Colm O’Regan: A Squash and A Squeeze book has one of the more useful messages any adult could learn

Getting me to let a book out of this house is like trying to get the council to put somewhere on the derelict sites register. 

The book has to be an active danger to passersby. And about 18 years need to pass.

So to kick the can down the road, we’re starting with some of the children’s books. 

(I mean the babyish ones they no longer look at because they are growing up. We’re not ripping words out of their little hands like some mistrustful medieval peasant.) 

There are sentimental books that won’t get the boot. Books that were read again and again AND AGAIN. 

They have five generations of virus embedded in their spines. The next pandemic won’t come from a wet market. It’ll be either from our knife block or The Worst Princess.

And then there are classics that will be kept because it’s hard to throw out a classic.

The attic will be like a little Library of Congress with culturally significant volumes. 

And a good few of those that will be kept will be the Julia Donaldson books. Such as The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo’s Child, Room on the Broom, The Snail and the Whale, The Smartest Giant in Town, Stick Man, Tabby McTat, Superworm, and more. 

And there is one other that pops into my head each year during post Christmas gloom.

When you live in a small house, even when you are glum about dismantling Christmas at least you can console yourself with one thing: When you take down the Christmas tree, the available floorspace of the house will increase by a few per cent. It feels like a tiny extension. 

As if a Dealz Dermot Bannon came in and said “if we get rid of that tree, it will really open up that corner near the sofa”. And Dealz Dermot Bannon would be right. 

And I thought straightaway of A Squash and A Squeeze. This is Julia Donaldson’s first book. 

She originally wrote it as a song for a BBC children’s programme in 1975. But [let me put on my hipster voice] I actually read the book first.

This simple little book has one of the more useful messages any adult could learn. 

A woman is complaining that her house is too small so an old man tells her to bring in, over the course of a day, her hen, goat, the pig, and finally the cow. 

Each time she does the house gets more crowded and eventually at the end when the house has become a Stage Irish Punch cartoon with goats dancing jigs on kitchen tables, the woman is at her wits end. 

Then the old man delivers the coup de theatre: “Now take them all out,” he says. 

And the house feels enormous by comparison to what it was before the menage-a-menagerie.

They are such simple lessons: Things could be worse, appreciate what you have, take the cow out of your house. 

And elsewhere Julia’s books all have memorable takeaways. Room on the Broom (teamwork is important, or if you keep on taking people in make sure they’re useful in a crisis), The Gruffalo (clever trumps might), The Gruffalo’s Child (even Gruffaloes have childcare scares), Tabby McTat (the struggles of being a musician when you don’t have rich parents), and then Stick Man is basically Gladiator but he’s a stick and his family are still alive. 

And Oliver Reed is Santa.

Now we’ve completed our book cull and we are getting rid of the grand total of one book.

A spare copy of Kipper. Julia will have plenty of company in the archive.

• Colm plays Coughlans live on April 15 — tickets available at: coughlans.ie