I THINK most of us have some concept of the value of money. We know how much we earn, pay in taxes and what the residue will buy.

And yes, I wish I had a little more cash, nothing unrealistic, just enough to see me through to a comfortable retirement.

I was listening to a radio debate the other day about the price increase for a National Lottery ticket from £1 to £2 and one of the guests was a woman who had won £7.5million.

She was very happy with her win because she had been able to do a lot of good work with it. She’d made sure her family was looked after and had made several large donations to her favourite charities and good causes.

She and her husband had kept no more than £2million which she said she could ‘imagine’ and was enough so they would never have to worry about going short again.

I know what she means about being able to ‘imagine’ £2million. It’s once you start getting much past figures of that size that the number becomes almost meaningless.

A massive sum of money currently being bandied about is the £50billion or so the Government wants to spend on rail transport.

This poses another question. Just what can you buy with £50billion?

Apparently, that may not be enough to buy the nation the much-vaunted high speed rail link from London to Manchester and Leeds.

I agree we should be investing in the train service, better rolling stock, new lines, electrification and better stations, but I’m just not sure that HS2 is the right thing to be spending all this money on.

One of the problems with HS2 is, by definition, it has to be ‘high speed’ and that means it doesn’t stop a lot.

If you happen to live near Crewe, Manchester Airport, Manchester city centre or Leeds, happy days. You can be whisked off to London in the blink of an eye.

But what if you don’t? What if you’ve got to travel to one of these stations? I think the personal benefits of high speed rail travel will rapidly evaporate if you are stuck in rush hour traffic on the M56 heading towards Manchester Airport.

According to the Government, we need HS2 to act as a spur to the economy and to end the north-south divide.

But I’m not sure that argument works either. The implication seems to be that once people and businesses can get out of London really quickly, they and their jobs will come pouring north.

I’m more inclined to believe that the opposite will be true, that once people can get into London really quickly, the jobs will stay in the south and workers from much further north will be able to commute.

I have a great deal of sympathy for home and business owners whose properties lie on the proposed route.

They face the prospect of their properties being blighted by these plans for the next 20 years or more and that is certainly not a position I would like to find myself in, even if all the Government’s forecasts of national benefits for HS2 prove to be accurate.