Olive Cooke was a 92 year old worker for charity, who some while ago took her own life, apparently overwhelmed with phone calls and dunning letters from charities asking her for more and more money. She had signed up to give money to 27 charities, but that done she was besieged with 267 letters a month alone, marked out as “easy prey” by an “unfeeling”, mechanised industry. She threw herself into the Avon Gorge.

These days, if you forget to tick the “no contact” box you get on its “pitiless radar”. Then the leaflets, replete with pictures of sad-eyed children and tormented animals, start flooding in, along with calendars, pens and even coins to ramp up the “moral blackmail”. Busy midlifers usually find a “proportionate response” to all this. But older people – members of a kinder, more polite generation – are “sitting ducks”. Charities need steady income streams to operate, and they’ve found that hounding people to sign up to give via direct debit is the most effective way of guaranteeing them. Eventually, their hard-sell tactics may come back to bite them; if we want them to mend their ways before then, it may be that only new regulation will work.

I have personally solved the problem by having a standard list of charities agreed between my wife and I. If a fundraiser phones I can then tell him or her that I have this list and I have agreed with my wife that we won’t add to it unless there is a very good reason. This simplifies the task and lets me make polite excuses where necessary.