‘SHUT up, I’m trying to get to sleep.’ ‘Dad – she’s turned the light on again.’ ‘I am getting a migraine listening to you crying.’

That’s the Princess. Not every night, but at least three nights out of seven, she calls out these cries of anguish, these shouted SOSs from her top bunk like the night watchman in the crow’s nest of a galleon being attacked by pirates.

And below, on the bottom bunk, there’s the cause of her bedtime ills: Little Red. The Clockwork Orange. The Mighty Atom. Pandemonium in PJs. The terry-towelling terrorist.

Most kids believe there is a monster under his or her bed. With the Princess, it’s her sister.

This is a scenario played out across the world, I imagine. Two kids, one bedroom. Both growing up. The elder needing to get away from the younger. Arguments, resentment, back-arching – Little Red is a seventh dan at back-arching.

Without getting all Guardian about it, we all know we are lucky to have a roof over our heads while hordes of wandering nomads traverse the wastelands of Keighley living in abandoned bus shelters and eating stray dogs. But the fact is, the kids are outgrowing their room.

To be fair, it really is big enough for only one child (or a spookily quiet spinster lodger called Murran, who collects thimbles and eats only soup – but let’s not jump the gun, the kids are only seven and four and they haven’t moved out yet).

The Princess really needs her own gaff.

So what’s the alternative? An extension is out of the question, what with the looming recession. It was said, only a couple of months ago, that people weren’t moving – they were adding on to what they’d already got. Now people aren’t even doing that. So instead of adding bricks and mortar, they’re just bricking themselves.

We could buy a sturdy tent, such as a West Show marquee, and put it up in the back garden for one of them to live in. She could invite friends round for sleepovers and they could make miniature gardens or show each other prize marrows.

Maintenance would be cheap and easy – a needle and thread – and whenever it rained we could always chuck out a bar of soap and shout: ‘Bath night.’

But the thing is, she would enjoy that. She might be a princess, but given the chance to go feral, she’d be off on all fours like Romulus and Remus to a wolf sanctuary.

A camper van? No. We’d only find it parked in a different place in the morning and the Princess with sand in her slippers and a vast, new, flotsam and jetsam collection on the dashboard.

So the only alternative is to go up into the attic. Which meant me, last Saturday, going up there and clearing out, rebagging, reboxing, sorting out, tidying up, throwing out and moving from one side to the other 20 years’ worth of cack The Gaffer and I have hoarded.

Why is it only humans that collect stuff they will never need again? You don’t find ants putting aside lengths of carpet that might come in handy some day. Or zebras saving sets of encyclopaedias that are so out of date that in the technology section computers are the size of cars and in the Germany bit of the Berlin Wall is still up.

The stuff we’ve saved would be too poor for a Third World car-boot sale.

We have four computers up there. They start with a Macintosh 128K. Then there’s a Brother word processor, then a big off-white PC thing, then a Bondi Blue iMac G3. It’s like a mini museum, a history of computers.

We have bin liner after bin liner of saved clothes. Leather blousons, berets, knitted coats with duffle-coat-style toggles, corduroy skirts, his-and-hers pinstriped suits, a bum bag.

There are Lycra garments up there (hers), waterproof items (mine) and 100%-polyester goods (both guilty), as well as shoes that wouldn’t look out of place on a bad taste-themed bus party.

I idled idly at my box of 33s. Would I ever again boogie on down to the mindlessly misogynistic southern rock of Jim Dandy and his hoary, hairy band of backwoods rockers, Black Oak Arkansas, or slip into a silk kimono and try to seduce The Gaffer with the erotic strings and swelling woodwind of Pasquale Dagom and the Sounds of Love Orchestra (‘Here are 12 reasons to get closer to your partner, 12 ways to unveil the sensual movements of the day, to let the music carry your troubles away and to let love in,’ said the label)?

Would I heckers like. So why don’t I just get shot of them all?

Then there were the two electronic keyboards, never used, two pushchairs, a car seat and a papoose, all very much used (in fact, the papoose still had dried, ancient baby food fossilised to the front), a box of cassettes, mostly home-recorded, enough books to start a mobile library, lamp bases that need an Ikea showroom in 1992 to ever look good, a box of Habitat hessian curtains (likewise), a suitcase full of tinned and jarred food (when did we become Mormons?) and, probably most embarrassing of all, reams of notebooks, sheets of A4 and lined refill pads of my own writing.

There is a reason why some things are locked up in an attic and that is so they are never seen again.

I looked at the clutter, the memories – both thankfully forgotten or now, regretfully revived – saw the small square of bright sunlight swathe through the dark, the dust rising, the insects scuttling and realised: this is no place for a Princess.

I’m sorry, love, but you and your sis will have to share until the storm is over.

Covered in sweat, dirt and cobwebs, body bent double because of the low roof like some grubby Gollum, I eased down the ladder and slid back down to earth.

Then I remembered something.

Phonebook. M for marquees.

‘Hello. Do you have any ex-West Show tents?’