WHAT are the pleasures of money? Counting it, that’s fun. I love it when I’m going for the evening paper and I find exactly 50p in assorted change by reaching in jars, pockets, down the back of the sofa. Going to the cash point, on the hour, and getting print-outs of my savings and current accounts and thinking hmm, that’s good, nobody has broken into them yet.

Every year at this time I tot up our Premium Bond winnings. Last year, we got £1,750, exactly the same as the year before. Funny how the National Savings people manage to arrive at the same total when it’s supposed to be randomly picked. My wife and I have the maximum £30,000 each, so that works out at a 3% return. Our best year was 1999 when we got £2,500, but that included one prize of £1,000 – our best ever.

Then I tot up all my various accounts and investments to see how much, notionally, I’m worth. I write down the total on a scrap of paper, put it in a secret drawer, then forget it for another year, hoping that Northern Rock will still be with us next January – and that I will be there, too.

I don’t actually spend much. Okay, so this very day I’ll be on a BA flight, club class to Barbados, but it’s my annual foreign holiday – come on, at my age I can afford to splash out a bit. It’s my only extravagance.

My main pleasure in having money is not spending it. I look at the January sales ads for gigantic reductions on must-have flat-screen LCD TVs, whatever they are, and think huh, they won’t catch me. I can’t understand these young people who have to have this year’s model, spending money they haven’t got, living permanently on credit.

I have never been in debt, bought stuff on hire purchase or paid a penny of interest to Barclaycard. I scrupulously pay off my Visa bill long before it’s due. I blame the parents. Hold on. I am the parents. My generation has somehow spawned a new breed who live on credit cards. What happened?

My own parents, to whom borrowing any money would have meant total shame, would be perplexed. To my mother, chicken was a rare treat, while real salmon, as opposed to tinned, was for the toffs. We lived on mince and tatties. Today chicken and salmon are cheaper than decent mince. Another mystery.

I tell myself we should save money, not for a rainy day workwise, but health-wise. We don’t have health cover, and anything can happen. Which it did last week. I got a flare-up of arthritis in my hand, screaming all night in agony, unable to sleep. I rang my (private) consultant, and saw him at eight in the morning. He gave me an injection – total cost £211. I could have bought another car for that.

I felt guilty jumping the queue, instead of waiting for my next appointment at the NHS clinic. But what’s the point of having money if you don’t spend it to ease pain?

I do have one luxury, an unnecessary expenditure, and that’s buying stuff for my various collections. I hunt the car boots and fairs every weekend. I look upon it as either research or therapy. It always cures any headache. I don’t buy expensive stuff, just a lot of cheapo items. And I’d like to share something with you from a copy of a magazine called Golden Penny, dated December 11, 1897, which I bought last week for £8.

It was a sort of high-class Hello mag, with stories about well-known people of the day. One story concerned George Grossmith, the actor and author. He’d just received a notice from the tax people, addressed to his late father, assessing his income for the year just finished at £2,000.

George sent it back to the tax people with a covering note. “I am glad to learn that my father is doing so well in the next world – £2,000 is a good deal more than he ever earned in this. Kindly forward this notice to his new address and remember me affectionately to him.”

Times Recommends

• How to sell your home in a downturn
• How to boost your spending power
• Unemployment benefits explained