In which I purchase a shredder

I suppose the time has come for me to tell you that my best-laid plans as announced last year have come to fruition, and I leave for somewhere where I will have to speak Spanish on or around Sept 1st this year.

As a result I am slowly trying to prepare my house for rental. This involves turning out a good 10 years' worth of accumulated archived bank documents, salary slips, and other assorted private information. One hears such dreadful stories about identity cloning that I haven't been throwing these away, but building them up in a corner awaiting the day I got access to a shredder.

Today I bought a shredder.

I had no idea it would be such fun to see assorted documents being munched into confetti. It reminded me forcibly of a game I used to play with Pickle, us either side of a door and me wiggling a bit of paper under it in a tantalising fashion. I had a delightful 15 minutes of watching my 1995 bank statements disappear in a very similar manner until the shredder seized up from overheating. It's cooling down now. I'd call it a cheap piece of tosh, but it wasn't cheap.

Of course, what I needed was one of these: