Hi Finance

I spent an hour or so this evening organising my bank statements. Financial records are always important, and for some reason I've never felt able to throw away any of my bank statements, ever since I first opened the account 20 years ago.

This is not to say that my record-keeping has always been so scrupulous - after all, the tidy pile of bank statements you see, pictured right, has not been all in the same place for a long time. But as I spent most of the year tidying up, each time I found a bank statement, I returned it to one place where all bank statements would hereinafter be stored. Eventually, I had rounded them all up safely in one neat place.

Or so I thought! Not until this evening have I become aware of the full carnage of my lax attitude and financial procedures. For you see, of the 492 statements that my bank has so far sent me, over the years.. 25 of them are missing.

Unacceptable! As many as 5% of my bank statements are still unaccounted for. I have no idea where they might be. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have thrown them away. But surely I've searched and tidied anywhere that stray bank statements could be hiding. So where could they be? I wonder. What am I to do, how am I to live my life, for example, without statement 106 from April 1994?

I suppose I could always ring the bank up. "Hello, can I have a copy of statement 106 please? And these 24 others..." But then again they might say "You must be nuts, we don't keep stuff from the last century." Even if they could service all of my requests, I could be looking at £125 in bank charges just to get copies. Are they that important to me? Well, I can answer that one straight away - no they're not. A complete collection is one thing, but cold hard cash is quite another. And besides, I might find the missing statements one day. Imagine how upset I'd be if I'd already paid £5 for a copy. Compare to how happy I could have been at finding a long-lost piece of financial history. No, I don't think we'll be paying for any copy statements now. They're really not that important.

That said, I'm still finding a strange reluctance to throw them away. All three inches and two kilograms of them. Of course I'd scan them first (got to keep records, after all)... but somehow having the originals is  nicer. Who knows, one day they might be art. I could have a room in the Tate somewhere, with the artist's actual bank statements as wallpaper. Who wouldn't be delighted by such a thing?

Hm. Maybe I'd better get the shredder ready.