Decluttering drawers: the local election canvass of the cleaning world

I’VE been cleaning out some drawers. It’s a thankless dispiriting task. The effects are hard to gauge, it takes ages and only a small area is covered. It’s the local election canvass of the decluttering world.

First there are the receipts. For the self-employed, every receipt is a conversation between you and an imaginary Revenue official where you both argue the finer points of tax-deductibility. The imaginary Revenue official, in my case played by Charles Dance (Game of Thrones’ Tywin Lannister), stares coldly as I protest that “Snickers and Chipsticks were an expense incurred wholly, exclusively and necessarily for the writing process”

A lot of the space is take up by manuals, trouble-shooting guides that tell you in 26 different languages what the hoover will do if you dare ask it to hoover up anything it disagrees with.

A lino of copper euro-cent coins covers the bottom of one drawer. They briefly promise a windfall until I count them and they amount to the price of a Snickers and a packet of Chipsticks. I plan on writing them off as a tax-deductible expense until Charles Dance tells me to cop on.

Finally the drawers contains lots of memory (not memories, memory): camera cards for disappeared cameras, dead phones and USB keys (for non-computery readers, a USB key is a small object about the size of an Emerald Toffee that stores reams of information. It plugs, via its little snout, into the side of a computer. Whenever a government department talks about a data breach it’s probably because someone has lost one of these yokes).

I became melancholic looking at the unreadable camera cards and the cold, dead, unchargeable phones. Locked away on them somewhere are phone numbers, text messages and photographs.

Not that is anything necessarily to be mourned. I don’t think future generations will miss a phone number of a taxi firm in Cardiff, “got lasagna can u turn on oven” , or a photograph of wireless-router password.

But as time goes on more and more of our means of accessing our information will become obsolete and so the data will effectively be lost to us.

Information used to be stored on tapes. After that it was floppy disks. How many Final Year Projects of today’s nostalgia-hungry generation are gone for ever? Then came CDs. Gradually the CD-ROM drive on a computer is being evolved out of existence like the disappearance of mammals’ primordial gills. USB will be around for a while but eventually it will surely disappear. Of course all the information is in ‘the Cloud’ but it’s out of our control. And what happens one day when Putin/Google/ the US Republicans inadvertently trigger a zombie apocalypse and the plug is pulled on all the server farms that make up The Cloud?

Naturally, the information you don’t want to stay will persist stubbornly.

Any photo of you looking glassy eyed at a wedding with a soup stain on your tie or with an ill-advised piercing will survive completely intact like a cockroach.

But if there’s anything you’d like to hold onto, just in case there’s an apocalypse, I’d say print it off and put in the drawer.