True, I can't say I've gone as far as Zoe Williams, who declared in the Guardian in November that she was forswearing fiction for the likes of John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, because during unrelenting fiscal catastrophe it feels "frivolous to read about made-up people", which is tantamount to "watching the telly when you have homework". I still read novels, even if the last one I dispatched, Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector, was in large part about a giddily appreciating internet start-up preparing for a public offering: more money.

Yet the overwhelming majority of the news I've consumed for the last few years has been economic. I can't be the only one who's had to take a de facto short course in the gnarly ways of finance in order to have the slightest clue what's happening in the world, despite an initial prejudice against what used to seem a dreary field. I will often read the business section first. I watch all those documentaries like Your Money and How They Spend It. My head is aswim with credit crunches, child benefits and today's interest rate on Italian debt. I don't mind this education, and certainly economics prickles with "ethically thorny" matters, especially competing versions of justice. Maybe you could make a case that there is nothing but money, really; that all of life comes down to bank balances one way or another.
    

But if so, I'll not make that case. For I've come full circle. Oh, I'm hooked: I'll read just about any article about the euro. But at once I'm suffocating; I'm claustrophobic. Enough with the money already! I yearn to go through one week without dwelling on cuts to the defence department, some new formula for calculating public pensions, revised rules for qualifying for jobseeker's allowance, or European bank liquidity. I never thought I'd have to remind myself, but even these days there has to be more to life than dosh.  

So let's hear it for watching telly while we have homework. Remember the olden days?  We read about love, death and personal betrayal. We watched the sun go down and stayed up late finishing old Sherlock Holmes movies. We talked about Kevin! We tried new recipes for lemon-rosemary squares, finally framed a favourite Francis Bacon print, and played fractious games of Scrabble. So drag out Talking Heads, or better yet, practise the viola. If Rome is going to burn anyway, I can't think of anything smarter to do than fiddle.