A book lands on my desk. The Penny Pinchers Book Revisited…, the title reads, Living Better for Less. The important thing in life, says the blurb on the back, is “having the freedom to spend money on the things that you care for, and having a lot more fun. John and Irma Mustoe show you how to enjoy an abundant life on a limited income.”

I’ll have me some of that. I open the book at random, excited at how happy the new, improved, thrifty me will be. I will soon be saving thousands of pounds a year in some unspecified, but thrilling and painless way; money which I will able to redirect seamlessly into the tills of Jimmy Choo and Net-a-porter. Or perhaps, I think, warming to my theme, John and Irma will insist that the way to future riches is to buy fewer things, but the most expensive possible. One pair of Manolos instead of three pairs from LK Bennett, say. I open the book at random.

“Cut apart an outdated dress and make it into an apron,” it says. Oh. Still, nil desperandum, try another page. “Pot pourri sachets can be cut down for stuffing toys.” I don’t have toys. Or pot pourri sachets. The suspicion is growing that John and Irma might be American, which worries me for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on but probably has something to do with Martha Stewart. I don’t have outdated dresses, and people who exist on toast and red wine don’t need aprons. In growing dismay, I flick through the pages, searching for tips on how to afford the world’s most expensive consumer goods on a journalist’s salary.

“Save any bit or piece of dowelling!” John and Irma have typed excitedly. Dowelling? What the hell is dowelling? Should I have some? Do I need it? Is dowelling the missing link in my life? Why is it available in both bits and pieces? John and Irma have got some explaining to do about dowelling.

Corner shops: comedy goldmines for our time

Looking for healthy food in a corner shop is like trying to find intelligent conversation in a Yates’s Wine Lodge

Background

• Bargainhunter: credit crunch fatigue

• Bargainhunter: How to zap unsightly veins

• Bargainhunter: The social benefits of fake tan

• The campaign to save phone boxes

• Tattoos are as subversive as cargo pants

“Large for planting beans, small for homemade quilting frame, dolls’ house or toy garage,” they add. This is not helpful. The questions are mounting. What in God’s name is a quilting frame? And what is it doing in the same sentence as a toy garage? I am no nearer knowing what dowelling is, why I should be saving it, or how this will bring me any closer to solvency. I am in fact lost, and not a little dispirited. Penny-pinching is not going to come naturally to me. I do not have the tools, or the dowelling. I turn to page 121.

“Fruit netting pays off.” Not in Chelsea it doesn’t.

By now I have spent half an hour of my life with the Penny Pinchers and I am starting to think that John and Irma do not have the answer to my problems, or indeed the problems of very many people. I shut the book, admire my shoes, and log on to Net-a-porter.

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