One of the downsides of having moved house a few times is you accumulate a whole pile of paper and sometimes, it’s not that organised. I’m swimming in the stuff. Seriously. And I have been unmotivated to tackle it because I knew it was going to involve shredding stuff and I never seemed to own a shredder. I do now and I have now sorted back through all the paperwork so that it is in organised piles but not really organised in a brain friendly way.

I used to be very good at paperwork until I wound up living in Belgium in 1997, and then the amount of paper I had to deal with in my personal life skyrocketed. It’s now worse than it was then.

I’ve tried folders. I’ve tried expanding boxfiles. I used to keep things in neat envelopes but that really doesn’t scale up.

I shredded 25L (at least) of confetti today and it’s all waiting for me to dump in the bin. I’m probably still not finished. I don’t want this to happen again so as of 1 January, a new, very user friendly system is going to have to go into place. To make it work, it’s going to have to find a home.

I don’t know how to do this. I’m struggling with space issues as it is. Houses in Ireland – even the three bedroomed ones – are built on the assumption that no one actually owns very much apart from some clothes. Our houses are too small. And we’re too fast to tell people what they need. I was sitting up in the box room which doubles as my office. I keep important stuff in the office, the very good, and very expensive photography books that remind me I’m a photographer, somewhere, in my soul, my Open University text books.

Two of my bills are gone electronic. I’m reluctant to send my bankstatements electronic on the grounds that I still haven’t a mortgage and therefore expect to need to produce a few when push comes to shove. If I ever buy a house, something which seems to be decreasing in likelihood every day.

Post Christmas, I’ll probably start yet another ring binder which will include critical paperwork such as NCT certs, P60s and related stuff, and then take whatever new paperwork comes in. And I’ll try to keep control of it this time although it would help if I didn’t move house. Just, you know, for a year or two have a little stability.