Dropping Paper

There is altogether far too much paper in the world, or at least in my life. Of this I am quite sure. You join me as the total and utter two-tone sound of a scanning scanner and shredding shredder signals that more paper is being erased from the world. My tidy-up continues, albeit at a slower rate, because today and for the past few days I have been making big in-roads into getting rid of all those unwanted bits of papers - receipts, bills, letters, credit card statements from years ago. Most people throw them away but I can't. I need a strategy to deal with them, and that strategy is digital.

After all, there's nothing that doesn't get better if it's computerised. Paper takes up space. It is hard to find, and harder still to search. Get all that information in a computer, on the other hand, and you can store entire roomfuls of paper on something the size of your fingernail, and search the whole lot in seconds. The whole thing strikes me as terribly efficient and excellent, and so, quite aside from the huge tidying-up benefits it brings, I have decided that I want as little paper in my life as is possible.

So I am busy scanning. Scanning and shredding. Already I have several years of American Express statements on my computer, instead of clogging up my vital passageways. In addition, a quick visit to their website reveals that in future, they would be more than happy to send me new statements on the computer, which will save them the bother of printing them out, and save me the bother of scanning them in. I like this a lot. Soon I will be clutter-free and organised, with every single piece of information that I could ever need just waiting at my fingertips.

Someone asked me the other day why it was that I was even bothering to scan stuff which was of so little use. My truthful answer was "so that I can throw it away", but I think in a way it goes deeper than that. With my increasingly poor memory, it's very much the case that I will soon forget anything that I don't still have. I wonder if that might go some way to explaining my hoarding tendencies.

I feel a little like Mr Benn. Remember at the end of each adventure, he would somehow mysteriously have picked up some kind of pebble or artefact from the earlier events. "I'll keep it with me", he would say, "to help me remember."Yes, Mr Benn's house was probably full of junk and pebbles too.

Anyway, back to reality, and inspired by my tidying prowess, I also phoned my bank. Lovely as bank statements are, they are a major source of clutter and I can NOT throw them away. As far as I know, I still have every bank statement I have ever been sent. All 19 years worth. I am looking at them right now. And so, given that I am so very clearly mental, I need a better way to deal with those monthly chronicles of my financial transactions.

Turns out the bank is happy to help. They can't stop sending me statements entirely (apparently that would be illegal) but they'd be happy to just send me one big bank statement, once every year. To say I was pleased was an understatement, this is perfect and will do very nicely indeed. Before I had finished celebrating, though, the nice lady on the phone told me that 'her colleague' had flagged my bank account for a 'review' and would I mind hanging on while I spoke to him?

No wonder - my bank used to phone me almost every month to have one of these 'review' sessions, which is basically them going through their "big list of things we sell", and seeing if they can sell me anything. After a while I told them to stop doing it, and that instruction means that, legally, they can't contact me to sell me things. It does, however, mean that if I contact them, they are perfectly at liberty to try to sell me as much as they want - and since I don't think I've phoned my bank any time in the last three or four years, they were clearly pretty keen to get the chance to try on the old sales routine again. They had nothing I wanted, but I let them try. They're only doing their job, after all, and it's not like I was paying for the phone call.

So, all in all, I am feeling busy and efficient. Doubly so since today is another eBay cheap listings day, providing another chance for me to share my junk with the rest of the world. Who will buy my sweet red roses? I wonder. Of course this is a double-edged sword, because any eBay seller can never have too many packaging supplies, and in my case that means I tend to hoard used jiffy bags. After all, such things are indespensable. But even there, I am making grand strides, and last night I went through my three boxes of stored used jiffy bags, and discarded the ones which were the least likely to be re-usable, either because someone had written my address on them with inconsiderately large writing (so it'd be hard to re-use by sticking another label over it), or for some other reason which would probably be too boring to articulate here.

But I still feel like I'm doing something. And maybe, just maybe, now I might actually be getting somewhere too.

The War On Lightbulbs

I was very pleased last night to turn on the lightbulb in my bedroom, only to be greeted by a big flash, and loud pop, and darkness there. Yes, very pleased.

Why? Well I'm glad you asked. For some time now, as part of my ruthless and ceaseless tidying-up project, I have been operating in this room by the light of the main hanging-down-from-the-ceiling lightbulb, rather than the softer tones of my usual desk lamp. In itself, no great hardship. But inside my desk lamp is a lovely energy-saving light bulb, which uses less electricity than a normal light bulb. I turn it on and am comforted by thoughts of my electricity meter spinning slightly less slowly, the environment being conserved, and dolphins leaping from the waves yearning to breathe free, enjoying the natural benefits of my considerate lighting decisions.

However, the main hanging-down-from-the-ceiling lightbulb offers no such benefits. It is not energy saving at all. It is energy wasting. I'm fairly sure it did not say that on the box - few people would buy light bulbs if labelled in such a fashion - but the evidence is too great to ignore. It was an ordinary Woolworths lightbulb, lacking in all kinds of environmental protection and energy conservation. Each time I turned it on, vast sections of the rain forest would burst into flames, causing innocent monkeys and toucans and dolphins to fall from their trees into the inferno below, such was the environmental catastrophe of my thoughtless lighting decision. I am quite sure.

Each time I killed the planet in this way, it did occur to me that perhaps it would be better if I just replaced this ordinary but otherwise perfectly good lightbulb with an energy saving model. But is it allowed to replace lightbulbs before they are used? Part of me just couldn't get over what a waste it would be. The other part of me suggested that maybe using the lightbulb to its point of extinction would be even more of a waste - a waste of electricity. And therefore, worse still, a waste of money.

Unable to reconcile this dilemma, I took no action, and just hoped that the lightbulb would eventually expire by itself some time soon. And last night, no doubt as a result of all the hideously bad karma being directed at it, the lightbulb finally solved my problem and went pop.

It has now been replaced by a lovely new low-energy lightbulb, which uses 25% of the electricity and puts out 50% more light, which frankly is a little annoying as it makes me feel like I'm in a doctor's surgery or some other brightly-lit white room. But I didn't have any less lightful low energy lightbulbs, so this will have to do for the moment. In fact a trip to the store cupboard revealed to my horror that I still have many boxes of high energy lightbulbs, including another 40 watt Woolworths which would have lit this room to its previous less dazzling degree.

However, safe in the knowledge that if I started using another old style lightbulb, I would have to finish it, and that such a course of action would probably take much too long, I decided instead to keep on keeping on with my more environmentally friendly illumination. Perhaps I can sell the other lightbulbs on eBay.

The War On Elastic Bands

As the grand tidy-up continues, I am increasingly enjoying the satisfied feeling that comes from throwing things away. Sadly in recent days the only things I have been throwing away are small items, like old pens which don't work quite as well as they used to. And I have in fact just this very second decided to throw away a Berol Notewriter which, despite still being plentiful in ink, requires me to hold the shaft at an unacceptably inclined angle. Yes, it's survival of the fittest right about now.

And as the ruthless war on clutter continues, a new enemy is in my sights. And I must tell you that this correspondent is at war with elastic bands. I have lots of elastic bands. They seem to turn up everywhere. They sneak into my home via the daily postal delivery. They surround paper and packages to obtain ingress through the letter box, but of course once they arrive they cannot be thrown away, because there is nothing wrong with them, and they might be useful one day.

No longer. That way of thinking is long gone. If I can throw away useful drawing pins, I can certainly throw away elastic bands. I have not used an elastic band for as long as I can remember. If I ever need to, I will buy some. Until that time, all elastic bands are being marched to the rubbish bins on sight.

It makes me feel like I'm doing something.

News From The Front

I know that listening to me talking about tidying up is just about the most boring thing possible - but bear with me.. I need to feel as if I'm doing something useful, and writing about it helps me get my plans in order. :-)

I have a feeling that I'm going to be tidying up for many months to come. I like to think that I've been doing something, but I wonder whether my progress is that significant. After all, while I can now see the wall which was previously covered by floor-to-ceiling boxes, this comes at the cost that I can no longer see my bed, which is now covered in most of the boxes that I moved out of the way of the wall. A picture is shown above. Do you see? My bed is somewhere under there.

My problems are manyfold. Much space is taken up by items which loosely fall into several groups:

Paper - I'm getting fairly good about throwing away old magazines - but not really really old magazines, because those are of historical interest and so must be preserved. Most of the rest of the 'paper' that's not shreddable is stuff that I can at least scan and store away onto the computer, where it takes up no space. So a strategy is in place to get rid of this.

Videotapes - Back in the 18th century there was something called VHS, and in the 17th century there was Betamax. I have lots of both. I bought lots of old Betamax tapes on eBay several years ago, on account of their immense historical interest. The VHS tapes were just ones that I needed to record on. But I had no cataloguing system and never labelled a tape after the age of about 25, so it turns out I have lots of boxes of tapes which all need to be laboriously viewed before I can realistically get rid of them. Old Betamax tapes fetch good prices on eBay, so no problem there. Old VHS is entirely unwanted and doesn't seem to sell for even 99p. I suspect I might have to give them away. Even though I hardly use videotapes any more, I absolutely cannot consider throwing them away. They have to go to good homes. I hope I can find some.

Boxes - it sounds odd, but it seems somehow wrong to throw away the original boxes that something came in. After all, what if I need to sell it on eBay in the future? An original box makes things easier to sell. What if I need to package it up again, if I should ever move home? An original box makes it easy. Is this stupid?

Unclassified Clutter - I have boxes full of miscellaneous bits and pieces that I just never got round to sorting out. A funny red Playstation controller. An authentic 1982 Sketch-A-Graph drawing thing. Boxes of floppy discs, the big kind. A Sony Walkman which may or may not work.

Sellables - I have several more boxes full of things which I need to sell on eBay, and which, ungratefully, nobody has yet purchased. But they will do, one day. Hopefully.

With so much building up around my ears, yesterday I was starting to feel a little despondent and wondered if I would ever progress my tidying enough that I might ever be able to stop sleeping on the couch. But after a little while, my ruthless spirit returned, and I was good.

One point of particular stickiness is that I seem to have kept all the exercise books from my school years. Now, I left school nearly 19 years ago, and those books have not come in too useful since then. But somehow it always seemed wrong to throw them away. Even when I unearthed them at the bottom of a tea chest several days ago, I couldn't immediately dispose of them. My instinct was, in fact, to keep these precious artefacts. Or at least to scan them - ultimately a hideously time-consuming process, but if that's what I need to do to let myself free the space occupied by their physical form, then I'll do it.

It took me a little while to rebuild my 'ruthless' streak enough to take action. In all my tidying up I've been very much inspired by the re-runs of 'Life Laundry' on UK Style, where people are harrassed into tidying their homes by a strange American lady called Donna Walter. (Except she says, and even spells it, as "Dawna Walter".)

Dawna, for it is she, would doubtless be going nuts if she had heard about me keeping my schoolbooks, and would in fact be delivering her trademark lecture (as delivered in every edition of Life Laundry) informing me that holding on to such useless things is me failing to let go of a painful part of my life, or something like that, so therefore only the ritual destruction of such items can truly free me from the evil vibrations of the past. (OK, she doesn't come across as quite so crazy on the TV, but if you buy the Life Laundry audio CD, as I did, she starts talking about all kinds of transcendental vibrations and other such oddities.)

But you know someting - Dawna might just have a point. I don't need my schoolbooks. There is nothing of me there. It's my handwriting, but it isn't me. It's answers to pointless maths questions. It's answers to textbook questions in French. It's the results of pointless experiments in Chemistry class. It's not like a diary. It's not some priceless 'early writings' by the internationally renowned Ant, discovered after all these years. It's just rubbish. And I need to let it go. Because even at the age of 34, I still regularly dream about being at school. And you know something? I don't think I actually go to school any more. I don't think I've gone for nearly 19 years now. So maybe I should let these books go.

And I did! I was awfully good, and shredded the lot. (Couldn't just put them in the bin as-is, after all.) Dawna would have been so pleased.

Tidying up is an expensive business, though. In this past month or so I've already had to purchase several items to assist me with the finer points of tidying. I'm very pleased with the shredder I mentioned a few weeks ago. It's still working (a miracle in itself) and has already shredded considerable amounts of paper which I would otherwise have probably just held onto.

I was thinking about buying one of those USB record turntables that you can plug into your computer, to turn all your old vinyl records into MP3s. OK, I don't have much vinyl, and nothing that I've listened to in.. 20 years. But I still reckon that it would be so much easier to throw it away if it wasn't my only copy of something that I might just one day want to listen to again. Admittedly the chances are slim that I would want to listen to "50 fabulous Disney classics" - an utterly awful double-album which I didn't like that much even when I was 7 - but I would be happy to throw it away once it has been digitally preserved. So, turntables.. I'm still thinking about this purchase.

This evening I've ordered some large packing boxes. I think these are going to be helpful, as I've run out of the other storage boxes I've been shoving things into while trying to get them into some kind of order. Plus, I've noticed that a lot of the things I'd like to get rid of are the awkward kind of things that won't sell on eBay (either too obscure or too heavy, and therefore unpostable.) So, the plan is that I'll be making up several boxes of "nice stuff I don't want but can't sell" and donate these to some local charities. I hope they like floppy disc boxes, I have lots of those. I have a feeling that there'll be plenty of large (heavy) books and clothes too. But for this to happen, they need a place to live while they're being sorted. These new boxes will be that place. See, I have a plan.

Last week, as I tidied and came across various bits and pieces, I started sticking them up on eBay. Start price just 99p, seller pays postage - let's see if anyone wants the stuff. Happily this actually worked out pretty well, with 9 out of the 10 items selling. I've just finished wrapping them up to take down the post office tomorrow. I got rid of several very large items which were taking up space but were "too nice to trash", including an older, noisier shredder, a large laptop bag, part of a satellite dish, and even some t-shirts which I never got around to wearing. The sales didn't make me a millionaire but they brought me something more important - space. And that's what I need right now.

In preparation for my renewed ruthlessness I have purchased a very large roll of rubbish bags, which I imagine over the course of the next few weeks will be mostly filled with shredding and any small items that I feel comfortable about tossing out entirely. And, hey, I've been good and thrown away several more things that I don't think I need. Amongst other items having left the house in a bin bag include a battered 'Junior Science Encyclopaedia' which in my youthful exuberance I wrote all over (this is something I seemed to do a lot in my youth), an obscure MB game called 'Bali', and a pack of playing cards. (Even I don't think those might come in useful!)

I threw away a pink plastic pig full of drawing pins, only to immediately experience the sheer pain of needing some drawing pins (for the first time in years) the very next day. But I made do with some double-sided sticky tape instead, and I think maybe that's a better solution as well.

But in the midst of all this chaos, pleasure comes from the simplest things. This morning I bought a bag of cable ties, which means that I can now easily seal up my bags full of shredding and rubbish, without having to fight to tie some kind of knot in the top of them. This one thing alone has made me very pleased indeed, and I cannot express how amazingly excellent this little step forward is. I guess it's the little things that make the difference.