It's time to get tough before the clutter totally takes over

A lot of the items cleared out in each of my purges – apart from ancient bottles of cough medicine, the odd cookbook we've never used, and gizmos and potions that promised but didn't perform cleaning miracles – are either clothing and shoes, ornaments, sad old cushions and pillows, books that weren't so great or videos/DVDs.

A few years ago I reasoned that our adolescent children would never again return to the joys of Disney animations, and by the time any children of theirs came along, films would be watched in some as-yet-undreamed-of format. The stack of videos went to a PTA fundraiser.

Anyone would think I'd thrown out ancient family silverware. As far as our daughters were concerned I had. "That's part of our cultural heritage. How would you like it if we got rid of your Hepburn/Tracy boxed set or Gone With the Wind?"

Fair point, but children create a lot of clutter without, in my experience, doing anything to keep it in check. I'm afraid I have cultivated a zero-tolerance attitude towards items that are neither useful nor beautiful, or anything without strong sentimental value.

My reply to them is that if they want to keep anything they haven't watched or used for years sacrosanct then they should store it in their own room. According to a new survey by insurers Esure, teenagers have gear worth more than 5,000 in their bedrooms anyway. What difference will a few more videos and DVDs make?

Only the hundreds of little Beanie Baby bears are allowed a space – albeit in a big basket inside the airing cupboard. At the time that they were at the height of their popularity, we were told they would be valuable collector's items in future, and considering the ridiculous number we have in good condition, it seemed foolish to apply the usual rules to this collection. You never know – if they do prove valuable, then they might help towards a deposit for a car or university debts.

The question of what to keep for posterity is a difficult one, which gets ever more vexed as you get older and are likely to inherit bits and pieces of furniture and bric-a-brac.

Curators of museums (God knows what their homes are like...) think of all the matter of everyday life as potential "artefacts", and the British Museum wants us all to keep diaries of our humdrum lives, which would keep quite a few more of them in jobs. But you can't go through life accumulating more and more goods, carrying them from home to home, just for the sake of it.

Another survey, by YouGov and the self-storage company SafeStore, reveals that many people regret dumping items soon after they've had a clear-out – the top ten objects of regret incude photographs, school books, games consoles and childhood musical instruments. But many average homes are bursting at the seams, and we can't all afford to rent storage space. Surely, if something is interesting enough to keep, it should be close at hand?

To my mind, if you don't like something enough to live with it, then with few exceptions, you should find it another home via charity shop, auction or gift. Long-term storage in a warehouse is surely just ducking the issue.

We have friends with large loft and garage spaces who keep sealed boxes containing almost every piece of writing, art work, handmade Christmas calendar or Easter card, plus all the exercise books and work sheets their little darlings created or wrote in during their school careers.

Every birthday card to mummy or daddy ("Deer mumy. I love you lots and lots and lots. Love, Jessica. PS the rabits on the front are you, me and dady.") is lovingly preserved, too. But what's it all for? Do they really imagine that their children or their children's children will be delighted at being presented with evidence of maths classes from the age of five to 16? After all, you do tend to remember the memorable bits of life anyway.

Of course there is some happy medium to be struck – I have kept a few sample pictures and an exercise book from each school year. Willy-nilly hoarding of every kind of ephemera, just in case it might be significant at some point, seems daft. A good exercise is to ask yourself why you want to keep that ugly old vase. "Because it belonged to Auntie Doris" possibly isn't that good an answer. She's hardly likely to smite you down if you can't live with it, is she?

We can't be expected to take a historian's view of our lives, preserving everything. That ways lies madness – and most of it will almost certainly end up in a skip anyway. For me, the litmus test from now on is whether I like an item enough to keep it somewhere I will see it everyday without going stark staring bonkers within a week.

I can't say fairer than that, can I?