I ring my parents in Doncaster to ask how their ark is coming along. Just the other side of their main road, in Bentley, residents are still thigh-deep in dyke-water. The leisure centre where I skived off school swimming lessons is a refugee camp. But my parents, for all their great age and predisposition to fret about minutiae, are sanguine. My father couldn’t get through flooded roads to his optician’s appointment, he’s concerned about his potatoes. But apart from that . . . “We’re not worried,” my mum says. “We are insured.” They are safe on the high ground of the prudent and cautious.

Although of modest means, my parents have always saved, planned, strived to forestall disaster. If the floods are Britain’s Hurricane Katrina and Yorkshire our ignored, pariah New Orleans – and they do share a taste in fried food if not music – the divide emerging is not racial, but between the insured and the uninsured.

Those who paid their premiums will, in time, get their lives and possessions back, new for old. Those who didn’t will have to rely on charity or family or a speck of the millions promised this week. But their ruin is their own fault: the Government has said it will not fully compensate the uninsured because that would rile their more farsighted neighbours (but, above all, the insurance companies).

Live on TV, evidence of a family’s dire financial planning is spread out in the road for all to see. Imagine, she had a leather suite from DFS but no insurance! Instead of buying that 42in plasma telly now rotting in his skip, he could have bought the 38in and a contents policy. And so epic rainfall is once again a divine punishment, this time upon the feckless.

Cost of floods will top £2billion as Brown promises aid

Insurers say outlay will be £1.5bn, but a quarter of homes are not insured for contents - as PM promises emergency aid

• Rescuers just left my son to die, says father of man trapped in flood drain

• Floods drive up broccoli, carrot and potato prices

• The future is wet. Summer was in April

BACKGROUND

• Insurers hit by £230m flood damage bill

• Insurers blacklist flood-prone homes

• Insurers deluged by claims for flood damage

• Insurance advice for flooded homeowners

Perhaps the floods have not gathered the nation’s sympathy because, as viewed from a dry sofa, they look so funny: postmasters in waders, dogs or princes in little dinghies, firemen giving piggy-backs to pretty girls. There is the same air of merry chaos as when your school was closed because of snow. Water is comic: fire is tragic. A freak blaze destroying the contents of 30,000 homes would have launched a multimillion appeal.

And these are northern floods too, featuring Yorkshire folk with their native comic timing: pensioners as scripted by Alan Bennett, women worrying about their kitchen cupboards in vintage Victoria Wood. It’s raining oop North! Nothing novel there, the South can snigger.

Yet for the uninsured there is no comedy value in a stinking house, or your kids at risk of old-fashioned water-bourne disease, or scrubbing sewage out of a fridge you can’t afford to replace.

Speak to insurance companies and it is clear they regard these floods as their greatest ever advertisement. Their agents are dashing in from as far as Belfast to demonstate the true value of stumping up for your premiums: that a claim is not merely about a cheque, but competent hands scooping you from your sodden life, putting you in a bed and breakfast, your pets in kennels, while experts rip up your floorboards, dry your house good and slow, so your house doesn’t later flower with mould, before decorators and plasterers move in and the van pitches up with your sofa and sparkly new TV. An average flood claim costs an insurer about £25,000.

Meanwhile, the uninsured are old-style Victorian destitutes, at least of £5,000 worth of possessions lost – maybe stuff they are still paying for on credit cards – their only solace a repayable loan from the Government’s social fund. It will be years before their lives, and those of their children, are put back on course, if they ever are.

So why do one in four people, almost a third in Scotland and London, take a risk and not insure their contents? Some non-insurers are natural chancers, those who think it a drag, a bore to play safe: “It always appals me,” says the man at Norwich Union, “how few journalists are insured, even financial specialists who should know better.” But more significantly, being uninsured is a key indicator of poverty. And these affected parts of Yorkshire and Humberside are strapped working-class areas. Half of the poorest homes have no contents policy, compared with one in five households on an average income. It is one of life’s crueller ironies that you are three times more likely to be burgled if you don’t have insurance: companies charge bigger premiums in dodgy, crime-ridden areas where residents tend to be poorest, therefore least able to pay. And even less able to replace a telly or CD player when, inevitably, it is nicked.

Besides, insurance is a “grudge” purchase, no fun, no buttons to press, no immediate benefit. Would you choose a £200 policy or a week in the sun? If a job is lost and money gets tighter, the monthly premium is the first slash to the budget. And anyway there is a pervading suspicion that insurance is a con – one that wealthier financial illiterates like myself share – that they take your money, boggle you with small print and never stump up.

But there are are those who career through life with no care for a future, because they have no control over their present. They squander their insurance money on Sky dishes, vodka, pizza and fags. They’ll always be there, the “undeserving poor” as was.

Should we save them when the floodwater rises? Or do we stand purse-lipped at their lack of providence, as the loss adjuster with his clipboard sanctions our new suite?

I am mystified why the BBC’s series Rome does not have a loyal and passionate following but is being bunged out quickly to get it over with, two episodes a week. Perhaps the snooty classicists find it too licentious and ignoble, while those who like lip-smacking sex and violence with their drama dread a dreary Latin lesson.

Yet for those with no classical education, but with a stomach for buggery, the fate of, say, Octavius Caesar is a wholly new and exciting tale. Besides being The Sopranos in togas, Rome has just about the best collection of attractive, muscled-up men, all clad in leather, armour and sweat and, unlike in the movies Alexander or 300 (about Sparta), not looking entirely gay. Vorenus, Pullo or Mark Antony? Hmm, tough one.

Those who sneer that the script is so bad it is unintentionally hilarious don’t get the point. It is meant to be funny, as in this week episode where a Roman matron chides her daughter for attending orgies. Besides – “By Juno’s c***!” – it should win a special Bafta for most imaginative swearing.

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