How the recession is teaching us all to love money - and why this may be a good thing, after all!
The British have always had an odd attitude towards money. We condemn it as the root of all evil. We see it as unclean (filthy lucre), particularly if you have too much of the stuff (when you become stinking rich) or too little (dirt poor).
We certainly don't like to talk about it openly. It's a vulgar subject. We routinely ask strangers what they do for a living, but would never dream of asking how much they earn.
Or our family and closest friends either.
But not everybody shares our squeamishness. I remember being shocked in Hong Kong, where the local Cantonese would open a conversation by asking about my salary, reducing me to an evasive, stuttering (and deceitful) mess.
Don't worry, love money.
I write about money for a living, but I have always been slightly shamefaced about it.
I know that my friends would find me a lot more interesting if I wrote about sports, celebrities, travel or crime.
But I don't, I write about money, and have always accepted the majority view that there is something sordid and boring about the topic.
Until now.
Because now I have learned to stop worrying and love writing about money, and I feel a lot better for it.
A charitable view.
It took a credit crunch to do it. And apparently, it's having a similar effect on other people as well.
New research from the Charities Aid Foundation reveals that the recession is changing our attitudes to money - making millions of Britons cherish the stuff more than we did before.
Over two-fifths of us believe that money is now more important than it was prior to the recession.
You might think that is a bad thing, if you subscribe to the traditional view that money is nasty and grubby.
But the research shows that while we now value money more, we value possessions less, which suggests we are finally getting our priorities straight.
Roads, hospitals, adult movies.
Money is a tool, a measure of value and a form of exchange, and - a useful one at that. It buys food and clothes for us and our families, it puts a roof over our head, pays our tax bills (which is spent on roads, hospitals, the porn habits of MPs' husbands), and if we're lucky, buys a few treats as well.
It is hard to earn and notoriously easy to spend.
The days of easy mass credit and endlessly rising house prices made us forget these basic truths, and treat money a little glibly - although not as glibly as investment bankers.
The recession is teaching us to look after it. Show affection towards it. Use it wisely, and perhaps surprisingly, more generously.
CAF research also shows that people are keeping up their charitable possessions and helping their family more in these difficult times. It also notes that charitable donations doubled in the US after the 1930s Great Depression, because people had seen the trauma of poverty at first hand.
Funny money.
The credit crunch has also shown us that racking up a large debts to blow on possessions we don't need and can't always afford is an abuse of money.
That's why the latest Bank of England figures showing people paying down their debts and building up their savings are so encouraging.
The financial meltdown has also taught us that saving money is good, borrowing too much is dangerous, and allowing investment bankers to become filthy rich from playing complex derivative-based games is mass financial suicide.
Now we have to wait and see whether the Government's costly bailouts are another form of mass financial suicide.
Love lucre?
I suppose we will always feel a bit funny about money. You could probably draw a straight line between Jesus casting the money lenders out of the temple and vigilante groups chucking stones at Sir Fred Goodwin's windows.
And I wouldn't like to stand up and quote this love letter to lucre to the anarchists and anti-capitalists that have been rampaging through the City of London.
But until somebody develops an entirely different social structure, or we return to a beads and barter system, we'll have to learn to live with money.
Maybe more of us can learn to love it. Not for its own sake, but what it can do for us, our loved ones, and society, if used properly. This website is a good place to start rebalancing your relationship with money.
And if we can't quite bring ourselves to love money, we should at least respect it.
Do you think we should love money? Share your thoughts using the comments section below!