It rained a lot. Again. I returned to the task of trying to tidy up the ironing room, and make space on the bookshelves to consolidate the history section upstairs, so that gardening and cooking in the study can both budge along.
I decided that the art of chucking stuff out is to get into the groove. I didn't need my second (or even first?) year notes on Economic Botany, and the planning framework has changed so much since 2003 that my file on that was of no conceivable use to anyone. I remember I did sell my key textbook from that module on Amazon, as soon as I'd finished the semester, on the grounds that it would only go out of date. Once I'd parted with rice as an industrial crop and my account of a trip to a tomato grower in Lincolnshire (a tricky assignment, that one, since he wouldn't give us any financial information at all) throwing away garden history didn't seem too hard.
By now my baleful eye has turned towards the boxes of years old bee magazines that we're currently playing host to on behalf of the Colchester beekeepers. I had better get the committee's approval before doing anything drastic, but unless somebody else will volunteer to have them in their spare room I think they are for the chop. Yes, they are theoretically a valuable historical archive, but I'll take the chance that somebody else somewhere in the country has a copy. Nobody has ever asked to look at them even once since I've had them.
Likewise the committee needs to agree how many back years of divisional accounts it wants to keep. I searched through them looking for clues as to what equipment or other assets the division might have bought in the dim and distant past, and which might now be lurking unrecorded with some of the older members, and found precious little of interest, about capital assets or anything else. I don't think social historians of the future will be wringing their hands about the loss of priceless information if I can get my colleagues' permission to bin that lot.
The Systems Administrator's immediate reaction on learning that we had two box files of paperwork relating to boats we no longer own was that they should be kept, but we'll return to the discussion tomorrow. I can't really see what use a twenty year old instruction manual for a boat heater which now belongs to somebody else somewhere down on the Medway is to us.
I had a nasty moment when I seemed to have broken the Systems Administrator's shredder, destroying a file of bank statements for my secondary current account for 2011 and earlier. All that happens on the account is that miscellaneous dividends are paid into it, and my National Trust membership is paid out of it by direct debit, and the only reason I keep it is out of idleness about changing all the dividend mandates, and as an act of revenge on my original bank, who had annoyed me. Specifically, when I was giving up the City and rang to discuss a different account package, since I no longer wanted a Gold Card, the person on the end of the phone on hearing I was going back to university said that they did have a student account, but I would have to provide written proof that I was a student. They had all of my redundancy payout sitting on the account at the time, and shortly afterwards I was rung up by someone from their wealth management section wanting to invest it for me. I was sufficiently irritated to take my business elsewhere, apart from leaving them with the faff of processing my dividends and the very occasional cheque, and aside from bank statements and one letter telling me that my branch (in Devon) was closing, I have not heard from them since.
The shredder was not broken. After I'd pulled the stuck paper out of the cutter blades, and the SA had poked at the sensor with a pair of scissors, and the machine had been given time to cool down, it worked again. We can't be sure which intervention made the difference, but agreed that it was probably not designed to shred five years' worth of statements in one go.
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