I just got home tonight after 680 miles of travelling in the UK, at least 490 of which were undergoing roadworks. On the doormat were two Christmas cards (this is my new level of popularity) and a letter from the bank. The bank letter said – to a customer it’s been paying 0.000000111% interest to over the last three years on a total account balance rarely below £800 – that I was now £580 overdrawn, which was £330 over the agreed overdraft of £250, and thus they were going to arrange a war crimes trial with me in the Stalin role, and the chances were I’d be lucky to get the death sentence commuted unless I pay them £10 a f**king day.

Well they didn’t actually write ‘£10 a f**king day’, that’s just what I said out loud when I read the letter’s third and most devastating paragraph. But I was calm. I was chilled. I was James Bond: a tiny bit shaken, but not stirred. So I went onto the internet 24/7 always there for me banking site I now use with Lloyds TSB….and this was the sequence of events:

* I signed in. Big mistake: ‘your password will have to be reset’. Not ‘your password will have to be reset for the third time in four months please because we can’t find our arses in the dark let alone yours’, just do it or else. Theirs is about the only password I can remember, because it involves my favourite numbers and a beautiful name of sentimental value. But now it had to be something else. Something else that I mustn’t write down anywhere without first of all buying a strongbox, hiring a SWAT team and then burying it 500 ft below ground while they covered me.

* Having reset the password with the greatest of animosity – and of course having given them my memorable information, picked up a phone call to say yes this was me, and then typed in an authorisation number – I clicked to transfer some money to wipe out the overdraft before ringing the phone banking service to tell them where they could stick the £10 a day charge. But it wouldn’t let me. Transfer the money I mean, not tell them to stick their pawnbroker overdraft rates up their undercarriage. I had been authorised and then unauthorised within the space of eight seconds: I am an author sir, how very dare you unauthorise me.

* With the screen in front of me, I rang through to the phone service. Once again, the Defcom4 level of security kicked in: could they have the first and fourth letter of my phone security number, could they have my birth date in six digit form, could I fax a copy of my latest dental X-ray, was I now or had I ever been a member of the Yogic Levitation Gang….on and on it went. I got through (after being told they’d be closed Christmas Day) and was given over to the care of Daphne, who couldn’t make the transfer either. So she put me through to the internet team, who asked for my name. I gave it, and the bloke put the phone down. I’m guessing that he used to run a Welsh kids care home, but I could be wrong.

* So I started all over again with the waist measurements and DNA series and name of my great Aunt’s Doberman, and this time I opted for Escalated Complaints before anyone could get a word in edgeways. New girl Angela said sure, just give me your 4-digit authorisation code from your screen you used last time, and the screen went dark, revealing only a light-blue panel that said ‘As we haven’t heard from you in ten minutes, we’ve logged you out’. There is a wonderful moment in the Steve Martin film Planes, Trains & Automobiles where Steve’s character Neil arrives back at the car hire desk having been given the key to a car that doesn’t exist. The exchange goes like this – and sorry folks, but I can’t be bothered with the asterisks this time:

Car Rental Agent: [cheerfully] Welcome to Marathon, may I help you?
Neal: Yes.
Car Rental Agent: How may I help you?
Neal: You can start by wiping that fucking dumb-ass smile off your rosey, fucking, cheeks! And you can give me a fucking automobile: a fucking Datsun, a fucking Toyota, a fucking Mustang, a fucking Buick! Four fucking wheels and a seat!
Car Rental Agent: I really don’t care for the way you’re speaking to me.
Neal: And I really don’t care for the way your company left me in the middle of fucking nowhere with fucking keys to a fucking car that isn’t fucking there. And I really didn’t care to fucking walk, down a fucking highway, and across a fucking runway to get back here to have you smile in my fucking face. I want a fucking car RIGHT FUCKING NOW!
Car Rental Agent: May I see your rental agreement?
Neal: I threw it away.
Car Rental Agent: Oh boy.
Neal: Oh boy, what?
Car Rental Agent: You’re fucked!

* Except that in my case, Angela had more sense than to give me the last line after I said “My authorisation just disappeared, because you guys logged me out. I cannot express how angry I am about this. But to give you some idea, on a scale of 1 to 10, I’m at 758.” This got me put through to Marcus, and here’s another thing that really irritates the bejesus out of me in these situations: why is the person in charge of these fiascos always a bloke? I mean, I am the last person on God’s Earth to support anything Harriet Harman ever even smiled at let alone said, but did it ever occur to banks that the reason why SNAFU rules inside their flea-bitten phone battery-hangars is the cocks are running things not the hens? Nobody ever said, “I think we’re in the presence of a major hen-up here” right? Nope: the phrase is cock-up. And here’s the news Lloyds banker guys: the girlies don’t have the cock thingies. We have the cocks, the ladies have the chest-bumps and the mounds of Venus, to be a little D H Lawrence about it. Are there clues in this for you?

* Anyway, Marcus did his best. He waived the overdraft fee after I threatened to sell his guinea pig into slavery, and then he gave me a number so secret that only Mervyn King and I know it.  And on the end of that number was Nick. Nick was concerned because he couldn’t see anything in what he called “your notes” that would lead anyone of sound mind to cause any one of the fifty-five minutes of angst I’d just been through. But he just couldn’t resist asking me seven more security questions before giving me yet another 4-digit code number to quote tomorrow morning when they ring me back to say….something or other of little import to anyone.

Anyway – to go back to where we started – the soon-to-be-standardised value of arguing aggressively with your bank is….£80. Because when I arrived back here tonight I owed Lloyds TSB this sum, and now I don’t.

This is terrific on one simple ‘add then subtract’ level, but completely insane on almost every other one that counts. Here I am, a good and valued customer being dicked about by a system that leaves me unable to manipulate my own money. That I am unable to do so is a mystery more enigmatic than why poor little Mr K in The Trial is charged with a crime that is never defined. Chiefly, I am unable to do so because the standards of honesty in our culture have slumped down to a level beyond the bottom of the barrel and well below the radar: the only solution is to inconvenience the innocent in the search for the guilty.

Except, of course, we don’t know if the guilty parties are scamming the bank, or running the bank. The only thing we do know is the value (£80) of one curmudgeonly customer arguing with a bank. But we will never know the cost of rescuing that bank from its own incompetence , sandbanking that bank against silly investments and bad bets, or indeed defending that bank against the newly tooled-up hitech criminal classes.

They can’t serve customers properly any more. They can’t stop thieves from digging their shovels into customer deposits any more. They can’t stop costing the taxpayer money any more. They can’t lend to entrepreneurial business any more. They don’t know why they’ve put security restraints on their clients’ money any more. And they can’t offer savers interest on their deposits any more.

I’m sorry, but I’ve lost my way here. Why exactly is the idea of banks leaving our shores so terrible to contemplate?