IT TOOK me nearly three hours to travel seven miles to work on Tuesday morning.

Most of that time was spent sorting out my in-car CDs, dusting the dashboard and quietly fuming while edging up the Elland bypass.

Which would have been bad enough on a normal working day, but Tuesday was my first day in the new Examiner multimedia newsroom.

And I had boxes to unpack. Several of them.

Speaking as someone who has moved house seven times – not including a couple of temporary moves without furniture – I’m of the opinion that there’s only one thing worse than packing and that’s unpacking.

I feel the same way about holidays – as it’s usually me who does both the packing and the unpacking for all of us.

Clearing out our old desks last week I thought I’d decluttered with a ruthlessness that would have made Attila the Hun proud.

Judging by the piles of ‘rubbish’ that appeared in the middle of the newsroom I was not alone. It made me smile when I thought back to the comment of a previous editor, some 20 years ago who said we were entering the era of the ‘paperless office’. I don’t think we’ve got there quite yet.

But after unpacking a box which contained little more than an assortment of miniature perfume bottles (too pretty to throw away), a carton of ribbons (ditto), four rulers; three staplers (two of which I don’t remember packing), a whistle; magnifiying glass, two tubs of vitamin tablets and a sheaf of thankyou letters from grateful readers (definitely too precious to chuck out), I have come to realise that I am an incorrigible HOARDER.

By the time I reached the bottom of box four, unearthing pictures of Firstborn when he was barely more than a foetus, along with an ancient black-and-white photo of myself in the Examiner’s original Ramsden Street newsroom, I’d completed a satisfyingly sentimental trip down memory lane and it was almost lunchtime.

And therein lies the problem with decluttering. It just takes too long, especially at home.

It’s quite possible to while away half a day emptying one corner of the attic or one small overhead cupboard.

A friend of mine, who was overwhelmed with clutter while moving house, said it gave her morbid nightmares.

"I started worrying that if I died and someone came to clear the house they’d find all these boxes of beauty products, rubbish and jumpers.

"And what would they think of me?’’

"You’ll be dead,’’ said I, "so what does it matter?’’

But she’s one of those people to whom appearances and tidy cupboards matter a great deal.

Life coaches and all those other personal enhancement gurus say that clutter is very bad for us and I think, on balance, I’d have to agree.

I once spent an extremely pleasant afternoon with an image consultant who had offered to ‘clear my wardrobe’.

At the end of the session there were four bin bags full of clothes that were too big, too small, duplicated several times over and ‘gardening clothes’.

"How much gardening do you actually do?’’ she’d asked.

And so I have vowed not to allow my new multimedia desk to become a repository for any more ribbons (taken from press releases, if you’re wondering) or whistles (ditto).

But it’s probably best if I don’t promise anything else.