NS&I has a new website and the home page features a very strange image for a savings bank. It’s a photograph of a screaming child wearing striped pink overalls standing in, and splattered with, mud. She is either absolutely terrified or very, very angry about something. It’s hard to tell which.

I just can’t imagine what the designers were thinking. Is the screaming child frustrated by our abysmal interest rates? Is she angered by the shabby treatment savers have received in our debt-obsessed economies? Is it an expression of contempt for the apparent futility of saving, or a declaration of war against the bank?

What is the meaning of this image? It stopped me in my tracks, and if I wasn’t already a parent, I’d be thinking twice about becoming one now. Very frightening…