You never know when your hoard of obsolete hardware might come in handy. Just wait...

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Internal hard drives with dust, fluff and shit on.Bundles of CAT5 all tangled like string.These are some of my least favourite things.

I like my house to be zen. Unfortunately, I am a hoarder, so it’s not. At least, my office isn’t. The rest of the house is so neat that three years after moving into it I still haven’t built up the courage to hang a picture. Instead, they remain stacked against a wall at the back of the cellar.

Before we moved to sunnier climes, my unnecessary office junk would spill over into the corridor. At this point, I would stick it in a box and put it in the garage. On each visit to the garage, I would find that the contents of previous boxes had somehow multiplied; the one I had put there just a week earlier had already begun making nests.

The car, of course, had to be parked in the drive outside, the garage being full of junk.

These days, we don’t have a garage, so I put the junk in the cellar along with the pictures.

Mme D tried to educate me out of this hoarding habit by making me watch TV programmes with titles such as Extreme Hoarders, the sequel I Can’t Stop Hoarding and the spin-off series Smelly Old Fat Bastards Who Don’t Wash And Won’t Throw Anything Away Because Guess What They Are Hoarders.

Occasionally this did the trick. After each episode, she would drag some item of junk out of the garage and ask: “What is this and do you still want to keep it?” My answer was usually along the lines of, “I can’t remember and no”, and off we trudged to the rather fabulous recycling centre run by our borough council.

In my defence, I should perhaps qualify what it is I hoard: old and surplus electronic kit that I don’t need any more.

Please also understand that I don’t intentionally collect the stuff. I am not a Collector. I do not keep a glass-fronted presentation cupboard full of differently coloured 3.5in floppy disks, for example, nor do I trawl eBay for Palm IIIs and Newtons.

There are exceptions, of course, such as the autograph-hunter’s book I slowly filled up during the 1970s. Surely some of these autographs of the rich and famous must be worth a lot of money now.

My mother was a collector, mind. All those ghastly dinner plates depicting the Queen that she put on the wall might be worth a few quid now, if I hadn’t turfed the lot into a skip. Me, I’m not big on nostalgia.

Oh, and there’s my 1980s Sony Walkman.

For younger readers who don’t know about such things, this is a Sony WM-4, an early personal stereo – only the fourth Walkman model to be released after Sony ditched the name ‘Stowaway’ – that played compact cassettes. It wasn’t my first or last personal tape player but it was the only one not to fall to bits or to sound like shit. It looks and weighs like a brick and takes four AA batteries which deplete by the time you’ve played all the way to the end of side B of your C90. Clip the mean bastard to your belt and you find yourself listing involuntarily to one side.

I’ve not used it for 25 years but it still works and I have a vague notion that a science museum might want to acquire it one day, and that’s why I haven’t disposed of it yet. This symbolises my problem: in wanting to be zen, I am horrified by modern disposable culture. The promise of recycling isn’t enough when something isn’t actually broken beyond repair.

So it’s only natural that I keep several large boxes of old gear and components… “just in case”.

This particular box contains assorted mains leads, monitor cables, Ethernet cables, old mice, a spare internal Blu-ray drive and other shit that I don’t need at the moment but I might do in the future. This junk came with stuff I bought or stuff I threw away.

For example, when a monitor breaks down, I dispose of it – by “dispose”, I mean it gets relocated to the cellar – but why should I send the still-fully-functional HDMI cable and mains lead to accompany it to landfill? When my old floor-standing PC has died one last time and can no longer be upgraded or resuscitated, why should I dump a perfectly good Blu-ray drive along with the burnt-out motherboard?

OK, so there are a dozen VGA cables in there too, so what? One day, I will need one, just you wait. That’s the crux of the problem: you can pretty much guarantee that you won’t need a particular obsolete cable until shortly after you have disposed of it. Experience has proven time and time again that within a week of ditching a long-shelved hunk of plastic and electronics, you will suddenly have an urgent use for it.

This has happened to me so often that I can no longer attribute the phenomenon to coincidence. Thrown away that useless old NAS drive casing? A departmental manager will very shortly knock on your door and demand one. Think you'll never need those massive SCSI cables ever again? The day after they've gone, I guarantee a client will call up in a panic wondering whether you have any. Surely no one needs any of that Firewire gear any more? Well, you won't until you throw it away, whereupon a queue of colleagues will form at your desk asking how to download "critical" video from 20-year-old DV camcorders.

My conclusion is that it's all part of their plan. The next time you cart an old piece of kit to your recycling centre, prick up your ears: you might hear it chuckling, "Heh, just you wait..."

A while back, a colleague uploaded to Facebook a photo of an external 3.5in floppy drive he'd just rediscovered at the back of his den. Practically everyone else in the group fired straight back: "Oh yeah, I've got one of those".

His was in black plastic. Mine is in grey with coffee-and-Marmite dappling. Here it is.

Let me make clear that I do not want this stupid floppy drive. It has no value and I am not fond of it. I wish I could be rid of it, along with boxes and boxes of other such junk.

But therein danger lies. On Monday, someone will inevitably call me up in desperation, offering to pay me "any amount of money" if I can rock up to their door within the hour brandishing a coffee-and-Marmite stained USB floppy drive. Oh, and they'll double the sum and pay in cash if I also have a couple of rope-thick, 1990s-style SCSI cables going spare.

Very occasionally – very, very occasionally, in fact – I am able to offload some of these things onto desperate people. I practically live for the day when someone asks: “Got a spare CAT5?” One small company I used to work for was pretty much kitted out with my old mice, keyboards, mains cables and routers. And mug mats. OK when I say “mug mats” I mean platters salvaged from old hard drives because it seemed such a waste to throw them away.

However, it gets depressing to keep finding outmoded and obsolete kit in these boxes such as pre-Bluetooth wireless mice whose drivers, obtainable only from obscure FTP sites and zipped up with Readmes written in Korean, no longer work anyway.

Much of my office and cellar is taken up by the boxes that my computer kit was delivered in – handy when you have to send things back for replacement under warranty, I suppose, although I’ve only ever had to do this once in my adult life. Even then, despite carefully packaging the item in its original nested boxes and plastic protective sheets, it was sent back to me smothered in cheap bubblewrap and sticky tape. They’d kept the boxes.

Result! The boxes are their problem now.

Apparently, philanthropist Melinda Gates – you know her, she used to be married to some nanobot virus billionaire or other – cherishes her useless Apple III.

It was a gift from her father, a NASA employee. The teenage Melinda kept the Apple III in her bedroom. She then lugged it over to Seattle when she got a job at Microsoft. She has hung on to it ever since.

Classic hoarding behaviour if you ask me. No one is going to tap at her door and ask her to look through a Visicalc spreadsheet or challenge her to a Tic-Tac-Toe championship. It is not useful and has no value except to a museum, or to fellow hoarders.

If you have ever wondered what might happen if you combined a hoarding mania with criminal tendencies, you get the notorious Cambrioleur de Niort. This middle-aged French nutjob was a career burglar who between 2012 and 2017 would break into houses and steal everything.

And when I say "everything", I mean it: not just cameras, credit cards and jewellery but clocks, ornaments, broken toys, pots and pans, open bottles of wine, cheap framed prints, moveable furniture, door handles – the lot.

He was so obsessive about amassing other people's possessions that on one occasion, having sold the burgled contents of a house to a "fence", he returned that night and burgled the stuff back again.

I wish I'd known about this bloke when I had to hire a home-clearance company to empty the parental pile of all those hideous regal dinner plates a few years ago. It would have been cheaper to mail the address to Le Cambrioleur de Niort along with a Budget Van Rental voucher and a set of house keys.

When he was eventually nabbed and dragged in front of the beak in 2018, reports say that it took the magistrate half an hour to summarise the inventory of the stolen goods they found in the burglar's Ali Baba-esque garage. When the magistrate finally finished reading out the list, he received a cheer and round of applause from those in attendance.

This puts things in perspective. I don't believe I'm quite at the stage where I begin breaking into your spare bedrooms to steal your crate of Nokia phone rechargers, DVI cables or Iomega Zip drives. Your door handles are safe too.

Nor will I be taking any collecting advice from Mrs Gates, given that 12 years ago she told a New York Times interviewer that she'd never allow an Apple product to cross her threshold. When asked whether she'd allow her own kids to have an iPod or iPad, she said "of course not" and claimed to own a Microsoft Zune instead.

That's right, one of these must-have, brick-thick hunks of junk:

I suppose it's possible that she keeps the Zune in the same packing crate as the Apple III (which I must assume she had helicoptered in through a skylight to avoid it crossing the threshold) but almost certainly for very different reasons. After all, the week after she chucks the Zune in the bin, someone will be sure to ring her up asking if she could lend them “a really shit portable media player”.

Ouch, I have just now tripped over some boxes in the kitchen. Why have I never noticed them before? Possibly because they weren’t there when I last looked. Mme D has dragged them out of the cellar for my consideration and judgement.

Another clear-out is overdue.

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