A WRITER who doesn’t want to spend any money on herself has come to Glasgow to explain her lifestyle choices. I’m half-expecting a tired old comedian to turn up and shout out that she’s the perfect woman. But no one does shout out. Partly because we are in a library, but mainly because this is the Aye Write! book festival which attracts those who prefer to act in a dignified manner.

We are in the Mitchell Library, the hub of Aye Write! where all rooms large and small have been converted into temporary theatres where the interested listen to the interesting.

My old colleague Ruth Wishart strolls past, no doubt going off to chair a discussion somewhere. And that looks like a Doctor Who over there. Yes indeed, Peter Davison is down to chat about his actor’s life.

The Mitchell Library, originally funded by tobacco merchant Stephen Mitchell who specified in his will that his money was for a public library where “books on all subjects not immoral shall be freely admitted”, used to be a bit more forbidding when I attempted to study in the Main Reading Hall for my Highers.

Now there is a large cafe, computers, books you can actually take out, and a feeling that this is a more welcoming building than it was before.During the book festival there is a daily scene at the Mitchell of a small army of courteous booklovers walking in all directions as they politely try to find the room in which their chosen author is speaking.

I’ve always liked the story about the commanding green copper dome over the main entrance to the Mitchell. There was a competition to choose the winning design for the library. The dome wasn’t in the winning entry, but was in the submission of a runner-up, so the competition judges just added it to the winner. Well, why not?

Anyway I have plunged into Aye Write! to hear Michelle McGagh, a freelance financial journalist in London, who explained that she and husband Frank bought a house which needed a lot of work. To avoid the dirt and dust they put most of their possessions in a storage unit which they occasionally visited to rescue items they needed.

It was there that Michelle found a box on which she had written “Not Needed”. She had no idea what was in it, or why she had kept it. In fact she began to think why she had most of the stuff in the unit. That’s all it was - stuff. If they were living without it, why not just carry on living without it, and they started to sell off and give away 80% of their possessions which were just gathering dust in the storage unit.

Then came her big idea. Why not go for an entire year without buying stuff. Yes, they would pay their mortgage and bills - they weren’t going to live on the street begging. But apart from a £30-a-week bill for basic foodstuffs and toiletries, they would spend nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Michelle would use her bike to get around, they would meet friends in galleries or the park rather than the pub, they had enough clothes anyway, and there was no need for the gym membership if you were out on your bike all the time.

It was just the slow frittering away of money that depressed Michelle. You take £20 out of an ATM and the next thing you know you’ve got three quid left in your pocket and you don’t know where the rest has gone. Said Michelle: “I would buy a flat white coffee on the way to work in the morning. So I worked out I was spending £650 a year on that daily cup of coffee. Now if I handed you £650 in cash and said you could spend it on anything you wanted, I don’t think you would want to spend it on coffee.”

She got a bit philosophical about it. “So I work for eight hours to earn money which I then spend on buying stuff to make me happy, and it doesn’t make me happy, so I work for another eight hours to earn the money to buy more stuff. So I stopped , to try to work out what made me happy.”

And businesses make it easier for you to spend money. Contactless payment with your credit and debit card is the simplest thing ever. Amazon stores all your details so that buying anything is simply a click on your computer mouse. The more remote from us our money becomes, the easier it is to spend it.

She did miss things. Small things mainly. Fresh flowers, going out for a curry - her home-made curries just didn’t cut it. Husband Frank cut her hair. “He’s an incredibly brave man,” she says.

And after doing this for a year? “I wasn’t expecting to be this much happier at the end,” says Michelle who has written about her experience in The No Spend Year.

Even their holiday was free, camping on a beach, and she says it was great - one of the best holidays ever.

Over the year, she and Frank saved £22,000. Did they have a big splurge with it? No. She used the cash to overpay their mortgage. She concedes that might sound very boring, but it means their mortgage will be paid off years earlier, and what could make you happier than that.

Happiness also came from getting help from friends, even strangers, and paying them back by doing tasks for them. It meant a closeness and rapport with people they had perhaps lost.

She was at pains to point out however that she was not saying people in poverty can save money. Michelle chose to live frugally. “I don’t live in poverty. Nobody chooses poverty. I can pay my mortgage. I could still pay my bills.”

Her talk ended with the chance of meet the author and buy a copy of her book. But as we left the room, an Aye Write! volunteer announced that the library had copies of the book you could borrow rather than having to buy it.

The canniness that the Mitchell showed in acquiring the design of the dome, is still there today.