Twelve years to sort six boxes. To bin, or not to bin - that is the question | Emma Brockes

Ticket stubs, newspaper cuttings and letters from my mother's old employer. But what is treasure and what is trash?

I moved into my present apartment seven years ago, and my six crates of papers moved with me - directly from one closet, where they had squatted undisturbed for five years, to another, where the same fate awaited. For almost two decades, these things have followed me around, and I've never had the slightest inclination to go through them.

Then last week, in a fit of January decluttering fervour, I decided to reclaim my closet. Everything came out into the living room, where it seemed to me an achievable aim to aggregate these six crates down into a single container. I could probably do it in an hour, I thought. Four days later and here I still am: surrounded by papers, trying to weigh the value of a letter from my mother's then 17-year-old brother to her in 1967, and whether I should keep receipts from my tax return in 1998.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist