GEORGE Osborne says Britain is walking tall and the sun is shining. Feeling rather buoyed by this, I open my wallet.

Inside this leather pouch, worn smooth from use and being sat on, I am disappointed to find one £10 note, two bank cards, one over-burdened credit card (domestic disasters only, no fripperies), assorted membership cards, crumpled receipts and an unchecked Lottery ticket.

Ten pounds is about average for my wallet, so that's a normal day. As for the Lottery, I always hold off to prolong the anticipation. Or to delay that moment when optimism passes the baton to pessimism.

In this weekly exchange, it has to be said that cruel old pessimism usually comes out on top. Optimism, being the young idiot he is, will keep jumping up and down, urging another go.

So according to Julian's Wallet Guide To The Budget, nothing much seems to be looking up; nothing much, indeed, has changed. I wasn't expecting to find that the Chancellor had magicked a fistful of tenners into my wallet, although that would have helped to pad out the week or pay off the overdraft.

Now I realise that one man's wallet is hardly a guide to anything, apart from that man's finances. But if I don't feel as well off as George Osborne says I am, then the gap between the rhetoric and the reality might be more widespread.

If enough wallets and purses tell the same story, then Osborne's story-book optimism – "This is the budget for Britain – the Comeback Country" – is likely to fall on stony-broke ground. If enough wallets and purses are bulging with notes, then Osborne and David Cameron have a better chance to squeeze back into power.

Budgets by their nature are dishonest exercises, political conjuring tricks designed to raise a good headline or two, and to divert the eye from the hidden string-pulling. A budget so close to an election sets even more plates spinning. And if some of them crash to the floor after the ballot, they might just say in the air long enough for the scattered shards not to matter.

The details are often too trying for the ordinary brain to absorb, which is surely part of the plan. In the end all that really matters about a budget in political terms is whether enough people are convinced by all the smart words ("A state neither bigger than we need, nor bigger than we can afford") to change their mind and their voting intentions.

And with last week's budget more than most, that reality/rhetoric gap is the one that really counts. Chancellors pick their figures carefully, and sometimes the statistics they use come heavily thumb-printed from all the massaging. If their chosen figures seem out of line with most people's harsher financial reality, then the gap causes problems.

Most polls suggest that either Labour or the Tories are a point or two ahead. But all these twitching polls really do is remind us of the three-thirds conundrum. Basically, this is that a third of voters say they will vote Labour, a third say they will vote Conservative and the remaining third is divided between the Lib-Dems, Greens, Ukip and others, as well as the undecided. These factions suggest that another coalition or a minority government is on the cards.

As for Ed Miliband's instant responses to the budget, this one fell to earth with a dull clung: "It's certainly not a national recovery when there are more zero-hours contracts than the population of Glasgow."

I agree with the Labour leader on the rotten nature of these cruel contracts, but, really, that soundbite was hopeless, wasn't it? And that comparison is meaningless, a pointless marrying of the unrelated.


ALARMING UPDATE: Last week I mentioned the alarm clock that had to go after it went off at midnight, half an hour after I fell asleep. Not an asset when you are a bit of an insomniac at the best of times. So a new clock was bought and all was well with the world.

Until I lay down to sleep. What on earth was that noise? It turned out the new clock measures out the seconds with a loud tick. What possible use is an alarm clock that keeps you awake all night?