A problem with moving house is that you have to sift through all the crap you’ve been happily hiding away for months. For the most part, this can be quite cathartic, as you mercilessly cull anything with more than a millimetre of dust on it, casting out vast sacks of rubbish into the gaping maw of the recycling bins, but there’s always a few things that need thinking about.

Over the last few years I’ve moved around a lot, usually living out of rooms better suited to a wailing infant than a wailing me, so this, plus my policy of regularly ebaying CDs and games in order to finance new CDs and games, has meant that I’ve never had much of an opportunity to accumlate more than a few metric tonnes of junk.

Despite this, I still end up running into things that I realise I’ve been carrying around with me for the last decade without any reason beyond a certain reluctance to throw them away, a vague sense that I ought to keep them. For instance, my Priory School National Record of Achievement, an A4 burgundy-and-gold-trim hardback folder for my GCSE certificates. Seeing as your GCSEs stop being relevant about half a day after you start college or get a job, why do I still have this? I can’t imagine I’ll ever be in a situation now where I have to prove to someone that I once got a D in French.

Then there’s the multi-RF adaptor I have, which allows me to plug in a Playstation, a Saturn and an N64 in one end and the other end into a TV. Do I own a Playstation, a Saturn or an N64? No. Do I own a TV? No! Why do I own this useless piece of equipment? I have no idea! Can’t throw it away — seems wasteful — but can’t sell it either because nobody wants it. So I carry it with me.

Or how about the Dreamcast? Ah, the Dreamcast — there’s another article in that altogether, but the fact is that it’s yellowing with age and exposure to sunlight, the batteries in the memory unit are dead and the raised ridges on the controller buttons and joystick have worn away. It whirrs, it clicks, it gets confused and can’t remember what the date is. It does get used, but only when I move house and it happens to be unpacked for an hour or two, and I’ll play the first twenty minutes of Shenmue for the millionth time.

I’d love to have it wired up permanently but in its current state it’d be like having Albert Steptoe sitting in my front room. No, it needs to go, but again, I don’t want to just throw it away, but I can’t sell it either — I’ve been told I’d get just 20p for each controller and perhaps £3 for the console. Pffft, they insult me.

You think, well, these things obviously don’t take up much space so can’t be that worth worrying about, but when, every few months or every couple of years, your entire life has to fit in the back of a Citroen Xara Picasso, everything counts.