Nothing much

Bit of a quiet day today. A very cold wind discouraged me from going outside and continuing the autumn/winter cleanup, so I stayed inside and cleaned out my writing desk. It's one of those places that I tend to shove bits and pieces when I can't be bothered putting them away properly or don't know what else to do with them. I know it's time to clean it out when I can no longer get the door shut. Stuff that I don't want immediately but think I might need in the future goes in there too, like voting papers for local elections, warranties for electrical appliances, loyalty cards, business cards, birthday cards, competitions I've entered but am unlikely to win, old job application rejections, aborted short stories, design ideas for the house/garden if I had a million dollars, etc. I've found that if I leave stuff in my desk for long enough, it all becomes past its use by date and can be safely thrown out. It's a sort of a filing system.
       It's a bit different at work. There we have filing cabinets and boxes of old paperwork that everyone is too scared to throw out in case it's someone's precious hoard of useless information. No one wants to be the dumb sap who threw out the statistics on how many tea-bags we used in the staff room in the 1963 financial year. Throw anything out in a communal situation and you're bound to hear "You threw it OUT! But I NEEDED it!"

       A friend has just posted on her facebook page that she cleaned her oven today for the first time in eight years. Atta girl, I wish more people would own up to the fact that they are not Superwoman. I love all those pics in the "Home and Garden" type magazines of lovely tidy clean rooms; so unrealistic, I wish they would show us the same room after a wet weekend when the whole family has been stuck inside. I'm tidy, but not clean. My theory is that if it looks tidy, it looks clean as well. This is OK as long as no one looks too closely. Hopefully, as a person gets older, the need to be perfect becomes subsumed in the need to take it easy; keeping a clean house is a lot of work, and often I just don't give a damn. When you're old, domestic dirt can always be blamed on senility, eccentricity or physical frailty. Or all three.