Everyone has a vice, that thing that we do to self-medicate against the anxieties of life. Imagine your vice is to shop. And then you horde it. Imagine you shop and horde so excessively that you’ll buy absolutely anything: Two-forthe- price-of-one tile cleaner; five pairs of the same jeans; enough soft toys to fill a child’s room. You can’t use it all and it stacks up, pile upon toppling pile, until you can hardly find a pathway through your double-story home. Your vice is so bad that you are paraded on the Oprah Show before millions of gasping viewers.

This was one of the Queen of Talk’s latest offerings. A grandmother with so much time and money on her hands that she accumulated nearly 80 tons of junk in 30 years. The crates of unused handbags and shoes alone were worth about $60,000. There’s something obscene about this kind of excess, particularly when viewed from the southern end of a continent so rife with poverty, hunger, war, threadbare environments and failing states. But the truth is this: there, but for the random accident of birth, goes any one of us. Because the ‘illnesses’ associated with affluence could afflict anyone born into the right conditions.