Thursday was – we’d been warned – the last day of
summer. As predicted, yesterday was cooler, darker and wetter. And today – with
just me and the dog at home – is the perfect kind of day for sorting out the
boggling amount of paperwork that has been clogging up my filing cabinet for
the last decade. Here’s what I’ve learned as a result:
1)
Tidy people have too much time on their hands. It has taken me 10 years
to get round to sorting some of this stuff out.
2)
I could have spent this time doing the 7 mile circuit of Richmond Park
with the dog!
3)
Now I know why my retired friends have such tidy homes – they have too
little else to occupy them.
4)
I will never again be jealous of a tidy home! The prospect of retiring
and having the time to keep on top of paperwork is truly scary.
5)
Piles of unsorted papers remind us that we have more important things to
do with our time.
6)
Piles of unsorted papers are also a source of stress – because we are
reminded that we have more important things to do with our time.
7)
Being tidy requires ruthlessness. It is hard to throw away a letter from
your sponsor child in Africa, or a batch of 40th birthday cards –
even when we do not plan to look at them again.
8)
We hang on to papers, pictures and cards because we love the memories
they bring when we occasionally turn them up during a search for something
else. One of those birthday cards was from a dear friend who died last year.
9)
These occasional gems – such as the childhood journals my daughter wrote
on our holidays – can be so engrossing that they lead us to forget what it was
we were meant to be looking for.
10) It may be another 10 years
before some of these gems surface again.
11) Hoarding is a sign of
sentimentality. We keep things that do not interest us today, imagining they may
become more interesting in the future.
12) My daughters’ school reports
from when they were 9 or 10 years old will be as dull in 10 years time as they
are now – so I must be mad to hang on to them.
13) I must be nurturing the
dream that my daughters are one day famous and being interviewed about the
contents of their school reports at 9 or 10 years old.
14) I must be deluded.
15) Having found the time for
this sort out has made me nostalgic for the years when I was rushed off my feet
with young children and far too busy even to read some of the correspondence
that surfaced.
16) Letters should really be
dealt with on the day they arrive, and not put on a to-do pile for later.
17) Ten years is too long to
have ignored three missives alerting us to the fact that the solicitor who
dealt with the purchase of our house has since been struck off…
18) I don’t even like to think
too much about what number 17, above means.
19) Hoarding and procrastinating
is a way of burying one’s head in the sand.
20) Trying to locate an important document from a bulging filing cabinet is stressful and time consuming and has caused many a tantrum in my home-office. I pay more heed to number 16.
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