Box of delights | 22 October 2011

I don’t know about you but I have to steel myself these days to turn on the Today programme in the morning. There is always the terrifying prospect that an infuriatingly overexcited Robert Peston will come on, barely able to contain his glee as he reports that one’s own bank or pension fund has just gone spectacularly bust. And when that dire day comes, as I increasingly fear it will, Peston will doubtless be followed by a sanctimonious government minister who will inform us that we are all going to have to work until we are 80 before we can receive our meagre state pensions.

What’s scariest of all, I find, is that when one runs into people who really understand money, they always seem to take the most apocalyptic view of all. Apparently, we should all have converted what savings we have into gold a long time ago and hidden it safely under the floorboards. I suppose there might be a quid or two in loose change down the back of the Spencer family’s sofa, but of bullion there is unfortunately not the faintest trace.

But this is a column that always tries to find a silver lining. Few sectors of the economy can be in quite such desperate straits as the recorded music industry, from record labels like EMI to the retail chain HMV, one of whose branches has probably recently closed on a high street near you. The young these days are so savvy that they have almost all found ways of downloading whatever music they want for free, and even an old fogey like me now buys fewer CDs   because you can listen to so many of them on the music-streaming service Spotify, for which I pay a mere fiver a month.