We’re all blabbing about our money now

To my mind, the fear went mainstream at the start of last week when political commentators were still concentrating on the sideshow of the Conservative Party conference. I came back from Birmingham early, and found myself in conversations which would have been unimaginable a few weeks earlier.

A respectable middle-aged woman collared me. She and her husband had spent the weekend wondering whether to move their money into National Savings, she said, and decided that it was too risky.

I was astonished not only by the depth of her paranoia — the entire economy would have to collapse before National Savings went under — but by her frankness. My type of middle-class north Londoner never talks about money, not even with our oldest friends. Our finances were private. Exposing them to others demeaned them and you — the conversational equivalent of stripping off and dancing around naked at a dinner party.

Among the many casualties of the financial crisis is English reserve. Everyone is blabbing now. Another mother told me that she had invested a legacy in the stock market earlier in the year to cover the costs of her children's education. Now that the market was in freefall, what should she do? "How the hell do I know?" I thought, before muttering something about cutting losses. Later I was hit by guilt. What if she took my advice and the market bounced back? But then I realised that she hadn't listened to a word I was saying. She just wanted to open the sluice gates and release her pent-up fears.

She's not the only one. Financial anxiety is producing a kind of Tourette's syndrome in which sufferers blurt out their worries to anyone who listens. I've had colleagues talking about "liquefying" their pensions, a lawyer with giant debts on a half-renovated home telling me that he's up until five in the morning trying to find another job before his firm goes bust, and everyone I know with a buy-to-let mortgage wondering aloud if they've made the biggest mistake of their lives.

As I write, news is coming in that the share price of NatWest has collapsed. Er, that's my bank. Rationally, I know my money is safe. Pscyhologically, the notion that the solid NatWest branch I've visited since 1987 could melt away is extraordinary. At a Whitehall drinks party on Monday, Treasury civil servants told me that 100 years from now historians would be writing books about these days. Damn right they will — and they will record that the City and the banking system never again regained the trust of the British people.

Dumb down or be doomed

No less a personage than Dame Margaret Drabble complains that she is under pressure from her publisher to dumb down her literary fiction. I'm sure Her Ladyship will fight them off but however vulgar it sounds to say it, her publisher has a point. Sales of literary fiction are vanishing. A good, serious first novel used to sell between 2,000 and 5,000 copies. Now it will be lucky to make the shops. Publishers tell me that even a place on the Booker shortlist no longer guarantees sales. The decline is not all — or even mainly — the fault of authors. Tesco and Asda pile mass-market books high and sell them cheap, and the high street bookshops are following suit. Nevertheless, if the old model of literary fiction is failing, authors must react. There's no point in being an unread writer.

Saatchi's China syndrome

I found I didn't mind the modern Chinese art at Lord Saatchi's new gallery as much as I thought I would. True, with honourable exceptions, it is from the same stable as much of what we see at Tate Modern or on the Turner Prize shortlist. But Saatchi is a private collector and is entitled to show whatever eccentric pieces take his fancy. Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, needs to intervene hard against the Tate because it is using taxpayers' funds to promote a narrow version of art. There's all the difference in the world between Lord Saatchi doing what he wants with private money and the Tate doing what it wants with public money.