It's true that for some sectors of the City, mergers and acquisitions or credit derivative desks for example, pickings were exceptionally thin, or even non-existant last year. Your job is your bonus as many bosses were keen to remind staff.

But for others, particularly at the higher reaches of the basks that avoided the worst of the credit crunch, bonuses were, at worst, level with previous record years.

Sometimes there is a simplistic perception that either everyone in the City is getting a £1 million bonus or nobody is getting anything. Of course in a working community of 300,000 people it is never as simple as that. Average bonuses are in the low tens of thousands of pounds and only around one per cent get the seven figure windfalls we all love to read about.

This year has been much better than 2008 for most of the investment banks. Then the story was often a fight for survival, desperate hoarding of cash and letting thousands of people go. This year trading has been healthier and profits have returned.

But one thing has changed and I would guess for quite some time: public awareness and tolerance of big bonuses. You could almost dream up another acronym for it - BAD or Bonuses are Disgusting. When times were good and unemployment effectively close to zero, the non-bonus earning majority would read about huge bonuses with a kind of resigned envy.

In these more difficult economic waters they are prepared to be far more outspoken. There is absolutely no way that the Government will allow big bonuses to be paid at the "state banks", RBS and Lloyds, in the run up to next year's election.

Private firms are of course free to pay their staff what they like. And in this new era of 50 per cent top tax they may even feel they need to hand out even more than before. But if they do they should be prepared for a wave of public revulsion and regulatory scrutiny that was not there before.

Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that irresponsible bonuses encouraged the risk taking that brought the world economy to its knees and cost hundreds of thousands of people their jobs and their homes.

Bonuses never went away. But the public's memory is not quite so goldfish-like as some in the City would like to believe. It is their fortune that the greed of politicians has temporarily displaced the greed of financiers as the most pressing "pubs and clubs" talking point in recent weeks. But that won't last forever. Bonuses may be back but don't expect the guilt free extravagance of the "Roaring Noughties" to return. Not yet at least.