A Marie Kondo session led me to a glorious teenage hoard of beer mats, false beards and locks of hair

I went to town on my tops and jumper drawer and now the thing closes – which is a move in the right direction

Marie Kondo, the tiny Japanese decluttering guru, is one of the only things distracting us from the utter ghastliness of the world at the moment.

Personally I think Kondo’s recent success is no coincidence. People are sick of living in this rat’s nest of tangled discontent and here at last, is someone who can restore order, if not on the whole world, then at least in our own homes.

She has also been the source of something equally unusual in these times of great trouble: some great jokes.

I wish I could claim authorship of the following, but it isn’t mine. It popped up on my twitter timeline and it made me laugh for a good five seconds, which so far this year is a record.

Ok, here goes:

Cue a noise that comes out of my mouth that I haven’t heard in a while – oh, its laughing, that’s nice.

Here is a woman with a tidy knicker drawer and as we all know, a tidy knicker drawer equals a tidy mind.

I wonder if Theresa May tidies her own knicker drawer or whether she allows the No 10 cleaners the pleasure? I can’t imagine she’s got much time for doing it herself at the moment, I bet her bedroom is in chaos, I bet there are empty blister packs of headache pills all over the floor and loads of those microwaveable lavender neck bags that are meant to relax you littered about, I bet there’s a half bottle of whiskey on Philip’s bedside table, because the poor bloke must be so bored of her droning on every night.

Anyway, sometimes a good tidy is what we all need to clear the decks and move on, so I did a Kondo of my tops and jumper drawer and now the thing closes, which is a move in the right direction.

Obviously I refuse to go the whole Kondo because she currently advises that keeping 30 books is sufficient. Hmm, we’ve got 48 in the downstairs lavatory alone.

That said, I’m not one of those people that clings to books. The bathroom collection is all art-related, they’re mostly exhibition catalogues from shows we’ve seen. Do they spark joy? Yes, they’re staying. But I discard novels quite easily, am I going to read it again? No, do I know anyone who would like to borrow it? No, then off to the charity shop it goes.

Of course, the great thing about ebooks and audio books is that everything you’ve ever purchased is stored on that great big cloud in the sky, the one I can’t really think about because it makes my brain hurt, but all hail the cloud, because it’s a great space saver.

Weirdly, I think that with age I’m becoming more ruthless about discarding stuff. I no longer feel I have to save every memento of every experience, possibly because these days it’s so easy to capture memories on your phone.

Back in the Seventies when I was growing up without a smartphone, I clung on to everything, curating items from my teenage years, like a Victorian butterfly collector but without the butterflies and with a love bite, preserving random items in Sellotape and labelling them in my best handwriting.

Hence as I continued to Kondo my wardrobe I found a small green cardboard box, which once upon a time contained some Mary Quant “Little Luxuries”, bath cystals and talc.

In the box is a pile of itemised junk, including a “Pony – the little drink with the big kick” beer mat from a cricket club dance, a sugar cube from a cafe where I went to meet boys, a lucky bus ticket, a lock of my hair (age 15) plus a clump of false beard worn when I played Lord Morton in our all-girls school production of Vivat Vivat Regina (you can imagine the nick name).

There is a David Essex concert ticket, Dave Hill from Slade’s autograph, a detention slip signed by my late father “for not wearing a hat”, my autumn 1975 school timetable (quintuple art on a Monday morning) and a note written under a fifth-form desk telling a mate I was still seeing “Steve The Welder”.

Now, we all need a bit of Kondo in our lives, before we find ourselves the subject of a distressing Channel 5 documentary about hoarding, but that box contains the essence of me as a 15-year-old and nothing Marie could say could persuade me to part with it.

That said, thank god I grew out of the habit of preserving my own hair and wrapping up sugar cubes in Sellotape just because a fit lad smiled at me in a cafe.

Hmm, or have I?