You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest today is John Day,

who teaches English at King's College London and is the author of homing on pigeons dwelling and

why we return. His diary in the current issue of the LRB is on hoarding.

The piece began life, I think, as a review of possessed Rebecca Fulcoff's cultural history of hoarding,

but grew or accumulated or accreted into a more personal account. Hello, John, and thank you

for talking to me today. Thanks for having me.

Pleasure to be here.

I suppose the first question is, has your dad read the piece?

He's not read the piece, no. He is, I suppose he will imminently. He's, he's aware that I've written it,

partly because I was badgering him with questions about where he'd rank

himself on the clutter image rating, the scale used to diagnose the severity of a hoarder's problem.

But he's aware he has these tendencies, so I think it's not a surprise to him that they've been

written about.

Yeah, I mean, do you want to talk a bit about those images?

I know it's slightly odd to have her, maybe this is not the right medium to be talking about pictures, but talk

a bit about what those photos are and what they're used for. Yeah, so the clutter image rating is a series

of, as a diagnostic tool developed by psychiatrists to, I guess, produce a more objective measure of hoarding because

obviously it's a fairly subjective diagnosis. And so it's a series of images of different

rooms with different levels of clutter in them that were produced by two clutter researchers,

Frost and Skeeterkey,

who I think got their graduate students to fill a room up,

to fill various rooms up with loads of objects, bits of paper, random things,

...