Róisín Ingle on . . . decluttering your contacts

I’ve been on a bit of an archaeological dig lately, excavating the contact list on my phone. It’s been years since I’ve done a proper stock

take. Turns out tackling your mobile phone contacts is like a cross between This Is Your Life and a particularly head-wrecking Krypton Factor- esque game show where you are tasked with trying to figure out who Lily Sweetshop might be.

You see I have a habit of meeting people, putting them in my contacts and then inventing a surname that cunningly describes the context I met them in. The idea is that I’ll definitely remember them when I’m scrolling through contacts instead of being left wondering who Mary Smith and Robert White are and what they are doing in my phone. That’s the idea but it’s a deeply flawed system that relies on my figuring out the story behind the carefully chosen if bamboozling code words.

These are some contacts in my phone: Claire Newborn, Andy Positivity, M Ice Sculptor, Denise Wedding. I don’t know who any of these people are but they sound like they might be interesting, especially Andy. To delete or not to delete that is the question. I leave them where they are for now. You never know when you might have a lump of ice that needs sculpting.

I am not very good at this. I should be getting more brutal when it comes to weeding out contacts I no longer need.

I should be deleting more of them, holding on to less. But I have a problem in general with what I call techno-hoarding. There are 39,655 emails in my inbox. Sometimes I look at that number and get cold sweats about the space I am taking up on the internet.

On better days I see this as a useful document of my life. I want to be able to search those emails and instantly come across a document on any subject that gives me an insight into where I was at that time in my life. I type in Holles St and get lost in a dreamy hole of memories of having babies and meeting a very kind woman called Rhona and marvelling that she went on to become the first master of a maternity hospital.

I can’t delete those. It’s my pocket personal encyclopedia. No. The email inbox is too daunting.

It seems at first it will be easier to tackle the nearly 900 names in my phone. There are people who have emigrated, that I haven’t seen or heard of for years. Delete.

There are others I’ve fallen out with but I can’t remember why. Delete. There are people I’ve drifted apart from, scrolling through I think fondly of them but wonder if we’d have anything in common all these years later. Keep. For now.

There are phone numbers for restaurants that closed years ago. These are easy to delete while at the same time paying brief homage to their particular way with peppery calamari. There is one from years back marked simply Estate Agent. Delete, obviously.

And then there are the ones I’m not quite sure what to do with. There is a contact called Lovely Boy, which I’m loath to get rid of for obvious reasons. And you just never know when you might need someone called Boiler Man.

There is one number I come across that brings unexpected clarity. Breda Walking. I have fond memories of Breda Walking. She emailed me once, invited me to join her weekly walks, became my training partner for the marathon, didn’t give up on me, helped me move my body when moving my body was not something I did on a regular basis. I wonder if Breda Walking still goes walking along Clontarf seafront? I wonder how she is? I wonder if she’d take me back into the fold and help me again, if I asked nicely? My archaeological dig reminds me I need Breda Walking and just plain old walking back in my life.

There are people in my contacts who are dead. I go through the text messages between us, reliving the laughs we had, the plans we made. The last text message they sent might not seem momentous to anybody else – “No bother, sure I’ll catch you Monday anyway and we’ll see what works . . . enjoy the rest of the weekend!” – but you can’t help reading and re-reading and wondering. And you definitely can’t press delete. roisin@irishtimes.com