the joy of filing

I am now the proud - and embarrassingly, I do mean proud - owner of a filing cabinet, only lightly distressed with coffeestains and paperclip scratches. I spent half the afternoon digging it out of the secondhand office warehouse down the road and heaving it up our stairs, but the research materials for my book which were previously strewn all over the spare bed are now satisfactorily stowed away in its drawers and I feel virtuous every time I look at it (which is fairly often, unavoidably: it takes up half the bloody room).
The irony of working from home and then making my house look like an office isn't lost on me, especially as my old office now looks more and more like a home: the paper moved last year to new headquarters that are all sofas and coffee machines and chillout areas to make everyone more creative. Unfortunately, having my own sofa and coffee on tap at home makes me not so much creative as inclined to lie around reading magazines and eating chocolate: hence the need for the grim Seventies office vibe. I was, I told myself, saving time and making myself more productive in the long run by spending a few hours getting organised.
Except that the more I think about it the more I suspect it's the (semi) grownup version of spending hours painstakingly colouring in your revision timetable with millions of different highlighters. File that under P for Procrastination, then.