SEVEN

As we lifted it down from the back of his van, Dodge looked at the piece of furniture doubtfully. It was one of those old-fashioned cupboards designed to contain a television, back in the days when people didn’t like to have their screens vulgarly on display but, at non-viewing times, kept them shut away in genteel invisibility.

Dodge’s was not the doubtful look of a junk merchant, about to say that nobody wanted to buy stuff like that these days. It was the doubtful look of an avid recycler, who just hadn’t yet worked out what he was going to turn the piece into. But who would soon come up with an idea. With Dodge, nothing was wasted.

The piece was maybe four foot high. Beneath the double doors, which hid the offensive screen, were a row of four narrow drawers. The whole thing was veneered in light oak, not in bad condition but just desperately old-fashioned. It had belonged to Minnie, one of the many people whose hoarding habit had started following the death of a spouse. Brought in by the social services, I had helped her tackle the problem and she, like a good few of my elderly clients, had become one of those on whom I still kept an eye. A visit every week or so, for which she was always excessively grateful. Another whose underlying problem was loneliness.

Minnie had been a London tour guide and retained an insatiable curiosity about the capital’s history. The clutter had started with her buying too many books on the subject and then, when her husband died, it had escalated into the accumulation of all kinds of stuff she was incapable of throwing away.

Having spent her entire professional life talking to people about London, it remained the basis of her conversation, and I would always leave our decluttering sessions full of new information. For instance, she’d tell me that a ‘Desmond’ was a ‘jacket’, Cockney Rhyming Slang based on the name of Desmond Hackett, a Daily Express football reporter from the 1950s. Or that the place name ‘Ealing’ derived from the seventh-century Old English ‘Gillingas’, meaning ‘the settlement of Gilla’s family’. Amazing, the stuff you learn as a declutterer.

A recent stroke, however, had made it impossible for Minnie to continue living on her own and condemned her to one of the local authority’s care homes. That meant emptying her house for sale to contribute to the costs. I don’t normally do basic clearance, but Minnie was so anxious about what was going to happen to her precious possessions that I said I would find good homes for them. And there couldn’t be a better home for anything than with Dodge.

‘Do you fancy a cup of tea?’

I did. I felt better than I had any right to after the amount of Jameson’s I’d put away the night before. But a cup of Dodge’s nettle tea would be just the thing to ease my residual dehydration. I followed him through into his living quarters.