Cash in hand confession

Jun 29 2007

IT WAS an offer to test a saint.

When my home needed repainting, a local decorator - I believe in supporting the smaller tradesmen - offered me a generous discount for cash.

I jumped at the chance and waddled off to the bank for a wedge of readies.

Thus becoming one of those middle-class criminals whose penchant for fiddling to save a few bob here and there on the domestic front is reaching epic proportions in Britain.

The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has announced a rising tide of such creative accounting. So I'm clearly not alone.

But I'm wondering if there is, indeed, a single householder in Britain who, confronted by the offer of £600 off the cash, would have beaten his breast and declared: "No cash, thank you, I'll pay the full price to help the nation's economy."

I give to beggars and contribute to animal charities. I sponsor an African child. I own up if I'm given too much change in a shop. I don't pilfer from the stationary cupboard. I pay all my taxes. I reckon I'm honest.

Strictly speaking, of course - and here my Catholic conscience comes into play - I'm still a player, albeit a trifling one, in middle Britain's highly respectable crime wave.

Priests, of course, would rather die than reveal secrets from the confessional, but I'd lay a pound to a penny that few penitents bother them with admissions of screwing the Exchequer for a few quid.

We're all at it, aren't we?