Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Document destruction and the path to nirvana

Like just about everyone else in the civilised world, my life's progress has been marked by the acquisition of pieces of paper. Some of these pieces of paper are the sort which are given out very casually but which are almost impossible to get rid of without fears that your identity will be borrowed by someone who then uses your Mastercard to get 50 toilets shipped to Lagos before opening a bank account in your name and using it to launder a couple of million quid from their business supplying class A drugs wholesale.

What this means is that I've been accumulating bank statements, utility bills (in Britain, a gas bill is for some reason considered better ID than a photocard driving licence by many places), charge slips, all those irritating bits of paper which are pointless after a few months of existence but which are almost impossible to get rid of with confidence. When I finally decided that I really didn't need to keep bank statements dating back to 1998 anyway (fascinating reading though they sometimes make) I gave up and bought a shredder.

And wow, after the best part of a day spent shredding old bank statements and cellphone bills and whatever and blatantly disregarding the rated capacity of the shredder (a home model rated for 8 pages per cycle and about 10 cycles per day) I have a couple of bin liners of baggage shredded and ready to be chucked out. Freedom at last! It'll be weird to be moving house in a month or two without having to schlep along boxes of pointless old documents that I was only holding onto because, well, it was easier to do that than it was to get rid of them.

I guess the next thing is to do a ruthless cull of my book collection, but that'll be a little harder.