INSURANCE is probably something you cannot afford to live without, and life assurance is something you oughtn't to die without, that is unless you are destitute, or unconcerned about who will be left to fork out for your funeral.

Life assurance and property insurance policy premiums amount to a sizeable part of the budgets of many people, and judging from the reported share values of the companies that administer them, seem to provide a handsome profit for insurers and their shareholders.

Many of you will have been bombarded with offers of money-saving policies, with inducements of free smoke alarms, clocks, radios and department store vouchers. I certainly have - by at least one or two a week, especially two or three months before my existing policy was due to elapse.

The companies all make a similar boast that they can provide the best cover for the lowest premium, and invite you to free-phone them for a quotation. If I've nothing better to do - which isn't often these days - I give them a ring to call their bluff. But at the end of their sales spiel, it always transpires that they cannot offer me better cover at a lower rate than I already have.

After receiving several offers during the past month, it set me wondering whether or not we are getting value for our investment, or being taken for a ride. A rough check of my expenditure on property insurance premiums over the 30 years since I moved into my present home revealed that, after discounts for security and age had been applied, I had paid insurance companies about £3,000.

During that time I made only three or four minor claims and received about £180 in compensation. So, apart from a degree of satisfaction derived from knowing that in the event of my home burning down, being struck by lightning, a Boeing 737 falling on it, or its contents being pillaged by a daring and resourceful burglar (he'd have to be to break through my security safeguards) I shall be eligible to submit a claim for compensation, my premiums are simply swelling my insurance company's coffers.

Of course, not all policyholders are total losers; it is a little known fact that Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer had the foresight to take out a life assurance policy for $5,000 - a princely sum in 1876 - just before he set out for the Little Bighorn; an act for which his soon after to be widowed wife 'Libby', was profoundly grateful.

One thing's for sure, the insurers have done very nicely out of this careful and security-minded householder.

Having said that, holding an insurance policy is rather like holding a tiger by its tail; you can't afford to let it go, because if you do something very nasty will almost certainly occur.

Mind you, where I do score over the majority of the population is that I don't pay out anything for vehicle insurance. If I did, then I really would have something to complain about.

SUFFERING a bout of dry-eyes, something I put down to peering through windows of the Microsoft 98 type - which in my boyhood would have been easily remedied by watching a Shirley Temple film - I went for an eye test. "Your reading sight is OK, but you ought to have stronger lenses for viewing television," the optician advised. I ordered some, and details of my test and order were logged into their computer.

Four days later I received a letter from the opticians, informing me that I was overdue for an eye-test and that as I was over 60, if I ordered some new spectacles, I would qualify for a 50 per cent reduction on the cost of the frames.

Respecting the professionalism of their ophthalmic opticians, I shan't mention the name of the firm, but I'd have thought that after 250 years in business they'd have got their administrative act together.