The art of piling paperwork high

To my sister, however, there is no finer sound in the world than the decisive thunk of a ring-binder as you clunk its metal manacles closed around your paperwork.

Once she has been primed with strong coffee and homemade scones, Steph rises to her feet and, with the authority of a designated official announcing Ready, Steady, go, she says: “Right – bring me a pile!”

Luckily, there is no shortage. I dash up to my study (currently a hard to navigate minefield of excess books and stacks of paperwork on the floor, offering only a narrow, safe route across to the printer).

I return with a stack of papers that could best be categorised as “mixed” and lay it as a humble offering before the Queen of Admin.

As well as bills and so on, the pile includes: unopened letters from shul, advising me of updates to their coronavirus protocol, and reminding me of my parents’ Yahrzeits (can’t remember why I went into the kitchen, but fairly sure I’m not going to forget those); bank statements for an account I closed some years ago (regular letters inform me that it contains £0.00); an AA membership card for a car I no longer have.

Steph holds out a water bill from 2018 — “ I think this might be a record”. But of course she is wrong because the next pile includes a newspaper cutting she sent me some time ago. It’s an article headed: How to throw stuff out without feeling guilty: learn ‘suteru’. The date on the newspaper is Sat March 4 2017.

Suteru, it turns out, is Japanese for throw away. The piece is about a book espousing the Japanese art of discarding (it’s an art — if I’d known, maybe I’d have been more enthusiastic?) — like Marie Kondo but with less knicker-folding. Luckily, as I had not yet embraced the art of Suteru at that point, this vital newspaper cutting was not thrown away. Instead, it was kept in a pile.

It prompts me to consider why I struggle so much to a) sort my paperwork and b) discard anything on paper — why in fact Suteru and I are destined to remain merely distant acquaintances rather than constant companions.

Our late parents were artists/writers, who both drew and wrote for pleasure as well as for a living. Over the years since their deaths, as my sister and I continue to alternately address and avoid the epic task of sorting the things they left behind, it is the paper we find hardest to deal with.

Dad drew not just in his sketchbooks, but also on paper napkins, old envelopes, the reverse of receipts. No postcard from him was without a little sketch on it somewhere. Mum also combined drawings and writing, so that a botanical study of a flower will have some thoughtful nature note alongside.

Even a tiny pocket diary might contain a fragment of a poem or sketch of a child on a bus — they are not easily discarded. I read through 20 years of my mother’s gardening journals and found, in the middle of one, her transcription of a conversation with her father about his experience in the trenches plunging me from crop rotation on one page to her father’s memory of watching his best friend be blown apart a few yards away.

But, but, you say — surely an unopened water bill from four years ago couldn’t secretly harbour a sketch from a late parent? No, yet still there is something so crucial to who we are as people who write and draw for work, for joy, that our reverence for works on paper, and even paper itself, borders on religious devotion.

Still, as my sister reminds me when I start to wax lyrical in this fashion, bills can be filed, precious memories preserved, but the vast bulk of these piles simply needs to be sifted then recycled.

The papers are not actually holding the essence of our parents; I need to learn to let go.
In the meantime, I am working on my next book: “Messhuge-Schtacken: The art of hanging onto piles of paperwork until you die.”

Follow Claire on Twitter: @clairecalman