25 years ago today I bought a filing cabinet. It might be useful, I thought, plus I do have a lot of paper and official documents so it'd be much better to file them away. To be more accurate my parents bought the filing cabinet for me, which was very kind of them, and I treated them to lunch at The Beagle afterwards. I wouldn't have been able to haul the cabinet up to the first floor by myself because it was heavy even when it was empty. Also we had to take it straight back to Staples for a replacement because the drawers didn't open, so in fact they helped me haul the cabinet upstairs twice.
I filled it later that evening while I was watching Castaway 2000 on the TV. I'd also bought lots of drop folders, just like we had in the office, so my phone bills went in one, my car mileage receipts went in another and my bank statements went in another. Actually my bank statements went in several, one for each account, then mortgage documentation, cashpoint receipts and everything. I labelled all the folders by writing on little folded slips of paper in very neat handwriting (Insurance, Electricity, Tax). I even wrote the label for my mobile phone bills in orange pen. It was a three drawer filing cabinet so the top drawer was generally financial, the second drawer was for all my work stuff and the third drawer was initially empty. It didn't stay empty for long.
The filing cabinet has only been shifted once since - once is enough - and now sits in a convenient recess in my bedroom. I've juggled the contents several times, adding a lifetime of utility bills and throwing out a lot of work-related bumf I once believed would always be important. Paperwork that arrives in the post, such as it does these days, still gets squeezed into the files when I get round to it. But a substantial proportion of what's in that filing cabinet still comes from a millennial era, a time before everything got digitised and paper was still important, so rifling through the drawers can be like flicking back in time.
electric
Date of bill 20 Jun 00 - Please pay £34.93 (412 units at 6.53p per unit)
Bill date 16 Mar 10 - Please pay £64.10 (414 units at 17.86p/10.89 per unit)
Bill date 9 Mar 2020 - Please pay £106.60 (438 units at 18.24p/17.51p per unit)
purchases
5.3.89 Sony Compact Disc Player - £249.95 (from Galaxy Audio Visual, Tottenham Ct Rd)
26.2.00 Nokia 3210e - £49.99
7.5.00 You've earned £7 in Clubcard Vouchers (voucher - 25p off cooking sauces)
28.5.00 Butlers Wharf Chop House - £127.01 (dinner for 3, with Sauvignon Blanc)
9.3.02 BA London Eye - £10 (your flight time is 15.00)
7.2.02 The Streets, Brixton Academy - 2×£15.60 (Stalls Standing)
22.8.03 The Britannia Hotel, Manchester - £98 (2 nights)
5.8.06 Century Falls DVD - £9.97
20.9.09 Annual Travelcard Zones 1 to 3 - £1208
27.4.15 Essential Khaki Straight FF ×2 - £130
TV
13.9.99 TV licence - £101
14.1.02 "Welcome to ITV Digital..."
28.3.02 "As you may already be aware ITV Digital has been placed into administration..."
20.3.03 "You will not be receiving a full refund of what you are owed..." (claim £111.09, likely dividend £2.23)
Time was when you really did need to keep this stuff. Everything arrived by post, on paper - no e-invoices or online accounts. If you ever wanted a refund you needed the receipt, if you wanted to pay your electricity bill you filled in the tear-off slip, and if you ever wanted to tell the gas board they were charging you for the wrong meter you needed years of backdated bills as evidence. They paid up eventually. Completing an expenses claim relied on collecting printouts, seeing how many text messages you'd sent meant scrutinising multiple pages and filing a tax return meant stashing a year of statements safely away. Even now there are still some ID applications which are facilitated by presenting a printed utility bill, which must make life a tad harder for those who've gone resolutely paper-free.
water
31.3.05 water bill - £178.48
10.3.10 water bill - £77.01 (following installation of water meter)
13.3.15 water bill - £99.74
manuals
Radio Controlled Projection Clock
Ferguson 14M2 Portable Colour Television (as seen in photo)
Sony Portable CD Player
Staple Wizard
car
3.3.99 VW Polo (purchase) - £12231.87
9.4.99 Car park fee paid, Basildon Council - 30p
22.5.99 Unleaded petrol - £27 (38.62 litres)
24.9.99 10000 mile service - £99.48 (screenwash £1.60)
14.1.00 Ipswich Body Repair Centre - £150
29.9.01 VW Polo (sale) - £6000
will
"This will dated 9th June 2005 is made by me..."
Some things do still need to be stored away carefully so you can get your hands on them easily. When my broadband vanished and BT customer services asked for my account number, it helped that I had a sheet of paper I could find in seconds on which it was printed. The inventory for my flat on the day I moved in will one day be invaluable. It remains possible that my £3 of Premium Bonds will again come up trumps. The passport photos I found attached to a 1999 driving licence application are remarkably cute.
But while writing this post it's become clear, if it wasn't already, that my filing cabinet includes rather a lot of paperwork that used to be useful but no longer is. 30 years of phone bills is overkill. Petrol receipts from 1999 are unnecessary. The follow-up letter to a dental appointment in 2006 is no longer relevant. Arguably I don't need all my old bank statements, although they do form such a good record of my life that I'd be loathed to get rid. You may have binned all yours years ago, indeed you may have chucked most of everything and never once felt it was a mistake.
What I should do is sit down and thin out my unwieldy paperwork archive, being well aware that much of it is irrelevant and unnecessary. I could probably get through all three drawers in an afternoon or two, chucking hundreds of sheets into the shredder once I'd checked them for importance and nostalgia. The receipt for my very first CD player stays, as do the files marked 'Health', 'Pension' and 'Mortgage', as does everything the taxman might one day want to see, but not all those covering letters, statements and faded printouts that mean nothing any more.
The trouble is that I have a useful place to hide everything out of sight and so I do, because my three convenient drawers mean it's not doing any harm to keep it. It turns out the filing cabinet I bought 25 years ago has enabled me to file away more and more, and that 25 years of paperwork creeps up on you if you do nothing to slim it down.
