Dear LPG, 

When I was young, and even in my 30s, money was something that many of us were still learning to keep in banks, and I think we also held a lot more of it at home. I am talking about the pound notes and change, which often weighed down our pockets, purses and wallets.

Newspapers, television and radio news, would broadcast information about the thousands, and sometimes even millions, of pounds that the government was spending on this and that, and the only thing that I could take from the information I was learning was that a lot of money was being spent. 

I suspect that many working people around us had never held a thousand pounds in our hands at one time, and although we all learned basic maths at school, the numbers that most of us manipulated were never that big.

These days, the coins in our pockets have become the one or two debit or credit cards that we carry around, if not an app on our mobile phones. We have very few coins to put in a beggar’s bowl; I think a time is coming when they will need to acquire a card reader to get any help from the rest of the public.   

The radio and television news, adverts, and many internet sites habitually swamp us with big numbers. 

Things have changed, and many more of us see money as a figure on a bank statement rather than notes and coins. I suppose that figures are a lot easier for us to deal with. However, broadcasters and politicians still have a habit of quoting significant numbers of people, money and many other things they are talking to us about without quantifying them or at least putting them into some context.  

If, when they mention the number of billions of people that will be affected by whatever they are talking about, they add what percentage of the population that number represents, or when talking about government spending, they would also mention how many people will be impacted, we would have a slightly better appreciation of what is happening.   

But perhaps, if we really want to know, we could do the research ourselves, and we know that any number, figure or quantity can be seen in a negative or positive light depending on how it is presented. 

OL, Lewisham.