On Saturday I spent a couple of hours in the town centre collecting money for the Citizens Advice Bureau. People were not exactly queueing up to put money in the tins. It had crossed my mind that the CAB would make more if I just gave them the money I spent on the bus fare into town instead of actually spending two hours in the cold, but of course thats not the point.

I got to thinking about charity – I had plenty of time to think – and I while its true that most of the board/trustees are well enough off to put £10 or £20 in, there is some good in actually going out and collecting. Some of the people giving money were kids with a few coins their parents gave them, or a pensioner digging 20p out of her purse and for that small outlay they got to feel good about themselves. In my time out on the streets I might have made a couple of dozen people feel that they had done their little bit to help others. And lets be honest, the same must apply to the collectors themselves. Don’t we feel that we have given up a couple of hours in selfless service and thus go home with at least a twinge of self-congratulation?

One thing I did notice is that it does seem to be the people who can least afford to give money away who donate to charities. There were people giving money because they had been helped by the CAB in the past who were giving a couple of pounds by emptying out all their loose change, who would possibly miss that couple of pounds. Meanwhile those who could easily afford to lose a few notes just walk by. Articles in newspapers often mention how the poorer sections of society give proportionately more of their income to charity than the richest, its just a bit shocking when you see it first hand.

Many well-off people do give their time instead of money, of course. Every charity has its quota of the middle classes on its management committee, and I have to admit that most of the voluntary sector would probably collapse without all these Daily Mail readers on board. The question is, if I get paid £20 per hour at work, do I decide that my time is worth £20 per hour so that every hour I spend on voluntary work is like donating that much? It depends what I am doing. If I spent an hour cleaning a charity’s offices then I reckon my time is only worth what it would have cost to hire a cleaner. The charity would have been better off with me donating £20: it could have paid a cleaner £5 per hour and got four hours of cleaning instead of my one.

My attitude to time right now is that I find it more valuable than money, and I am starting to begrudge all the various calls on my time to help out with community centre events or the fair trade campaign or whatever. Its very strange because right now I have a lot of time. At the start of the year I was spending 2, 3, or 4 evneings per week in the Town Hall at meetings, or carrying out official engagements as Deputy Mayor. There was not enough time to get home from work then go out again so I used to stay a bit later at work and go straight from the station to the Town Hall. Now I am not on the Council I get all that free time back again. Not only that, as part of my company’s settlement with the unions our working week has reduced to 35 hours, so I can now leave a little bit earlier. At the same time work has got to be terribly dull so I make sure I leave on time and now get home at the sort of time I was previously leaving work, and have the whole evening free. So why am I reluctant to give up that time? When I was overwhelmed I frequently gave up time if anyone asked for a favour. I just cut back on things like sleep.

I have a theory, although I’m not sure I can articulate it properly. I think that attitudes to time can be compared to attitudes to money. When I was overstretched my time was like the money of someone who had got a car loan to pay off, a mortgage, several credit cards maxed out and an overdraft. You can imagine them blowing £50 on a night out with the justification that if you are £20,000 in debt you might as well be £20,050 in debt. That same person with no debts but no money left for the month might decide not to go out just to avoid going into the red. Thats what I was like with my time. As soon as I had some I realised how much I liked having it to myself. Maybe you have to go without something to realise how much its worth to you?

I wonder if that is why the wealthy don’t give so much, proportionately, to charities? Having got accustomed to their money maybe they want to keep it close and hoard it in much the same way as I am tempted to hoard time? Who knows? Obviously I don’t!

Yesterday I found out that the collection on Saturday raised £180-something, which is more than I expected, and not bad considering eveyone was more worried about their Christmas shopping.