Lifestyle Choices

THE DRAWER WITH THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING and what to put in it

Filing is a word that makes most women look mutinous, but it’s not only a good idea, but in home emergencies absolutely essential. Don’t be frightened by the idea of filing. The verb only means putting things in a sensible place where you can find them quickly and easily. Four years of my filing fit into a suitcase.

Know your limitations and don’t plan a filing system that is better than you are, as you won’t stick to it and you will find that even more depressing than doing it.

What follows sounds amazingly neat and tidy, but it isn’t. Most of my key work seems to be on the front of old envelopes (backs already used for key work). If I stopped to type or write them out they would never get done; it’s easier to shove any old scrap of paper into its correct place in the system than to have it lying around.

The simplest filing system: This might just be an alphabetically indexed document wallet. Or a Twin- lock personal file suitcase.

My humble system started with two cardboard mushroom boxes labelled ‘ I N’ and 0 U T ‘, and one kitchen drawer that deserves its peeling label The drawer with the answer to everything’. It contained eight standard office cardboard files, with two pockets each, providing sixteen compartments, which should be enough for any fun-loving, file- hating harassed housewife.

What to put in your files: Everyone’s individual filing system is a different sort of organized chaos. Once you’ve started it the only thing you will have to remember is that this repository, whatever its size or situation, is from now on the one and only safe place in the house. Any scrap of valuable paper (except money) should be in it, even if it’s just saved in the huge envelope labelled ‘For sorting out sometime’.

File roughly as follows, according to your circumstances and tidiness potential, in the eight double pocket files you have bought. I never file anything in alphabetical or date order or it would never get filed.

In fact, you might, given the strength, time, patience and a rainy Sunday afternoon, draw up a list of your family numbers, so you won’t have to forget to fill them in the beginning of your diary every year. These range from national health numbers, national insurance numbers, passport numbers, driving licence numbers, insurance policy numbers, transistor radios, cassettes, stereos, TV, cameras, watches, bicycles, slide and cinema projectors, cars: almost anything mechanical and stealable has a serial number somewhere on the case. Note these numbers with a description of the object. Also include any car or scooter numbers. For some reason the police think you need slapping straight into a straitjacket if you can’t remember your car number: but some brains are pondering mightier things, such as whether to file love letters under X for kisses and did you remember to put the plastic losable key to the washing machine in your jewel box, where the baby can’t grab it to teethe on.

It’s a good idea to add a list of the items which you keep in your handbag, together with their serial numbers: credit cards, Barclay card, Access card, £3c1 cheque card, cheque books, union card, library card, driving licence, car insurance certificate, National Trust life membership card. In case of theft you can quickly inform the police and cancel or replace these items.

If there is still room in your drawer keep an envelope or plastic bag full of assorted sticky labels, for files, jam jars, etc., and if you can bear it, wander round your home with string and labels and remove unused keys from furniture and suitcases, labelling the keys as you go and putting them in a plastic bag. This saves time when you are trying to keep, find and/or identify keys which are rarely used. In this container I also keep a list of anyone who has a front door key, however temporarily. Burglaries are most upsetting and unsettling.

That is the minimum efficiency method. Read on if you feel you can take something slightly more grandiose. If, for example, you have complicated home help or do stalwart voluntary work or are running a cottage industry (I know a girl who started a thriving lunch business by selling pizzas out of her kitchen window to the office workers in the factory opposite).

More advanced filing: The advanced filer uses a proper filing cabinet. You might — as I did - use an old orange box or a wire crate, until I bought a secondhand filing cabinet and resprayed it scarlet. Now, if anyone asked me what I would save in a fire I would say that cabinet.

I was encouraged to buy that filing cabinet (of all ridiculous things to have in the house) by the beautiful historian Lady Antonia Fraser. She said that it took her two years to get around to buying one and another year to summon up the energy to fill it, but that it really does work and she can find something like the television licence in a minute. But only she can find it, because Lady Antonia believes in surrounding herself with a certain amount of uncertainty, if not mystery. So, she has a secret system which only she understands: bills, for instance, are not filed under B but under U for unpleasant.

My filing cabinet is a four-drawer danger. The top drawer is for boring business; files labelled `Insurance‘, ‘ Accountant ‘, ‘Receipts’, ‘ Bills’; the second drawer is for my writing works; the third drawer has files labelled `In/Out’, ‘Pending’, ‘Stationery’, and ‘ Voluntary Work’; the fourth drawer holds family things such as photographs, letters and school reports.

You think that’s going too far? American matriarch Rose Kennedy kept a card index on each child.

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