I have to admit that I am not all that good at throwing things that are obviously rubbish straight into the bin or recycling. I tend to pile junk mail, journals and bills up, then have to hide it all somewhere if someone comes round and I want to give the impression of being a neat and tidy person. Before Christmas I had a small box full of this kind of stuff which was placed in the spare room out of the way, and in the last few weeks a couple of other piles of paper have grown too. This is bad behaviour I know, but now you can’t just throw rubbish into the bin (without shredding it or checking it should be in the recycling bin) I have become lazy.

Tonight I needed something I thought was in the box, and have ended up on a major decluttering mission. What is a worry is the amount of papers that have arrived through my letter box unsolicited (no sadly I don’t mean my credit card bill, though I can’t say I really wanted that either), no I mean all the offers of loans and credit cards, all the offers of money off dog food (I have no dog), vouchers for a pound off my shopping at Marks and Spencer and then there are leaflets. Fast food providers (pizza, curry, Chinese and even a company that can deliver a full English breakfast and roast beef dinner!) not to mention leaflets from the council telling me what they do with my council tax money and how they won some kind of best blooming contrete jungle award (I think that was about flower displays).

In these times of global warming, potential drought and scarce natural resources why are we still being sent this stuff? I think that if I didn’t recycle I would send at least one rubbish bag to landfill each week just stuffed full of paper.

Today I have been on a kind of bonding, team building away day type of experience. I think it was meant to calm the worried and anxious and help us focus on the challenges ahead (whatever they are). Actually it wasn’t too bad, certainly it was good for our team and it was good to get together with some of the people in our directorate I don’t really know all that well. It also gave me the opportunity to spend some time with my new manager, who I am pleased to say is turning out to be good to work with. Tomorrow I am back to university, for our assessment day, so that should be an interesting one!