When you're a bright county councillor with a sideline as a top planning consultant, there just aren't enough hours in the day.

You start afresh each morning, rushing from site to site, offering important advice and gathering crucial documents. By teatime you're quite tired, and you have to go home and rest. You certainly don't have time to go back to the office to shred the more private paperwork.

But cast your mind forward to 2010, when the next tribunal will be getting into its stride. Those documents you dumped in your room could be seized by the authorities and used to make you have an embarrassing "I don't recall"-type memory lapse.

Now you can say goodbye to that no-time-to-shred anxiety with the portable paper shredder. As you drive away with an incriminating document, simply feed it into the metal jaws of the little machine.

The device takes a standard nine-volt battery, and you can feed up to three sheets at a time . . . but sometimes it's therapeutic to put them in one by one.

The Portable Shredder, £20 sterling (€30), is available by mail order from Paperchase on 00 44 20 74676200.

Become a gizmo source: smaccarthaigh@irish-times.ie