I have spent most of the day cleaning and sorting my old study, which has long since become 'room which you do not enter unless you need somewhere to stack huge piles of crap'. It's a long hard slog, filling garbage bags and boxes, excavating through the heaps of sheer rubbish I've managed to accumulate.

Then there's the stuff that's not rubbish but really I no longer need to hang on to. Scrabbling through an old box of treasures, I found maybe a handful of old jewellery to keep, and a few s...