We are talking to a number of these organisations about whether we could be more tightly linked,” she says. When you consider all the other things much younger children are already doing online by then, these age limits seem increasingly out of step. Claer Barrett’s two-year-old niece gets to grips with a pain aux raisins — after having tapped Claer’s bank card to pay for it I mean, you are a polymath. (Algy laughs) You are a fantastic illustrator, and an investment expert and fine journalist. It is not. Well, yeah, my normal books, well, my normal books are children’s picture books. So I think my first ever book was about a frog who has lots of baby brothers and sisters and is slightly traumatised, but then learns to love it. I’ve, (laughter) I’ve done many more picture books since then, so I think my picture books outnumber my finance books by about 11 to 1. You can earn, like, profits from the properties that you sell, and then you build up, like, different clients’ houses as well.

So yeah, so it will, the interest will change over time depending on inflation. So right now it looks appalling and hopefully it will start to look better. But the bright side is that it doesn’t operate like a normal loan. Like if you’re struggling, if you’ve not got a job . . .I think there’s a share which is called Ashtead, which hires out equipment mainly in America for building, and is doing especially well with data centres now. But this is a company where, it buys in loads of equipment, and then the more demand it finds there is, the more it can rent it out for and the longer it stays out with people who are paying money to have it. And so it’s particularly well-suited to pushing upgrades through from brokers because the brokers will have an assumption which is relatively conservative in terms of, you know, we think they may be able to have this equipment out on hire X per cent of the time for X amount of money. And then if there are some really strong trends (inaudible) in markets, you can have the forecast being pushed up and up and up and up because it’s so sensitive to good news, essentially. And it’s had a lot of good news. In the US, hiring is relatively new compared to ownership. So in the US you’ve got this structural trend, as they call it, of more companies hiring more stuff and you’ve also got people loving to build data centres at the moment.

If young people can build digital capability, the chances are they’ll be better prepared for future financial challenges that life may throw at them Claer Barrett Yeah. Nobody’s talking about giving help to renters. But a related question, so you said you’re a freelancer. So there’s an awful lot of discrimination, frankly, in the financial system against freelancers, people who don’t have a regular wage. But there’s more and more people who are working as freelancers or in the gig economy as a way of dressing it up. Tell us your thoughts about that.

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Now, let’s talk about successes in the den. As an investor, what impresses you the most about someone who’s pitching? Yes, it is on offer in many bigger workplaces especially. And if it isn’t, you know, money coaching, it gets a bit of a bad rap sometimes because money coaching, it’s one of these catch-all terms you need. It technically needs to be qualified although some people are, but firms are offering it because they can see there’s a firm of accountants I know quite well because I often speak to them about FT Money articles. They could see that their female partners in particular were so frazzled and so busy trying to juggle all the different elements of life that actually their personal finances were being neglected. And it wasn’t that they didn’t know what to do. They just kind of like needed a bit of help to get themselves organised and actually put some of the plans in place for themselves that they were doing for their clients. And I found that extraordinary in a way, because if you were an accountant, you think that you would look after yourself first and others next. But even I know that’s often not the way.

Actually, I’ve got a different question. So when you have money, how do you make more? Well, it’s a bit of a broad question. Yeah, So it’s about it’s about work and technology. My working title is ‘Human Robots’. So it’s exploring both the kind of dystopian and hopefully more utopian possibilities about what’s coming towards us.in the future. That’s what we mean by value. I mean, even though that was the one that did the least well of the four, I mean, 242 per cent over 10 years (inaudible) . . .