Today

Pouring with rain today, so what better thing to do than sort out your paperwork? I sorted mine out after Paul's stuff was transported to Sussex, but after his return, we got sort of drowned in paper.

It appears that we have enough paperclips, rubber bands, fountain pen cartridges, drawing pins, pens, and punched plastic wallets to last us until we die. Punched plastic wallets are like wire coat hangers: they breed and take over the world when your back's turned.

I've a policy which is never leave a hotel, function etc without pocketing the free pen or pencil, so we also have pots, drawers and packets of these things, of variable quality.

Then there are the bank statements going back 10 years, out of date insurance policies and all those cheap loan, 0% credit transfer and accidental death insurance offers that you don't throw out the minute you get them.

We've at least 6 briefcases, some girlie, like my powder blue one, some smart, like Paul's silver one and some frankly frightful. I've found 4 clipboards and 7 document holders, zipped and unzipped. In fact we could equip an entire conference with assorted freebies.

And as for phone battery chargers - even though Paul can't bear to throw out his old phones, we still don't need 7 Nokia chargers as they're all the same.

In My Day

My father had a desk in the corner of our living room. The room was large, so it didn't exactly crowd us. He had boxes of pencils, from which we borrowed freely. For some reason I often couldn't find a pencil sharpener and many times used the kitchen bread knife for the purpose. Later Daddy bought one of those fancy desk-mounted ones.

We didn't have pen cartridges in those days; instead there were bottles of ink: Watermans and Quink. Daddy had a tall cylindrical tin full of paper clips. One of my pleasures during idle moments was to string them together in long chains. How Daddy must have been pleased when he wanted one in a hurry!

For paper we used drafts of parliamentary questions. On the back was plain paper for drawing or playing consequences, or keeping scores. On the front were fragments like this: "In view of the recent upsurge in... would the right honourable member for East Cheam like to assure the house that....." etc etc.

There was no such thing as punched plastic wallets and Daddy kept essential documents in manilla envelopes, secured with rubber bands and labelled on the outside.

Daddy just couldn't resist buying stationery and could go mad in WH Smiths.

Like father, like daughter actually - shopping in Staples brings out the worst in me. How is it then, that you can never find a drawing pin when you want one?