“NOTHING can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” wrote Benjamin Franklin just over 200 years ago.

In the time I’ve been writing this column these are two things I’ve not touched on. But as I grow older the former becomes increasingly hard to ignore, and with inflation currently running at about 2.7 per cent (six times the level it was this time last year) so now is the latter...

The best quote I know about money comes from the children’s classic Emil and the Detectives. The book was ground breaking when first published in 1929; remarkable for the way in which it embraced previously shunned issues and paved the way for a new approach to children’s fiction. For those who don’t know the story, Emil is a young lad from the suburbs, his mother a hard-working lone parent struggling to bring up her son. She entrusts Emil with some hard-earned money to take to his Aunt in Berlin. It gets stolen and Emil is befriended by a gang of street-wise companions who take matters into their own hands.

One of Emil’s new companions, from a comfortable professional home, muses over why the loss of a relatively trivial amount is so devastating to Emil. When he tells Emil that no one in his house ever talks about money, Emil wisely replies: “Then I expect you have plenty.”

My 12-year-old son is beginning to understand the value of money. He has a modest allowance paid into a bank account and contributes towards his mobile phone contract. He is learning to balance the urge to spend it at once with the delayed gratification of saving to afford the latest-release console game. It’s a lesson that some of us spend a life time learning.

The other evening, in response to his curiosity, I found myself trying to explain Gift Aid, PAYE, and the difference between basic and higher rate income tax. Albeit discredited, ‘austerity’ still holds sway over public sector pay, inequality continues to grow: living standards for the bottom half are projected to decline, whilst the richest are expected to grow by over 4 per cent during the lifetime of this parliament. With household bills rising, I am sure my son and I are not alone in talking about money and why we can’t have all the things his friends have.

Money gives us choice. The more money we have, the more choices we have. Most of us (thankfully) won’t have to join the growing queues at our local foodbanks, we will just find ourselves having to make harder choices and greater sacrifices in the months and years ahead.

I console myself later, however, as we chuckle together reading Jeeves and Wooster at bedtime; a book borrowed from the local library. Happiness often still resides in things that money cannot buy.