Hoarding or collecting? Where does the Royal Collection draw the line in the sand?

And even if she was a hoarder, is hoarding sometimes a credit to the hoarder rather than the tragic psychological disorder it is usually portrayed as being?

A report in the online US magazine The Onion says that Her Majesty was a hoarder and that in her will she leaves to her already overwhelmed-looking son the 35,000 editions of the pro-monarchy Daily Telegraph newspaper she collected over every day of her long, long reign.

Coincidentally, and this very week, the online London Review of Books has published an engaging piece about hoarders and hoarding based on a new book, a cultural history of hoarding and hoarders.

Jon Day's wittily-entitled essay Hoardiculture is his review of historian Rebecca Falkoff's Possessed.

A low-level hoarder myself and so very interested in the subject, I gave each of the pieces a rapt reading (while not sure The Onion was telling the truth).

Dear Reader, if you are a hoarder, just how possessed are you by your hobby/habit/affliction?

Jon Day discusses one possible way of measuring your plight (or perhaps, depending on how you look at it, your achievement).

"[There is] the Clutter Image Rating (2008), [an illustrated] diagnostic tool designed ... to replace vague self-definitions of hoarding with a more objective measure.

"The CIR consists of images of different interiors - kitchen, bedroom, living room - which are progressively filled with objects. In the first picture of the living room the space is more or less empty ... by the ninth, the room is barely visible beneath a teetering mountain of objects."

Day testifies that "I grew up in a house that was somewhere between level five (hoarding that might require some 'professional assistance') and level seven".

The CIR is a mildly helpful tool but its preoccupation with visual measurements is not a wholly satisfactory measurement of a hoarder's hoardiness. My hoarding (though focused and intense) is almost all done in (bulging) cupboards and so would hardly rate on the CIR scale.

Then, too, a hoarder with a superabundance of spaces to hoard things and of tidying-up minions, will appear to do no cluttering whatsoever. In the event of the Queen really having accumulated 35,000 copies of a daily newspaper, one would have noticed no clutter at all in a servant-rich Buckingham Palace of 800 rooms.

By contrast if, as one suspects, there are crazed suburban hoarders of The Canberra Times, they may be living among level eight hells of towering, teetering cliffs of newsprint.

Her Majesty may not have hoarded the Daily Telegraph but I have on many occasions been to exhibitions of her and her family's hoarded artworks and other objects of wonder.

One day at the Queen's Gallery at Holyroodhouse Palace in Edinburgh I went, marvelling, to the Canaletto in Venice exhibition of just some (200 paintings and many, many drawings) of Her Majesty's fabulous collection of the works of the fabulous Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697-1768).

As a lifelong admirer of Canaletto, but never able to afford anything of his other than one cheap print of his, I remember I spent a few hot republican and socialist moments at the Holyroodhouse exhibition brooding about the chasm of wealth and privilege existing between monarchs and commoners. But I didn't dwell on that, since to dwell on mankind's criminal inequalities is to drive oneself mad.

Meanwhile, though the Royal Collection, as it is officially called, is a collection of more than one million objects, especially paintings, drawings and other works of art

And of course collecting and hoarding are not always the same thing, although the distinction between them is surely a little blurred.

MORE WARDEN:

Perhaps one way of testing whether one is a hoarder or only (only!) a collector is to ask oneself truthfully if one can bear the thought of any of one's accumulated possession's being given away or thrown away. How might Her Majesty have reacted to the suggestion that one of her Canaletto paintings be given away (perhaps to the deserving poor, perhaps to adorn and beautify a wall of some premises, a prison, say, housing unfortunates)?

Here I inject the confession that I know that I am not just a collector but a diagnosed hoarder of flower vases (and of objects that can be used as flower vases) because the very idea that even one of them might be tossed out to make some room in the bulging cupboard that contains them all causes me high anxiety.

Eerily, my hoard of flower vases is almost exactly the same size as the collection-hoard of royally owned Canalettos in the aforementioned exhibition at the Holyroodhouse gallery.

How might Her Majesty have reacted to the suggestion that she give away one of her Canaletto paintings so as to do some good in the underprivileged world beyond the other-worldly ultra-privileged world beyond her palace? Had she refused, angrily, perhaps setting her savage corgis on the commoner making the shocking suggestion, that would have shown her to be a true hoarder.

But the late Queen and I, even if hoarders, may still be OK. Jon Day ends his piece with the poignant thought that "When I was younger, I was embarrassed by my father's hoard."

"Now I'm sort of proud of it. It speaks of his eccentricity, the range and idiosyncrasy of his interests, his admirable indifference to cleaning. It's fecund and generative, if slightly overwhelming, like a work of art, or a stormy sea. In my father's hoarding I now see a commitment, not to utility or beauty, but to memory, and meanings."