I believe money is important.

Plenty of households treated money as faintly indecent. It was never discussed at the table. Children worked it out from other signals — the sound of a particular envelope landing on the mat, a parent going quiet on the drive home, the year the holiday was an aunt's spare room again.

Growing up inside that silence teaches you that caring about money is a defect of character rather than a condition of eating.

Saying plainly that it matters is not greed. It is the end of a pretence that has cost a great many families an enormous amount of unnecessary shame.