Acme, just wanted to say I'm so sorry your Cinnamon is declining. We recently had to make the decision to have our cat Minty put to sleep, and in spite of it being entirely the right thing to do, I know how heartbreaking it is. It helps us to concentrate on the very happy life he had, and the really lovely little moments we shared. I so feel for you.

About the decluttering, I always do a massive attack on the filing cabinet in the study every January. Two huge drawers with quite neatly arranged folders, but over the year they get more and more stuffed full of papers. This is only for running the house, our car and other documents (Tax and so on). But the amount of A4 bits of paper gets silly. I weed out all but the most essential stuff and do one file at a time. By the time I've done only the first drawer, there's a massive pile of paper to get rid of. It can't be recycled because there may be details of accounts etc so it all has to be shredded piece by piece. Our electric shredder overheats after 5 sheets, so this process takes literally weeks! I'm nearly at the end of the second drawer now. And I've managed to do a financial review at the same time, which is always useful. I'd like to burn all this paper, but our garden is tiny and there's a huge 1000 litre oil tank sitting there. Bit dangerous to burn stuff right beside that!
I remember the time when all this malarkey was unknown. My parents didn't have huge amounts of paper around the place. I'm thinking of employing a secretary and an accountant!