730 things — Day 34 of 365

I very much enjoy the videos from ecofriend.lia on YouTube.

Here she talks about her new strategy for de-cluttering sentimental items.

I think this is a big issue for many of us.

I have one large box (not the same shape as a suitcase but similar capacity) with all my files in it. Some of those are things I must keep — for instance, my tax files going back 7 years, as this is required by the Inland Revenue (though I have now moved on to digitising all paperwork, so the tax files will move to being only a tiny stash), and I have details of book contracts (before they all went electronic) and my passport and an In Case of Death folder for my family, holding information they will need and my will and pre-paid-funeral plan.

In that box I also have a substantial stash (perhaps 2 box files in amount) of precious memorabilia.

Here's an example. This picture.

It's a card, in fact, with an inscription inside it.

It was made for me by my best friend at school, when we were both fifteen. It means the world to me, and I cannot imagine a circumstance in which I could bring myself to throw it away, because it was painted by her. Her own hands touched and fashioned this, at a time she had newly come to know Jesus.

We are no longer in contact, and I heard she moved on from the faith she had found, but this picture holds in its body a moment in time that will never come again, a memory that is precious to me.

So, that's the kind of thing I want to keep.

But there are some things from that box I feel it is time to let go. This will be something I don't do all in a hurry. I have already thrown out so much; what remains in my box is the collection of items I wanted to hold onto. It may be the time has come to digitise some (cards from my children, for instance), but I think some I will still want to keep. I'd rather go slowly than regret.

However, today I am moving on two things from that box. 

They both represent something important, but because they are associated with me rather than with someone else, and I am still here with me and always will be, I think since I can't lose me it doesn't matter if I have the thing. Of course I might get dementia and lose my mind and so lose myself in that sense, but if I do then I won't be bothered about these things any more.

The first item I'm moving on today is this album of drawings.

I wrote about it here, so the drawings are recorded in that post and therefore not lost. 

I realised I was hanging onto the album because I used to draw a lot, and I think those drawings are quite good — they capture something — and I felt pleased that I'd done them. 

But I suspect I'm making what I did in the past a substitute for doing creative work now, and that's a pity. I think if I want to draw, I can — and should; I don't need to hang on to what has become a talisman of artistic potential. So I threw the album away.

And here's something else that became a talisman. This is really quite a thick file, from 2004.

I haven't read through it in years, but I kept it because it represented something important.

When I was at school, I did atrociously in Maths. I got a steady 10% in end-of-year exams. I think sometimes I may have scored even less. My maths teacher told me I was "past the point of no return". 

When our GCEs were coming up (now GCSE, the high school exams you take at fifteen or sixteen), my mother secured me a few weeks maths coaching from a retired teacher — which made all the difference and I scored a respectable middle grade in the public exam. But still I had the rooted idea I had no head for figures.

But actually, this isn't true. As an adult I handled our family budget fairly shrewdly and imaginatively. I have never been parsimonious and we chucked a lot of money about — I mean, I believe in the providence of God — but we did okay.

And then three things happened that changed my perspective and installed a new and unfamiliar self-belief.

As a Methodist minister I had a lot of extraneous income (wedding and funeral fees etc) and expenses (ongoing training, books, travel and so forth) and had to keep meticulous accounts every year. Pages of 'em.

Back in those days it was possible to go to the Tax Office and have an Inland Revenue employee go through one's annual account for the tax return before handing it in (they don't do that any more). One year, they and I were out by £300 in the accounting. I was able to go through the figures, which were all present and correct, and demonstrate to the Inland Revenue official why I was right and they were wrong.

Then, I took up an appointment where the Finance Steward (the church treasurer) was a retired insurance man, a real whizz with figures. One of the first things you have to do in a new appointment in the Methodist Church is chair the September Church Council, for which there's always a bundle of preparatory papers, including the annual accounts to be approved for auditing. I went through them in preparation for the meeting, and noticed that one item was accounted twice in two different places. When I told the treasurer he found it hard to believe, but checking himself he saw that was the case. As many ministers' eyes glaze over when shown the accounts and they don't bother to check them properly, this was the beginning of a real friendship of mutual respect with that treasurer. He was so pleased that I bothered about it, that I cared and I checked. And it increased my confidence that figures and I were not incompatible.

And then came the Tax Credit Débacle. I won't go into too much detail, because  it doesn't show the Inland Revenue up in a very good light, and they were only doing their best. This was at the time when Tax Credits replaced other forms of benefit, and the management of it was dumped on the Revenue by the government. Basically what happened was that rookie officials with only the briefest of training made some huge errors. They began by phoning me on a Sunday afternoon and pressurising me into receiving a payment for which I thought I wasn't eligible. But as they were very insistent and it was £3000 pa, I said "Okay", and let them do it.

As the months went by, increasingly sure I should not be in receipt of this (they hadn't taken into account my husband's income, and should have done), I began to ask them to stop the payments. They refused. 

In desperation I went to the Tax Office. By a stroke of luck, I had prepared the Tax Inspector for marriage and officiated at his wedding so he thought kindly of me, and tried to help me, but the Powers That Be stood firm and insisted the payments were unalterable.

My final tactic was to close my bank account, so they couldn't pay me any more. 

And then somehow they got all tangled up with the Department of Work and Pensions and started bombarding me with correspondence demanding to know if my husband could stand on one leg and hold a one-litre jug of water (because he was dying so my daughter was in receipt of attendance allowance to allow her to stop work and help me look after him). 

Here's a paragraph from one of the many letters, late on into the correspondence after I'd watched numerous errors unfolding:

So one way and another, the Revenue and I got into the most colossal battle. But here's the thing: reader — I won!!! I mean, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I could take on the Revenue, with no accountant to help me, and come out victorious (to the tune of two thousand quid). But I did, and the reason I did was that I kept meticulous, careful and accurate accounts, put everything in writing to all the different departments that contacted me, with dates and references of all the other officials who had written, and filed the correspondence; and they didn't do any of that, so they had no written record to substantiate their point of view.

That changed forever my estimation of my ability to handle finance, accounting and officialdom. It was the thing that gave me unassailable confidence that I could tackle money and sums and officials.

But no one is interested in this folder of correspondence except me, so I think, in all truth, it's time to keep the unassailable confidence but let the folder of paperwork go. So I'm doing that today.

I am keeping just one letter from that file (but I'll photograph it and keep it in digital form) — the last one, in which a senior Customer Relations officer from the Revenue wrote to say it was okay for me to keep the money they'd inadvertently paid me. Even though this was all the way back in 2004, I'm going to hang on to that.

It surprised me to find how hard it felt to part from these two things.