I KNOW charities have been hit hard by austerity, but does that justify them turning into the bad guys?

The news that a 92-year-old woman found dead in her home had been "exhausted" by charity funding requests sent a chill down my spine.

Poppy seller Olive Cooke was said to have worked tirelessly for charities, but a friend said she had been under pressure from requests for money.

The Prime Minister has called for fundraising regulators to investigate.

This week I read about another woman who claims to receive 90 charity 'begging letters' a month, after setting up just three charity donations. Feeling guilty about throwing the letters away, she insists on reading them and feels under pressure to make donations.

My advice would be to chuck them out without looking at them. It's what I find myself doing on an almost daily basis.

A decade or so ago my dad sponsored a girl in an African village to go to school. He did it quietly, without any fuss, through a charity helping children from poor rural communities gain access to education.

It was a gesture that came back to haunt him. Just about every day, for years, a stream of letters from charities has poured through his letterbox. Each time I visited him, which was most days, there'd be a new pile of letters pleading for money. Often stuffed into the envelopes were little 'gifts' such as pens, baby socks, bags, beaded bracelets, even plastic crucifixes.

The letters went in the recycling bin but, despite having a cold call block on his 'phone, Dad was also getting daily calls from charities asking him to sign up to payment plans. His no-nonsense response was a swift "No thank you" but to someone less assertive that kind of call may be difficult to deal with. Even charity cold callers can be like terriers once they've got you talking.

I regarded charity phone calls as little more than a nuisance - until my dad was in the final stages of a terminal illness and then I found them intrusive and upsetting. "No, he can't come to the phone. He's dying," I snapped at one caller. "Well I didn't know," she sniffed.

Even in death, the letters plague him. Four months after he died, I still catch my breath walking into his house. I still expect to see him sitting in his chair. Instead, I'm greeted with a little pile of charity begging letters with his name on the envelopes.

I'm happy to support charities, but I won't give in to relentless junk mail, aggressive phone calls and those awful "chuggers" who step in front of you in the city centre. It's the unacceptable face of fundraising.