De-cluttered - by Cecilia Peartree

I often say life's too short for de-cluttering, and I still firmly believe it is - until suddenly time is too short not to de-clutter. I ran up against this problem at my day job recently, when we had to clear everything out of our office and move to a different, and not entirely preferable, one in the basement. There are two windows in our new office, but they might as well not be there, because the only tantalising glimpse of the outside world is of a tall grassy bank topped by a 6 foot high hedge. But I mustn't go on and on about that now. One of the few benefits of the new office is that the people responsible for refurbishing it have at last agreed that we should have light switches, which you would imagine are more or less essential in any interior but which we didn't have in our office upstairs for reasons I had better not even start going into here. Another benefit is that the room is so dark and cosy that everyone has begun to refer to it as the Bat Cave. I hope to develop super-powers any day now.

Anyway, I found myself having to tidy the shelves above my desk as well as the desk itself, and actually to throw stuff out. As I had been working in the same office, with a short spell in a neighbouring one, for over 27 years, an amazing amount of stuff had accumulated, from a plastic bag that had disintegrated in the drawer, causing havoc, to a Myers-Briggs personality profile someone had done for me when we did management training, assorted birthday cards, a good deal of spare stationery and a folder called 'The Chicago File' which I had created ages ago when making arrangements for my first trip to America.

I am generally a great believer in keeping things just in case they come in useful one day, and this approach has served me well in the case of work emails which I like to keep as evidence of other people's unreasonableness, apart from anything else. However I've now discovered how to archive off older emails into a series of folders which apparently don't take up any room on the mail server but which are still accessible. I believe the same thing may be possible with Yahoo mail but I haven't dared to try it yet, despite having about 10,000 messages currently in my inbox.

At home the result of keeping things just in case I need them is that I am unable to find them if I do need them, which I suppose defeats the purpose of keeping them in the first place. I've tried to pre-empt this with my writing by making notes only in a notebook, which there is slightly less chance of losing than some random piece of paper, and by having a folder on my computer called 'all writing' where I put absolutely everything to do with writing. Every so often the main folder looks a bit cluttered and I set up another sub-folder and re-organise things a bit. That's quite simple compared with the physical effort involved when you suddenly need a cat basket to transport a cat to the vet and have to turn out the cupboard under the stairs to find one, only to see three cat baskets later in a pile in the corner of the front room. Now that we only have two cats I suppose one of the baskets is redundant. But with cats you never know when another one will come along.

But I digress. I think this happens more and more as you get older, and in fact I have been considering just lately whether I should try to cut down on the rambling in my novels. Maybe my mind needs to be de-cluttered too? Or maybe that would rob me of all creativity - I tend to think it would.