Time to chuck out the chintz

Once upon a time, a cluttered room was called a cosy room. Now, clutter tends to get called junk. Minimalism has the moral high ground. Space is good; junk is bad, and anyone who can't reveal the clean, clear lines of their living space needs help.

The high priestess of the anti-clutter movement is Dawna Walter, who runs storage shop The Holding Company, and who has been dispensing hints on how to tidy up our lives for seven years. Now she's moving onto TV. Starting this evening on BBC2, she stars in The Life Laundry, in which she puts helplessly cluttered families through the indignity of lining up their junk on the lawn, facing up to it and letting it go.

How do we feel about this? Relieved - because here comes salvation? Awestruck at how she does it? Personally, I wish everyone would stop telling me to get rid of my "junk". It is part of my life - part of me.

What Dawna is really against is holding on to things that no longer have a purpose. She's into Reiki and it has made her appreciate "the huge emotional impact clutter can have on our lives, and what an energising experience it is to clear it all away".

It depends on your definition of junk - I can see there's little point in keeping broken gadgets, A-level notes or clothes that don't fit. But I moved house recently and while lots of junky-junk got ditched, with me came a record collection that had been stuck in the loft for years, a mass of books for which there hadn't been shelf-space, boxes of photographs and 30 years' worth of diaries and letters, most of which are taking up space in the garage, along with old beds, several hundred ageing cassette tapes and one tiny, un-roadworthy car. And all my late-Eighties power-shouldered jackets. What would Dawna think?

Books are a contentious subject. I love books for themselves, even if they're dog-eared old paperbacks. A space-clearer would chuck them. Some people can do that - such as my nanny, Amanda, whose flat is beautifully clear. If she buys a new ornament, she dumps an old one. "I don't keep things I don't need," she says. "Why keep a book I'm not going to read again?" I can, and so can my friend Antonia: "It's a chunk of your mind you're throwing away," she says. "I still like looking at my A-level Tennyson text-books, with all the underlinings." Dawna might allow books to stay, because at least they can be marshalled onto shelves. Photographs should be put in albums, framed on walls, or ditched.

Letters should be chucked, because "holding on to old words is a reminder of who we were at that time. Releasing them allows us not to play the same role again in another situation". I'd have thought that having a reminder of who we were, and how we came to be what we are, is no bad thing.

Dawna advises: "Rid yourself of those items that may be associated with unpleasant memories or no longer have any meaning to you." Fair enough, but my junk is stuffed with meaning - and good memories.

Dawna might say I have emotional problems in letting the past go. She might be right, but if you came around to tea, you wouldn't see why I've got a bee in my bonnet about junk. The sitting room is often clutter-free. But I know that if I faced up to the garage and threw out all my old records, diaries and books, I wouldn't feel energised - I'd feel bereft. And I'd wonder what to put in their place.

The Life Laundry, Wednesdays, 8.30pm, BBC2.