ext_122761 ([identity profile] j4.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] j4 2009-11-09 01:37 pm (UTC)

I had an epiphany about bank statements a few years ago; I realised that I was carrying around every bank statement I'd ever had (right back to the Natwest 'piggy bank' account I got when I was about 10) and yet I had never had occasion to look at an old bank statement. I decided to keep just the past two years, plus a final statement for accounts which had been closed (so I'd have the account number if necessary), and threw the remaining metre-high stack of paper in the recycling. Most of my banking is now online, and I have still never had occasion to look back at a paper statement except to find my account number (and occasionally to find a phone number for a bank, because their online info is so uniformly dreadful). It's probably a bit different if you're self-employed, though!

Newspaper articles were harder to get rid of, and it was mildly interesting to see what the 13-year-old me had cut out and kept... but (as I said in comment above) I am not the archivist of the 20th Century. If I was, I'd demand a better salary. I reckon the Independent probably have archives of everything interesting they published between 1992 and 1996, and I probably don't need to mirror those archives in a box marked "misc" in the bottom of a wardrobe somewhere near Loughborough.

Scribblings of ideas are much, much harder to get rid of. I suppose one day I will have to admit that I am not a novelist, a poet, a songwriter, an artist, or an academic, and keeping all this stuff is a bit like keeping a guitar I can't play and telling people that one day I'll be in a rock band. What I'd really like to do is put all the 'ideas' somewhere online so that someone else can use them -- a sort of creative commons jumble sale. I oscillate between "this stuff is crap, if I make it public I'll just get laughed at" and "I could turn this stuff into something good, I don't want to give away my brilliant idea"; but the latter is, I think, just dog-in-the-manger behaviour, and the manger in question is pretty mangy to start with.

The hardest thing is the nagging thought that I should be keeping all this stuff in case any future kids of mine might get as much fun out of looking through it as I got out of looking through my parents' old newspaper clippings & stuff. But a) I don't think there's actually any danger of me throwing all this stuff away, and b) maybe I should be consciously trying not to breed another generation of hoarders... (not that this is actively an issue yet or looking likely to be any time soon, so, meh).

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting