Saturation may damage the concept of charity

This is not all. Sponsorship now also raises untold sums as people run, climb, abseil, swim, hang upside down, kiss, read, dress up in ludicrous clothes or sell themselves as slaves to raise money for causes with which they feel a particular affinity. Businesses have been quick to spot the marketing possibilities. At the weekend a large department store tried to persuade me to buy a "limited edition Matthew Williamson DAB digital radio" for 125 by promising that my purchase would trigger a donation to a children's charity. Unfortunately it proved impossible to discover exactly what the donation would be (1p? 1? 100?), so I resisted. That was quite an easy decision, but other decisions are more difficult.

Take my father, travelling on a chartered bus on holiday with a rather esoteric interest group. Barely had he met his fellow travellers when one presented him with a request for money for her particular interest group, an organisation which doubtless does fine work but which is not on the extensive list of my father already regularly supports. In effect, this was emotional blackmail, based on the fact that these people were all stuck together and a refusal might sour relations.

Those who drink in pubs now regularly find collecting tins being rattled under their noses and give just to be left alone. In the street it is worse. You can barely walk two yards in Glasgow without a young person wielding a clipboard trying to elicit your bank details for a standing order. At home things are no quieter. Requests for money come through the post, up the fax, along the e-mail and down the telephone. People send round-robins to their entire electronic address list with easy-giving web-page links attached so that your donation, or lack of it, can be publicly displayed. Never in the history of mankind have charities been so plentiful or so pushy.

Now, just to reassure acquaintances who have applied to me lately, there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking for money for your pet good cause. If you want to help Romanian orphans, crippled ex-jockeys, alcoholics, cancer research organisations, the homeless, the helpless and the hapless, that is splendid, and since you can't do it alone, you must try and cajole others into joining with you. When friends are ill, or die of dreadful diseases, you willingly give to a charity of their, or their family's, choice. Signing a cheque instead of sending flowers may feel a bit cold but it certainly does more good. Nobody resents this kind of thing, just as nobody resents being asked for money to feed starving children in Niger.

The real difficulty comes, however, when rather more dubious pleas pour in. Since you cannot possibly give to them all, how do you say no, particularly to the very personal approaches, without either causing offence or lying awake at night feeling utterly mean?

Some demands are almost comically cheeky. I recently received a sponsorship request which, on detailed inspection, was designed simply to make somebody feel better about taking an extended holiday in a stunning mountain range in an exotic country. I forget which charity was going to benefit, but the gist of the letter was that we should clap the climber on the back for his glamorous exertions and fork out as he watched a sunrise to die for.

Most sponsorship requests don't irritate me - every year I get a few e-mails from people running the marathon, for example, and although I don't reply to them all, marathon running seems so utterly ghastly that I am usually happy to provide at least some financial incentive to get to the finish line. Mountain-man, however, got right up my nose. Yet even as I binned the form I felt bad. Should I have written, explaining why I felt cross? Should I have telephoned? Or should I have just bitten my lip and signed a cheque because at least he bothered to ask?

No two people will have the same answer, for there is nothing that divides us more quickly than our attitude to charitable giving. Of course nobody ever wants to admit to being thoroughly annoyed by the continuous soliciting bombardment we all endure for fear that they might be thought a nasty person.

However, anonymous surveys and drink-fuelled dinners usually provide a clue. In a poll at the millennium done for ICM, 68 per cent of people expressed marked dissatisfaction with how charities operate. A rather less systematic poll of friends reveals that although approval of the charitable impulse is universal, there is real concern that stuffing money in tins or banging out credit card numbers has become a substitute for any proper thought about what charities really do and how effective they really are. Giving may be a morally good act, but giving thoughtlessly begs a few questions.

The catalyst for current discussions has not just been the proliferation of requests, but also the tsunami appeal and the aftermath of Live Aid and Live 8. Taking the latter first, many people have now read serious pieces about how the well-motivated but naive pouring of Geldof-endorsed money into certain countries in Africa may have saved some lives in the short term but also exacerbated long-term problems, including shoring up murderous regimes. At Live 8, the charitable impulse was tarnished by 7,000 "goody-bags" and the "golden circle" privileges of celebrities whose annual expenditure on shoes could feed millions and who now view charity as part of their marketing strategies. Then there was the unfortunate fact that long after charities begged people to send no more cheques to the tsunami appeal, schools allowed pupils to hold non-uniform days for the victims just because it was trendy. And all this comes on top of the ubiquitous daily demands and things like Red Nose Day, when an amorphous charity fog descends and we concentrate on targets and TV personalities rather than outcomes and accountability.

How long can all this go on before the concept of charity is damaged so badly that people turn away? Already Britain exhibits signs of charity fatigue and although people will always respond to appalling pictures, there is a growing cynicism about how charity is defined and how charity money is actually used.

We know that pouring in more charity money is not the real answer to Third World problems. We know that many charitable organisations are badly run. We recognise that our senses are dulled by the sheer volume of demands made on us every day.

Through all this, however, St Paul is still entirely right. Charity, in both the biblical sense of love and the modern sense of giving, is extremely important. My point is that if we are not to turn it into something we run from rather than embrace, perhaps both givers and takers should treat it with a little more care.