Not my desk

Given how fastidious I am about tidiness, I somehow don’t suffer this when I am in my office at home. The room I work in is, to use estate agent language, a shithole. In one corner boxes of Christmas decorations balance precariously on top of each other, occasionally breaking into a noise that is part festive chorus and part cry for new batteries. The stairs leading up to my office are lined with piles of dormant video tapes of films and programmes I will probably never watch but don’t want to part with, a few of them are unwatched and unused films I bought as material for my abandoned series Charity Shop Film Guide. Books, CDs, records, and cassettes take up a huge amount of space, as do boxes of demo/promo CDs and my archive of Nottingham music that encompasses most of the songs released over the last (when I started collecting properly) five years. My work archive and lever arch files of various items of paperwork are stacked up with other loose bits of paper waiting to be added (I even keep the receipts from cash point machines in a box just in case I have cause to query something happening to my account). There is also a suitcase with a fleece and a couple of jumpers inside that Jack uses as a bed when I am working. My desk is a mess of newspapers, notebooks, USB sticks, blank CDs, pens, sweet wrappers, dirty cups, and other assorted flotsam which as I am typing the description of my surroundings even I can’t believe I manage to work in such conditions.

As part of a work avoidance exercise I decided to do a bit of tidying up today, despite this being a task up there with painting the Forth Bridge. Although my audio archive is slowly finding its way onto CDs, they still aren’t in any kind of order as I am randomly pulling podcasts, radio shows, interviews, and music sessions from USB sticks and copying them to CD before I delete them from the USB stick. Thanks to some meticulous diary keeping and notebook logging of my work I have been able date everything, but after dating them I have simply been dropping them in a filing box. Sorting this collection out was something I couldn’t be bothered with today, but I have tidied up quite a lot of paperwork. I’m not entirely sure why we need to keep such items as bank statements although I suppose they might occasionally come in handy. I know that you are advised to keep financial paperwork for six years but how many times in six years have you ever needed them? Surely the bank will be able to retrieve this information should you need it rather than sending you a statement in the post in this environmentally friendly day and age? If they are needed then I have them all in order right back to the Abbey National and through Abbey before settling on Santander. In fact, a lot of them will be useless now as I closed my original account when it was hacked and opened my present one, so my claim to have had the same bank account for twenty years (I am a wow at parties) is no longer true. Could I bin the statements from the dead account or should I still keep them for six years? Also, if I bin the old statements, should I destroy them so identity thieves can’t retrieve them from the recycling bin or would they be as useless to the thief as they are to me?

My office recycling bin (a cardboard box) now contains several instruction books and papers regarding a range of electrical equipment that I no longer own so I felt safe throwing it away as even the most dedicated identity scavenger is frankly more than welcome to the instructions to phones and cameras that I no longer own.

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February housekeeping

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