1.

I spend much less time shopping – that is going to real shops -than in the past because now I get so much online. I buy most of my food on line -everything except fresh things like meat or fruit and vegetables. Er, I get books from Amazon, I buy a lot of clothes on line. And it’s so quick. You don’t have to go there, you don’t spend as long looking for what you want. It’s just much, much quicker. I definitely prefer it.

2.

One of the things that has changed for me is getting to work. It takes me much longer now because I cycle. A few years ago I drove, I took the car, but then I decided to cycle, not always because I enjoy it, but because I know it’s healthier. It takes me about half an hour to get to work now. Actually, when the weather’s good I really enjoy it, but when it’s raining or just cold and horrible, I get up and I think oh no!

3.

I definitely spend a lot more time cooking now than I did before, I think because, er, about a year ago I started living with my boyfriend. When I lived alone, in the evening I was tired and I just got a takeaway, or made something really quickly, or just had some bread and cheese or whatever was in the fridge, whatever was easier. But when you have someone else in the house you feel more like cooking. And also my boyfriend’s a vegetarian, so it’s a bit more complicated to do something very quick. So before I spent about 20 minutes a day and now I spend about an hour. But I’m quite happy with that, I enjoy it.

4.

I probably spend about the same amount of time working as I did three years ago. I’m a freelance writer now and three years ago I had an office job so I was doing, you know, 35 hours a week. Now some weeks I probably work about 50 hours and others 20 hours, but on average I think it’s about the same.

5.

I definitely spend less time seeing friends because two years ago we moved to the country from the city – and most of our friends are in the city and they’re quite a long way away from us now. Sometimes they come and spend the weekend with us or we go and spend the weekend with them, but on average I definitely spend less time with them.

Interviewer: Today we’re talking about a very interesting experiment to find the most and least honest cities in the world. It involved journalists travelling to 16 cities and ‘losing’ 12 wallets in each city, then waiting to see how many people returned them in each place. Our presenter Oliver has got the results. So, Oliver, which was the most honest city?

Oliver: Well, in first place was Helsinki, in Finland. People returned 11 of the 12 wallets. A businessman, who found the wallet in the city centre, said that Finnish people were naturally honest. He said there was very little corruption in Finland, and that people didn’t even drive through red traffic lights!

Interviewer: Really? And the least honest?

Oliver: Well, I was quite surprised by this, but the least honest city, in 16th place, was Lisbon in Portugal. Only one person phoned to say they’d found the wallet. And he wasn’t Portuguese, he was a 60-year-old tourist from Holland.

Interviewer: Interesting! What other results surprised you?

Oliver: Well, I expected richer cities, cities with a higher standard of living, to be more honest than poorer ones, but this wasn’t necessarily true. The city that came second in the experiment was Mumbai in India -people returned 9 out of the 12 wallets. One of them was a young mother. She took it to a post office and she said ‘I teach my children to be honest, just like my parents taught me.’

Interviewer: And which city came next?

Oliver: In joint third place were New York and Budapest. People gave back eight wallets in both places.

Interviewer: And then?

Oliver: Moscow and Amsterdam came joint fifth. In both places 7 out of 12 wallets were returned. And people gave lovely reasons for returning them. In Moscow a woman said ‘I think that people need to help each other, and if I can make someone a little happier, I want to do it.’ And in Amsterdam a man said ‘My wife once lost her wallet. It was found and returned. So, I wanted to do the same.’

Interviewer: I notice my home city, London, is on the list. How did it do?

Oliver: London was somewhere in the middle, joint ninth with Warsaw. Just five of the wallets were returned in each place. Interestingly, one of the people who returned a wallet in London was a Polish woman. When she found the wallet, she gave it to her boss. He -her boss -said to her, ‘If you find money you can’t be sure it belongs to a rich man -it might be the last bit of money a mother has to feed her family.’

Interviewer: I think that’s fantastic advice. So, were there any general conclusions? What did the experiment prove?

Oliver: 47 per cent of the wallets were returned, so that’s nearly half. And when we looked through the results we found that you couldn’t predict who was going to be honest or dishonest. There was no common factor. Young people and old people both kept or returned wallets; men and women both kept or returned wallets; and as I said before, it didn’t make any difference whether a city was rich or poor. So, our conclusion was that there are honest and dishonest people everywhere.