TOM UTLEY: What’s wrong with keeping old bank statements (2024)

My task this weekend is to throw away my life. You may think this a melodramatic way of describing my wife’s order to chuck out most of the contents of my four-drawer filing cabinet, keeping only documents she regards as important. But that’s what it feels like.

One of my sisters-in-law warned me that something like this would happen. This was when I sadly told her of Mrs U’s plans to convert the smallest of our bedrooms into a shower room and expand the kitchen by ripping out my beloved (and increasingly essential) downstairs loo.

‘Oh, that’ll be only the start of it,’ she said, knowing my wife all too well. ‘Once the work’s done, she’ll think the rest of the house looks shabby. So she’ll have a massive clear-out and start tarting up all the other rooms, one by one.’

Sure enough, everything she prophesied is coming to pass. With the loo gone and the shower room at last finished — having taken roughly as long to complete as it took to build Rome — Mrs U has turned her attention elsewhere.

With as much fortitude as I could muster, I consented to the disposal of the sofa-bed in the sitting room — though it surely had some scientific importance as the heaviest, ugliest and (according to those unfortunate enough to have tried to sleep on it) most uncomfortable piece of furniture ever constructed by man.

Sacrifice

I agreed, too, with a leaden heart, to her binning our entire collection of video cassette tapes. True, we no longer possess a machine capable of playing them, and I suppose if we wanted to see any of those films again, we could find them online.

But it still felt wrong to throw away tapes that were perfectly playable (if only we had the equipment) and which might, one day, be of interest to students of late 20th-century technology.

In a further sacrifice, after much protest, I even said goodbye to our four boys’ bunk beds, which had been lying dismantled in our choc-a-bloc attic for the 20 years since they were last slept in.

OK, we hadn’t had much use for them lately. Nor could I deny that some of the slats seemed to be broken and a lot of the bolts were missing. But mightn’t we need them for our yet-to-be-born grandchildren when they came to stay — and couldn’t slats and bolts be replaced more cheaply than the whole kit?

Moreover, wouldn’t bunks come in handy if Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un lost the plot completely and we had to retreat to a nuclear shelter in the garden?

It was no good. When Mrs U has made up her mind about something, she’s deaf to the sweet voice of masculine reason. Resistance was useless, and I yielded with a nobility of spirit that would have done credit to Alexander the Great.

Somehow or other, I told myself, I could probably adjust to life without the murderously uncomfortable sofa-bed, the dust-caked video cassettes and the broken bunks. But the filing cabinet was quite another matter.

I knew the writing was on the wall when I arrived home from work a couple of weeks ago to find Mrs U standing with both hands on the kitchen table, leaning slightly forward, as she does when she has something challenging to say.

‘Tom, darling, can you tell me this?’ she said. ‘Why have you kept every single bank statement you’ve had since 1972? Is that strictly necessary?’

Let me just point out that this was a wild exaggeration. Indeed, some of my bank statements are missing, with a gap of several months over a period in the late Eighties, when I seem to have neglected record-keeping. But that is by the way.

In that awful moment, I realised she must have been poking around in my filing cabinet, which has stood in the back bedroom since I was forced to move it from what is now the shower room. I’d hoped its new home would be permanent, though I admit it takes up a lot of space.

But no, her question suggested only one thing: the precious cabinet — repository of the archives of my entire existence — was next in her sights for the skip.

My grim foreboding hardened into a certainty when she followed up her inquiry with a series of others.

Obscure

Why, she wanted to know, had I kept the MOT and insurance certificates for every car I’d ever owned?

Did I really still need the instructions and warranty for the Zanussi washing machine we had in our first flat in 1980?

Come to that, did I have some obscure reason for preserving the instructions and warranties for every toaster, record-player, Goblin Teasmade, Sony Walkman, Sinclair calculator, Rubik’s Cube, Nintendo Pac-Man, iPod, Game Boy, Xbox, hi-fi system, clock radio, hair-dryer and lawnmower anyone in the family had ever possessed, no matter how briefly?

Still, she hadn’t finished. Did I seriously need to keep all 50-odd party conference passes — Labour, Liberal, Social Democrat, Liberal Democrat and Conservative — issued to me in my days as a Parliamentary lobby correspondent? It wasn’t as if they would get me into any conference in the 21st century.

Did I still need every payslip I’d ever received, every copy of every tax return I’d submitted — and every vaccination certificate for every long-dead pet?

Was there some rational explanation as to why I was hanging on to perhaps thousands of letters from readers, stretching back 40 years to the start of my career on the Tavistock Times? Did I really plan to read them again before I died, or answer those I overlooked several decades ago?

Reader, she was addressing me as if I were some kind of obsessive hoarder!

Women, eh? They simply don’t understand anything. To my wife, four decades’ worth of bank statements may seem a tad on the dull side and not worth keeping.

Memories

But what if I should ever feel like writing my autobiography (unlikely, I grant you, but people with equally uninteresting lives have done it)?

Since I’ve never kept a diary — and my memory is so bad these days I can barely recall anything of my life before lunchtime yesterday — bank statements are surely an invaluable primary source. After all, can’t we trace a great deal of our history through our financial transactions?

The same goes for documents of cars we used to own. They conjure up memories of where we drove, and with whom. As for old conference passes — all right, they don’t have all that much practical use any more, and I can’t pretend I’ve looked at mine since I neatly filed away my last one under C. But if I did, wouldn’t I find them pregnant with memory-jerking meaning?

Indeed, they all have their own story to tell. Conservatives, Brighton, 1980? ‘The lady’s not for turning.’

Labour, Bournemouth, 1985? That was the conference (Jeremy Corbyn, please note) where Neil Kinnock attacked Derek Hatton’s hard-Left Liverpool over ‘the grotesque chaos of a Labour council — a Labour council — hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’.

Conservatives, Brighton, 1984? The bomb.

Long after my last memory cell has disintegrated, my passes will be tangible evidence that I was there. So, dammit, I’m going to keep them. But as for most of the rest of my documents, I fear they’ll have to go. Mrs U is not one to be crossed.

So it is that, this weekend, I begin the melancholy task of sorting through files of a lifetime, keeping only those such as birth and marriage certificates, current insurance policies and documents for the car we own. I am to put these in a two-drawer cabinet, which she is kindly letting me keep in the cupboard under the stairs.

An obsessive hoarder? Me? Nonsense! Like so many other sensible men, I just can’t bear chucking out anything useful or interesting. Would any of my readers like the instructions for a Zanussi washing machine, circa 1980?