word for somebody who hates throwing anything away, but if there is, I’m one.

Which is unfortunate, because my wife has become fixated on getting rid of stuff “so the kids don’t have to do it when we are gone”.

Not that she’s the only one.

Several times, recently, I have heard people talk of doing just that, the reason being that they have been through that process of having to clear the house of an elderly relative after their sad death, and want to spare their own children the burden.

But I can think of much worse burdens you can leave your kids, and who’s to say they don’t want some of that stuff?

After all, there are various things I wish my mother had kept, and I would have liked to have been able to decide.

And if they do throw it all away after all, it will only cost them a few hours and the price of a skip.

The other day I got home to find my wife was nowhere to be seen, and it turned out that she was up in the loft, starting the process by bringing down an old suitcase full of photos, documents and other heirlooms.

I showed her the sheer futility of it all by taking her out to the garage to see all the things in there that I can never dump.

They include the various weird and wonderful - and sometimes beautiful - tools and gadgets I inherited from my father-in-law and two uncles.

All three of them were railwaymen, and therefore as important to our family history as those other three engineers: Isambard, Kingdom and Brunel.

So although I don’t have the necessary knowledge, skill, experience or patience to use many of them, their tools are far too precious to let go.

They include three hand drills that no man like me, who owns two electric ones, will ever need.

But the biggest pressure on space in our house comes from Things That Might Come in Handy One Day.

Things like magnets, stoppers, plumb bobs, bungs and all kinds of other things I have stripped down from machines and appliances when they stopped working.

Then there is my ‘materials’ box, which is the size of a beer crate, and contains off-cuts of every kind of plastic, metal, piping, string, felt, foam, rubber, etc, that you can think of – all kept in the (albeit unlikely) event that they will be needed for some project or repair.

I even keep a box of old imperial spanners, even though they probably don’t fit a single nut or bolt in the house - because everybody knows that the day after you get rid of something like that, you’ll need it.

So whenever my wife says we have to start getting rid of things before we die, the answer is simple: over my dead body.