How I hate paperwork. Forms to fill, bills to pay, statements to file, receipts to keep, documents documenting things, proving things, explaining things. Keep them all. Up the pile rises, higher and higher, until this tower of fear and confusion can no longer support itself. Down it comes, collapsing under the weight of all the misery, the wretched sheets fanning out across the floor like the most dispiriting hand of cards ever dealt.

It’s at this stage I wish I was more like a friend I had who ran a department in a private school. It was one of those crammer places, where you go to retake the exams your original private school couldn’t get you through. At the end of each term he’d cast a baleful eye over the calamity of his desk, find himself a bin bag, and sweep into it every last bit of paper. Nothing would be spared – every letter, opened or unopened, along with any sweet wrappers, fragments of rolling tobacco and heaven knows what else. Off to landfill it went while off on holiday this dissolute character would go. And back to a lovely clear desk he’d return next term.

Despicable behaviour? Yes. Something enviable, even admirable, about this mindset? Also yes. And, to my knowledge, no serious comeback ever ensued. He never got into trouble. There’s a lesson here somewhere.

It’s a lesson I’d love to be brave or irresponsible enough to take on board, but I’m not made of the right (or wrong?) stuff. For me, the filing, or some shambolic approximation of filing, must commence. What to keep? For what? For why? These questions take too long to address, so I just keep everything, all of it, in a sense mirroring the work of my reckless teacher mate. He, like me, couldn’t be arsed to decide what to keep and what to dump. But he went entirely the other way and dumped it. Great minds can think (or rather not think) alike but act entirely differently.

I’m aware, obviously, that I could go paperless, and I do for some things, but I can’t remember why I decided this would be OK with those things, and it might not be. My friend and colleague Martin Lewis, the money-saving expert himself, suggested I photograph everything. I tried this, but after 15 minutes of crawling across the floor and snapping away on my cameraphone, my knees started to hurt. And it was back to those sliding drawers of dismay – the filing cabinet.

Herein, bulging suspended files hang heavy on the rails, the little hooks bent and desperate. Some fail and fall. Furthermore, I’ve never found a way of making those little tabs work, the ones telling you what each file is for. Either the tab falls off, or it loses its label, or both. Bloated and nameless, there the files remain, suspended in time for all time.

It’s a truth dimly acknowledged that you need to keep stuff for six years. Or longer for some stuff. Or less for other stuff. I forget why. Even if I could bring myself to spend time deciding which rule applies to what, how could this possibly work? It would surely mean that now, with April 2026 done and dusted, I should start digging out everything from April 2020 to consign it to the shredder of history. I mean, who does this?

And so it is that my collection grows. Endlessly. And also worthlessly, because as sure as eggs are eggs, when the time comes for me to produce a particular piece of paper, I will be quite unable to locate it. My filing cabinets are just like my brain when I’m at a pub quiz. All the answers are up there, but never can I summon them when the question is asked.

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist