Sort Your Life Out (BBC)
The word is SABLE — an acronym for Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy. In other words, you’ve got far too much stuff.
My bookshelves went SABLE many years ago, and I can’t bear chucking out anything I haven’t read yet — or anything I’ve read and enjoyed.
There are so many boxes of second-hand paperbacks in the loft, our ceiling is cracking.
That doesn’t stop me from buying more, though these days it’s almost always e-books, for constraints of cash as well as space.
If I live to be 110, read a book a week and never buy any more, I should get through about half my library.
It’s madness. And, like all irrational behaviour, it has deep psychological roots. I reckon my problem began in boyhood, when my pocket money was a shilling a week and a new Biggles adventure cost three shillings and sixpence.
You don’t need to remember pre-decimal currency to appreciate the difficulty this posed.
Stacey Solomon confronted an extreme case of compulsive shopping on Sort Your Life Out.
This show’s winning trick is to empty the house of every possession, from the beds to the teaspoons, and lay everything out on the floor of a warehouse
Pictured: Mother-of-three Sheeny, who was approaching her 40th birthday with a hoard of clothes that could fill a megastore, many of them unworn and with the labels still attached
Mother-of-three Sheeny, in Coventry, was approaching her 40th birthday with a hoard of clothes that could fill a megastore, many of them unworn and with the labels still attached.
As well as overflowing from the wardrobes, clothes were crammed into 28 suitcases and dumped in heaps on the chairs, beds and sofas.
There were 437 pairs of shoes. Even Imelda Marcos might think that was excessive.
It was a similar story in the kitchen, where the worktops were piled high with more than 1,000 utensils. How Sheeny found room to do any cooking was a mystery.
This show’s winning trick is to empty the house of every possession, from the beds to the teaspoons, and lay everything out on the floor of a warehouse. Viewed like that, the scale of the stockpile becomes plain.
Stacey roped in her husband, Joe Swash, and 16-year-old son Zachary to help unpack the house, though it must have taken a bigger team than that.
I’d like to see more of the logistics, with the fleets of removal lorries, instead of just cutting straight to the moment of the big reveal, when the warehouse doors trundle upwards and the family see all their worldly goods in neat rows stretching into the distance.
Most of all, I’d like to see a financial breakdown. How much does a hoard that size cost to accumulate?
Sheeny owned 6,568 items of clothing, the most ever seen in five series of the show.
Call it (at a wild guess) an average of 20 quid a garment. That’s more than £130,000 on clothes . . . and given Sheeny’s fondness for stylish clobber, it could be a lot more.
The shock of those sums might help shopaholics to rein back.
I’ve just thought about how much all those boxes of unread books must have cost me . . . and I’m certainly never buying another one again, definitely absolutely not.
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