Papers, papers, papers

We seem to be overwhelmed with paper; I don’t mean newspapers, when we have finished with them they go in the recycling box. I mean papers with things written on them… I am so relieved that at least some utilities companies have now gone paper-free and everything is viewed on line, but we still receive an enormous amount of stuff, through the post. We do file things, we have a nice neat filing cabinet in our bedroom, but we also have files which contain other papers… important papers, and papers we fear might be important. However… we are not as assiduous in filing as perhaps we should be, and this results in piles… piles of stuff waiting to be filed. Such piles might also include recipes pulled out of magazines and recipe cards from stores, post cards we’ve bought but forgot to send, news items we’ve kept from newspapers but have forgotten why, old Christmas cards, old envelopes, instructions for items we’ve bought…

Then there comes the moment when we need a particular piece of paper… it could be a really important piece of paper… and we go to the filing cabinet, to find it has not been filed there; we search through the files and it’s not there either… so it must be… in one of the piles, because we never throw away important thing, do we? So… we search the pile on top of the filing cabinet, we search the pile on the desk in our daughter’s room, we search the pile which for some reason is in a laundry basket, we search the pile on the dining room table, we search the pile on the settee in the dining room, we search the different piles which have been put in carrier bags awaiting further sorting… we search… and search…

I have yet to find the particular piece of paper I’m searching for.