The good, the bad and the ugly

I was standing at the checkout counter at the Warehouse recently waiting for what seemed to be an inordinate amount of time for the young lady in front of me to have her transaction completed. She was purchasing quite a large amount of bedding and it required her to sign a number of forms. I was about to return my meagre purchases to their original shelving when the proceeding was finally completed and the young lady exited the store with her goods. I asked the checkout operator: “What was that all about?”

She told me that the lady had bought the bedding on layby. This surprised me because in my day if you bought goods on layby the shopkeeper kept the items in store until they were fully paid for. It was an eminently sensible system and in most cases no interest was charged, though in some instances a modest storage fee might be added.

What the young lady with the bedding had actually done was to buy on hire purchase. No doubt a high interest rate was in train and the Warehouse took the risk that the goods would eventually all be paid for. It would be difficult to repossess used bedding.

I can’t help but conclude that the layby system, as we understood it, was a much more sensible procedure and would have taught thrift and frugality in it processes.

I don’t like the expression “in my day” much because all-in-all things are  better today than they were and our recollections of the past our usually clouded by tinted memories and we conveniently ignore those aspects that weren't so rosy.

So please excuse my indulgence.

Back “in my day” per head of population New Zealand was considered to be the greatest trading nation in the world, yet the finance ministers of the day were prudent and never allowed us to spend more money than we earned. For instance you couldn’t buy a new car unless you personally had overseas funds. The government did allow some new cars to be available, but these numbers were determined by the amount of the surplus in our offshore accounts.

When I was twenty-one I bought a second-hand Volkswagen that had travelled 14,000 miles. It cost me 914 pounds. A new Volkswagen cost 900 pounds. The Volkswagen dealer might put you on a waiting list for a new vehicle, but only if you had a car to trade-in and he was then able to negotiate the trade-in price from a position of great strength.

So there’s an example of the good and the bad. The government was behaving in a common sense manner by not allowing overseas goods to come in without us being able to meet all our commitments as a nation, but the end result was high prices and limited access.

I am convinced however that there was one thing that was better “in my day” and that was the music. It played an important role in our lives. For amusement in that pre-television era we listened to music on the radio, went to movies described as “musicals” and at parties we stood around pianos and sang.

I’ve looked at today’s music and have concluded that much of it is drug-induced poetry set to tuneless dirges. I suppose this was inevitable. As Julie Andrews lyrically explained to Captain Von Trapp’s kids in The Sound of Music with her hit song Do-Re-Mi, there are only seven notes in the chromatic scale and it was generally assumed that popular music, with so few options available, would eventually run of out of tunes that were original.

I’m convinced that time has come.

I was as proud as any other New Zealander to see Lorde take to the Los Angeles stage and wow a sophisticated audience, but none of the music I heard on the Grammy Awards night could hold a candle to the melodies we grew up with.

I tried to think of a song from “my day” with the same message as Lorde’s Royals and came up with “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” sung by Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm. Their song sensibly describes in a less complicated manner what I think Lorde had in mind.

It surfaced in the 1956 movie High Society which also starred Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby and the irrepressible Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. Miss Kelly was arguably the most beautiful woman in the world at the time.

Crosby and Kelly sang a romantic ballad called True Love which topped all the hit parades in its day and apart from the Sinatra/Holm duet, Sinatra and Crosby, whom the world has never seen the like of before or since, performed the harmonic “Well, Did You Evah”.

The highlight of the movie for me however was Crosby and Armstrong’s classic rendition of a song called “Now You Has Jazz.”


Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra; now their records were well worth putting aside on layby.

“The Beatles are a Shakespeare for the twentieth century.” - Helen Reddington

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Ten things that will disappear

I received an email recently postulating that there will be ten things that will disappear in our lifetime. The document seems to have originated in the US, but as you would expect, it is just as applicable here.

First to go they reckon is the Post office. Well it’s almost disappeared already in our town.

A “Temporarily Closed” sign on the posting slots in Lincoln Road has been there for months and the government have agreed to a three day delivery service as opposed to the six day service we are currently receiving.

Shouldn’t be too much of a problem; most items that now come in the letter box are either bills, begging letters or junk mail.

The second item listed is the cheque. Plastic cards and online transactions supersede the necessity to write a cheque. Receiving online accounts and paying them by direct credit is just hastening the demise of the cheque – and the post office.

If you are reading this via a conventional hand-held periodical you will be disturbed to know that third on the list is the newspaper which will go the way of the milkman says the writer. You will be able to read the newspaper online, but you have to be ready to pay for it.

Fourth item is the book. Although I personally enjoy the physical book you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages you can now browse a bookstore online and even preview a chapter before you buy. I love conventional bookstores, but I guess the eventual departure of the genial bookseller is inevitable.

Number five is the landline telephone. Most people are keeping their landline just because they’ve always had it. Even primary school kids have got cell phones.

Next up – number six – is music. This is the saddest part of the change story. The writer reckons the music industry is dying a slow death because of the lack of innovative new music. Can you imagine anyone walking around in some future time whistling Royals?

Apparently over forty per cent of music purchased today is “catalogue items” meaning traditional music the public is familiar with; older established artists. This is also true of the live concert circuit and here I am thinking of the sell-out concerts of Neil Diamond the Rolling Stones or Cliff Richard.

Television is number seven. Revenues of the networks are down dramatically. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers and they’re playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time previously spent watching TV.

Number eight is surprisingly “Things you own.” Here the author claims that your photographs, music, movies and documents are now being stored in a “cloud” that is either under the control of Apple, Microsoft or Google. So do you actually own this stuff or will it be able to disappear at any moment in a big “poof?”

Makes you want to run to your cupboard and pull out a photo album, grab a book from the bookshelf or open up a CD case and pull out a recording.

In ninth place is joined handwriting. Already gone in some schools who no longer teach joined handwriting because nearly everything is done now on computers or iPad

Last but not least at number ten is privacy.

Actually it’s already gone. There are cameras on the streets, in most buildings and even built into your computer and your smart phone.

“They” know where you are right down to the GPS co-ordinates and the Google Street View. The TV show Person of Interest may not be as far-fetched as you might think.

When you buy something your buying pattern is circulated a million times and “they” will use this information to try to get you to buy something else, again and again.

On the privacy issue the author concludes that all we will be left with and can’t be changed are our “memories.”

Lack of privacy has never worried me; after all I’m a law-abiding citizen, I’ve got nothing to hide. But that’s fine if you’ve got a democratically elected government you can trust. But under our dopey MMP system of governance, which is patently undemocratic, anything could happen. Imagine the tyrannical potential if ex-Australian communist party member Russell Norman or ex-German fraudster Kim Dotcom were to rise to power.

So number eleven on my wish list would be the demise of MMP.

“Future shock…the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” - Alvin Toffler

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The welcome return of the artisan

According to various explanations of the Grimm Fairy tales the “rub-a-dub-dub” rhyme was referring to the laundering of money. The upper floors of candlestick shops were often used as poor tenant housing and houses of ill repute because the process of rendering tallow to make candles smelled so terribly that no one who had money/social standing would live in the space. Back then prostitution was regarded with the same sort of disdain as it is today, so spending money gained from arranging such encounters was frowned upon.

Legend has it that the butcher and the baker were in cahoots with the candlestick maker, sending him clients for the “ladies of the night” who were his main tenants and were laundering their share of the profits through their successful legitimate businesses. When they were caught “cleaning” the money all three became public embarrassments.

The explanation for the candlestick maker however has always confused me. I assumed a candlestick was the device for holding a candle and not the candle itself. However research has shown that in those centuries before Liberace was to place a candelabra on his grand piano a candle was indeed known as a candlestick. Once the wax started to melt the ancients set it firmly in a saucer.

Anyway all this is merely a dubious lead into a story about two new businesses in Masterton, both of which I have a tenuous connection to.

David Gallagher was the last apprentice I trained back in the 1990’s and if that makes you want to question his skill level then I can tell you that under my stewardship he won the New Zealand Butcher’s Apprentice of the Year Award. His craftsmanship however should perhaps be credited to my senior staff.

He has spent the last twelve years in the police force, but he approached me some months back asking me if he thought a stand-alone butcher’s shop might once again be viable.

In the early 1990s there were butchers shops all over town, but a new law completely abolishing shop trading hours and restrictions was enacted in 1993 allowing supermarkets to open all hours and sell whatever they liked which meant traditional food retailers such as butchers, greengrocers and bakers largely withdrew from the marketplace.

I agreed with David it was probably time for the re-emergence of the traditional butcher’s shop, but I thought his choice of venue in First Street was a shade risky. However since opening Gourmet Meats just before Christmas the business has thrived and has exceeded all his, and to some extent my, expectations.

It makes sense; there are more people living in Lansdowne than there are in Pahiatua. He is also displaying a desirable product using his skills and flair as a craftsman butcher.

Meanwhile a separate office section of the Sign Factory which was once the Tip Top Ice Cream Factory and then Long’s Bacon Ham and Smallgoods Factory has been largely underutilised since the Wairarapa Organisation for Older Persons (WOOPS) shifted to new premises at the Solway Showgrounds.

Enter Frank Bain, original owner of the Ten O’clock Cookie Company, who concluded that a traditional bakery would be popular once again and siting it on the corner of Villa and Victoria Streets would be an ideal location for such an enterprise.

After extensive and I suspect expensive alterations The Old Bakehouse is opening for business next Monday where Frank and his family will be cooking up a storm.

One member of the family, world-renowned pop vocalist Ladyhawke who was over here for Christmas and helped paint the shop area, won’t be there to serve you a mince pie. She is domiciled in Los Angeles.

In a cashless society overrun by eftpos machines it is unlikely that the butcher and the baker will be laundering money from the ill-gotten gains of a candlestick maker. Nonetheless Frank’s wife Jillian, Ladyhawke’s mother, says she could well be described as a lady of the night given that she intends working during the darkness hours as she will be kneading the dough.

Well at least I think she meant kneading.

“Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub; and who do you think they be? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker; turn ‘em out, knaves all three!” - Olde nursery rhyme

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Not everyone free after long walk

Unlike the Prime Minister I have a clear memory of where I stood on the 1981 Springbok Rugby tour of New Zealand. I was unashamedly pro-tour. Not that I went to any of the matches. I may well have attempted to go if they had been any played in our neck of the woods, but I was content to view the games on TV - well at least those contests that were allowed to go ahead.

I was not pro-apartheid; I personally didn’t know anyone who was, but I went along with the mantra that politics and sport don’t mix as expounded by Ces Blazey, Ron Don and Rob Muldoon and was less enamoured with the contrary view put to us by John Minto, Trevor Richards and Tom Newnham.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and after witnessing the worldwide awe in which the late great Nelson Mandela was held I can only conclude that I got it all wrong.

But we were the product of the times and the information we had of South Africa meant we thought we understood why the segregation of the races may have been inevitable.

We were taught for instance that the Boers and the British migrated to the cooler end of the African continent which at the time was sparsely populated. After warring amongst themselves they eventually built a thriving industrialised state whereby black Africans came from far and wide to share in the wealth.

Unfortunately border controls were not in place and soon the 2 million Europeans were overwhelmed by 6 million native Africans which was an impossible situation for the economy to absorb. Ghettos sprang up and crime was rampant due to the inequality between rich whites and poor blacks.

Further we were told the colour of a person’s skin was not the issue, but it was more of a cultural divide.

We knew of the abhorrent genital mutilation that some African tribes practiced and we saw newsreels at the “pictures” of a custom whereby black people would cut the jugular vein in the neck of cows, collect the blood and then drink it. We watched with horror as the cattle-beast subsequently staggered and died on the screen before us. Excessive examples perhaps, but we could be excused for assuming they were mainstream.

So somehow we had an understanding, or perhaps a misunderstanding of the reasoning behind some form of segregation.

We also had a grudging admiration for the Afrikaners as we witnessed their prowess on the rugby field. Yet we despised them for the very same reason in a confused dichotomy of thought.

In 1981 I don’t think we’d heard of Nelson Mandela. If we had we would have believed that he was a terrorist who led a militant sabotage campaign against the ruling South African National government and was sentenced to life in prison where he subsequently languished for 27 years.

We might have even thought that he was lucky to get such a light sentence. Back then there were plenty of folk in this country who would have welcomed the return of the death penalty and even today many say a life sentence should mean whole of life.

Meanwhile for the black majority day to day life itself was not too rosy. The South African police force proved the old adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Despite this Mandela it seems got on well with his jailers and it was a Messianic “Madiba” that emerged from Robben Island and against all odds, and using a forgiving spirit not seen for two thousand years, reunited a country that was on the brink of anarchy.

He was elected President of the previously divided nation and set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that amazingly forgave those who had committed the most heinous acts of inhumane cruelty.

The rest as they say is history, but history hasn’t been all that kind to the rainbow nation.

John Minto, the national organiser of the Halt All Racist Tours movement was nominated for the Companion of O. R. Tambo Award by a South African government official, but asked for the bid to be withdrawn.

The Tambo Award is the highest honour given to non-South Africans in recognition of friendship, co-operation and support.

In an open letter to South African president Thabo Mbeki, Minto lambasted the African National Congress government which he said had side-lined social and economic rights.

“When we protested and marched into police batons and barbed wire here in the struggle against apartheid, we were not fighting for a small black elite to become millionaires. We were fighting for a better South Africa for all its citizens. The faces at the top have changed from white to black, but the substance of the change is an illusion,” wrote the disenchanted protester.

But nothing is in vain and Nelson Mandela’s lack of resentment is a stunning example to us all. Four presidents and seventy-five heads of state attended his memorial service exhibiting the high regard in which he was held.

John Key attended; I bet he will never forget that.

“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” - Nelson Mandela

 

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And His Truth goes marching on

Sometimes I have to conclude that New Zealand is a confused little country. According to the 2013 census the number of people who identify as having no religion has reached 1.6 million, an increase of 26 per cent since the last census in 2006.

And yet a Massey University survey taken in 2008 found that 72 percent of New Zealander’s believed in God. The survey was of New Zealanders above the age of 18 and was said to have a margin of error of 3 per cent.

I imagine that many of the remaining 28 per cent who don’t believe in God still respect and support the comparatively liberal moral values that Christianity has imposed on the Western world and support the holiday seasons of Christmas an Easter for sensibly secular reasons.

The new census figure disclose that Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian church membership have all contracted while Pentecostal congregations have increased.

The number of followers of Hinduism and Islam also increased.

This sort of information is always imparted around Christmas when I suspect editors tell their junior reporters to go out and find some stories to counteract this madness that we call the festive season.

I’m a little confused because from my observations the only people who don’t sing the national hymn “God Defend New Zealand” with a surprising degree of enthusiasm at a rugby test are the All Blacks themselves. And unambiguous religious services to commemorate ANZAC day are becoming increasingly popular, particularly among the younger generation.

I was talking to a nurse recently who did her training at Masterton Hospital in the 1970’s and is now a midwife attached to Hutt hospital and she told me that most patients today are generally unsure of their religious connections. They used to say Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist or Baptist, but many now have no denominational roots and, if asked, describe themselves as either Christian or atheist.

The end result is that whereas once there was an army of church ministers swarming through the wards at all hours of the day or night looking eagerly at the religious affiliations shown on the cards at the end of the bed, the hospitals are now largely bereft of clergymen and the comfort that faith can bring has diminished.

And so, given the season, I thought perhaps we should re-acquaint ourselves with the founder of Christianity and the best explanation I have encountered comes from Swiss-born American theologian Philip Schaff (1819-1893) who said that: “Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms conquered more millions than Alexander the great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon.

“Without science and learning He shed more light on things human and divine than all the philosophers and scholars combined.

“Without the eloquence of schools He spoke words of life that were never spoken before or since and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of orator or poet.

“Without writing a single line He has set more pens in motion and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art and sweet songs of praise than the whole army of great men and women of ancient and modern times.

“Born in a manger and crucified as a criminal He now controls the destinies of the civilised world and rules the spiritual empire which embraces one third of the inhabitants of the globe.

“There was never in this world a life so unpretending, modest and lowly in its outward form and condition and yet producing such extraordinary effects upon all ages, nations and classes of men.

“The annals of history produce no other example of such complete and astonishing success in spite of the absence of those material, social, literary and artistic powers and influences which are indispensable to success for a mere man.”

You can’t deny His existence; dare you question His divinity?

Oxford University Don and famed author C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity wrote the following: “I’m trying to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’

“That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

“You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up with this patronising nonsense about him being a great human teacher.

“He has not left that option open to us. He did not intend to.”

And so two thousand and thirteen years on, during the festive season and beyond, wise men seek Him still.

Have a great Christmas!

“There are no atheists on a turbulent aeroplane.” – Erica Jong

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A New Year nightmare in the making

Weston Ten-Green-Bottles settled back on the chair in his office in Martyrdom’s imposing Town Hall and felt somewhat apprehensive. The elections were over, the new lady Laud-Mare, Linley Pattercake, was ensconced in the adjacent office and he ought to have been at peace with the world.

But there were potential obstacles on the road ahead. The Regret Theatre owner Brenton Goodloser was back on the town kownsil and was inclined to rattle cages around the table whenever he fancied. Weston noticed however that he had matured over time and now without the signature pony-tail he may have become a quieter beast.

The view from Weston’s office was bleak. He was staring at the stone walls on the old Public Rust building whereas Ms Pattercake got a birds-eye view over the splendid new Town Square that David Bored-Man had instigated and produced with help from other local philanthropists and philanthropic groups.

In another life he and Bored-Man had got themselves offside with the kownsil when he had inadvertently allowed the bustling builder to demolish the derelict dunny’s at Koora-poo-knee.

Weston had taken to wearing dark glasses whenever he looked out of the south facing windows of the building as the contrast of the bright-green freshly-planted lawn and the karitane-yellow of the newly painted Wire-rapper Times-Rage building was dazzling.

His office did have its compensations. If he lifted the double-hung window ever so slightly he would get a tantalising whiff of the burger and fried onion aroma coming from the two fast food outlets of the adjoining corners which would inevitably get his juices running.

And if he leaned out far enough and stretched his neck a tad he could see the inspiring artwork that the Rust Lands Rust had put on the side of their Starry-Eyed block in Lincoln Road.

The Multi-coloured corrugated-iron mural suited a town that seemed to have more than its fair share of corrugated iron buildings that pesky upstart columnist Licky Wrong was constantly complaining about.

Of course, thought Weston, Licky’s taste was all in his mouth.

There was some good news. According to the latest census Martyrdom’s population had gone up by 729. Back at the last census in 2006 the increase had only been 54. Weston tended not to see people in the figures, but rather ratepayer dollars and it comforted his tortured soul.

So he decided he would enjoy Christmas, but the new year was certain to bring its own challenges. Local gu’mmint Kommission chairperson Basher Horrorsin would soon report on their view of where they considered Wire-rapper’s local body directions lay. Horks Bay weren’t happy with their re-organisational plans and he feared that when the Wire-rapper draft proposals were announced the citizens would be revolting.

Weston shuddered at the thought.

All sorts of options had been submitted to the Kommission and potential outcomes could see Weston spend the rest of his natural life fishing at Lake Toe-Poor. Ms Pattercake had already prophesied that she would be the first and last lady Laud-Mare of Martyrdom.

Down the road-a-piece Carleton Mare Kim-Jong Maka and his sidekick Colon Wrong (no relation to Licky) had no such qualms. The gu’mmint had already appointed Kim-Jong to the Wire-rapper and Mower Cut Hospitality Boards and he felt certain he would also be the chosen one to lead the Wire-rapper, though Adriana Nails would be breathing down his neck.

The real risk however would be if Basher Horrorsin and his commissariat decided that the Wire-rapper should join with Das Kapital and become part of a Souper-Sitty.

In that case it would be Cecelia Wade-Green who would lead the charge of the light-headed brigade and Kownsil cars would be exchanged for bicycles.

Weston grabbed the sun glasses off his desk and decided to call it a day. In the haste to flee his office he nearly tripped over the metre-high stack of correspondence from Richard Iceberg regarding the symmetry gates, and he bounded down the stairs, bypassing the under-utilised lift installed at great cost back in 1995 by gu’mmint decree, and headed for home.

As he navigated his way through the new town square he looked fondly back at his beloved Town Hall and realised in the worst case scenario the grand old building would become redundant; it would have to find another use. An old person’s home perhaps?

Or maybe David Bored-Man would paint it shocking-pink and turn it into a museum.

“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” - Richard Lovelace

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Tracing the world's money-go-round

According to the oral history of our family, my great-grandfather on my father’s side was a remittance man from England. Remittance men were the ne’er-do-well sons of well-to-do families who were banished to the colonies so not to further disgrace their kin-folk. They were sent a regular remittance to live on and this was maintained as long as they never set foot again in the old country.

My great-grandfather’s Achilles’ heel apparently was the demon drink and the final straw came when as a young man he had a night out with a friend who was a Lord, the eldest son of an Earl, whereby they both drank more than was prudent and attempted to walk back to their respective London homes in the snow. Not far from the hostelry where they had imbibed they fell over and stayed comatose all night while the snow all but buried their personages. In the morning they were dug out; the Lord was dead, but he had fallen last, and on top, and the warmth of his body had kept my great-grandfather alive.

As claimed in the family narrative, my great-great-grandfather was the biggest shareholder in the Times of London and desperate to keep the sordid story out of the paper sent my great-grandfather to the antipodes with a modest annual remittance to allow him to maintain his viability. Well anyway that’s how the story goes as told to me by my maiden aunts as I sat at their feet as a child and it may have got embellished over time.

My great-grandfather was by all accounts a big man in every sense of the word. Big in stature - he was six foot five - big on generosity and a big appetite for fun, frivolity and gambling which inferred he hadn’t learnt any lessons from his shameful conduct in Britain.

It also meant that very little of the remittance reached my great-grandmother, who struggled to raise a large family.

Now if you thought remittance men were a relic from the past, you couldn’t be more wrong. Today’s remittance men are the migrant workers who send money home to their families. In this case the situation is reversed. There is no disgrace involved and the money goes back from the colonies to the home countries.

People in the first-world societies rely more and more on migrant workers to do the menial tasks they feel they’ve outgrown. You can see this in the army of all-night office cleaners who descend on the streets of downtown Wellington late in the evening. They are almost always Pacific Islanders.

Their extended family members will be grateful for whatever help they can get from the leftovers of their meagre wages when it is remitted home.

We found out recently when their devastating storm caused us to focus on the Philippines that there are 40,000 Filipinos skilled and unskilled living in this country, apparently here on work visas to do the tasks that New Zealand’s unemployed seem unwilling or unable to do.

The Philippines is famous for sending its citizens out into the world to toil; 9.5 million of them live outside the country. I read where remittance payments sent home to the Philippines totalled $US21 billion in 2011, but it is thought that officially recorded remittances are only a fraction of the real figure.

This must be a great boost for the Philippine economy, but I’m intrigued to know just how it is accounted for in its country of origin.

We were taught at school that governments had to keep a tight rein on the money supply. To overprint money - though apparently an attractive option for the Greens - would cause inflation of the kind that occurred in the Weimer Republic in Germany and led to Hitler’s rise to power and the eventual advent of the Second World War.

But if billions of dollars are being sent overseas by migrant workers worldwide, how can the money supply be kept track of?

All of this revenue transfer is ably abetted by the international banking system that now moves money from one country to another at the push of a computer keyboard button. Just how governments account for this money and why it doesn’t disrupt their balance of payments disciplines is an abiding mystery.

Of course these days little printed paper money is involved. In our near cashless society the banks are said to be awash with ersatz money which they lend out on credit cards at rates that a few decades ago were the sole preserve of charlatans, usurers and loan sharks. The world banking system, as we witnessed in 2008, is now so convoluted that surely no-one would know how to untangle it.

My great-grandfather came from simpler times. I guess his money arrived by boat and the pound sterling would have been eagerly changed into local currency and then just as eagerly received by the local brewers.

But I must go now; my offspring have called a family meeting. Something about shipping me to England and sending me money to stay there.

I haven’t a clue what they’re on about.

“A person may be indebted for a nose or an eye, for a graceful carriage or a voluble discourse, to a great-aunt or uncle, whose existence he has scarcely heard of.” - William Hazlitt.

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