Continuing on my purge journey, I am most of the way through our two filing cabinets.

The label on that folder says “1 year of bills” which indicates the original intent, but not the current reality. Firstly, it has multiplied from one folder into three – whenever one filled up, a new one just got added behind it. It has bills going back to when we still lived in London. Other folders have even more ancient content, such as phone contracts from 2001, and Eric’s rental agreements from before we even met. Thirty-year-old paperwork!

Eric was more fond than me of keeping paper copies of things. The utilities and services I had signed up for, I paid by e-invoice or automatic payment; the ones he signed up for, we got paper bills for – and they all ended up in the folders. But in the end, when push came to shove as he moved out, very little of it was important enough to bring with him.

Now the vast majority of all of it is going out. I threw out two large paper bags full of old papers today – around 20 kg and thousands of pages.

With the archives much reduced in volume, I can fit what’s left into one of the filing cabinets and get rid of the other one. That cabinet has been tucked away in one of the built-in wardrobes, which will then have room for my clothes instead, so I can sell or give away the free-standing wardrobe in the bedroom, which will in turn let me rearrange the rest of the furniture and figure out what kind of new bed will fit the new space. It’s a whole chain.