Aargh! One of my key excuses for not tidying has bitten the dust.

People have been on at me to dejunk – “just throw it away!” It’s in boxes you’ve never looked in. Boxes that have moved house at least twice, unopened. You can’t possibly need when you haven’t needed it in all this time.

Ah, I have traditionally retorted. Amongst the junk are pearls! Things I will indubitably need again even if I have not needed them recently. For example – killer example – my GCSE, A Level and degree certificates!

Only of course, this week, I found them. I knew roughly where they were and I put my hand on them as soon as I started looking.

By my own logic, almost everything else can be thrown away. Oops.

My backup excuse is wastefulness. It would be terribly wasteful to just throw these things away! Starving Children in Africa! My junk could be useful to someone… if only I had time to sort it out properly… catalogue, sort and file… Save / Bin / Charity shop / Freecycle…

Re-assure me of this: it’s normal, right, to keep every edition of every magazine you subscribe to in varying states of pile from “neat” (magazines you no longer subscribe to, often because you didn’t get around to reading one before the next one arrived, sometimes still in their plastic wrappers) to chaotic (the Private Eyes that arrive 25 times a year for the last twenty years…). People don’t subscribe to magazines just to throw them away when they are read…? Do they?

Thank heavens I never got into a daily newspaper habit.