Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements

Well, in contrast to the instructions above I have elected to keep my old bank statements and throw away my old love letters...

I spent yesterday sorting through our box of important documents, and organised all our bank statements for our joint account. I have 33, and I'm only missing 2 since we opened the account. I spent today digging through loads of old letters and diaries and decided to throw most of them away. It feels kinda weird, because it's a bit like throwing away history, if you can do such a thing. It's like destroying the past, or at least making a concerted effort to forget it.

Throwing away old love letters is fairly easy to justify... I guess most people do that each time they break up with someone. I'd kept most of the letters from each of the 5 relationships I've been in, except for the correspondence from the first one, which I burnt and threw the remnants of into the Dee... Inventive, no? But I digress... The point is, I'd kept quite a lot of old letters up till now, but I can't really figure why. I imagine the point of the quoted lyrics is that some day you might want to look back on a time when someone loved you, or whatever, but that doesn't really seem all that necessary now that I'm married and intending to stay that way until death do us part. So, I'm getting rid of a whole load of old love letters.

Diaries is a bit harder to square in some ways. My mum once told me that one of her biggest regrets was getting rid of her old diaries. (For reference my dad says that one of his biggest regrets was selling his record collection when he was younger, so there you go.) However, my diaries are mostly just miserable semi-emo whinings, which is hardly a great surprise as my teenage years were resoundingly crap. I'm not really in a hurry to read about years of bullying, teenage angst and the all pervading dearth of women. On the other hand, I'm not sure I need to read about all the ups and downs of my relationships once the latter problem was resolved, now that I'm married to someone else. In all truth, reading my old diaries is like reading about the life of someone else. Most of it I just can't connect with. I really was a different person back then, before various women (Tamsin, Rachel, Laura, Alison, mostly in that order) helped to sort me out. So, thanks ladies...

Right. This post was a bit emo in itself, so I'd better cut it short here, especially as I need to go and feed my daughter. Catch you all again soon.

PS. I've fixed it so comments can be posted!