161 Wide Eyed and Cashless

I was in a hardware store last week to have some keys cut.  I tried to pay £4.50 by using Apple Pay on my phone.  

As I held the phone over the card reader, Ray, the shop owner said, “Sorry,” and pointed to a small printed notice that read:  

NOT FOR TRANSACTIONS UNDER £7.50

I looked in my wallet and discovered that I had no banknotes and only about four pounds in coins.

There were two people behind me waiting to be served and so I decided not to argue or make any kind of fuss but to go across the road to the bank and get some cash from the ATM.

I can’t remember the last time I had bought anything with cash before then.  The use of cash is falling generally, with predictions that fewer than one in ten transactions will be completed with notes and coins in 10 years' time.  With no limits on transactions when using contactless Apple Pay, I use it virtually all the time.

Ten years ago, cash was used in 60% of payments, but it has been overtaken in popularity now by debit cards, driven by the use of contactless technology.

Nearly 5 million people use cash no more than once a month according to a report by the banking trade body, UK Finance.  I must be one of them.

I used to pay the man who looks after my garden in cash but some months ago he gave me his bank details and asked if I would pay him using online bank transfer in future.  Consequently, I rarely need to use cash to buy anything these days.  

I do try to keep a stock of pound coins to tip the delivery drivers who bring us takeaway meals.  Also, it’s good to have some coins to give to the increasing number of rough sleepers that I see around the town centre but coins are becoming more and more difficult to obtain.

Having withdrawn £50 from the cash machine, I was back in the store five minutes later to pay and collect my keys.  

“Oh, a five pound note,” said Ray.  “We don’t see many of these nowadays.”  He studied it for a second or two.  

“If you ever get any more like this, bring them here and I’ll give you eight pounds for each of them.”

“What?” I said.  “Any five pound note?  Are they rare?”  

“These are,” he said.

I was a little annoyed but I had no reason to berate myself as I’d heard nothing about rare fivers although I had read about “Kew Gardens” 50p coins that sell for £160.

Ramble 1:

If you genuinely have absolutely nothing to do and you are so bored that your bones are itching, you could while away 13 minutes 8 seconds by going to:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZJ7yDIaoKs

You will meet Christopher.  He opens bag after bag of £2 coins that he's just brought home from the bank and he studies every one of them, searching for unusual examples.  The excitement in his voice when he discovers a Northern Ireland Commonwealth Games coin worth £30 is comical.

“What’s special about it?”  I asked.  Ray just smiled and said nothing.

“Go on,” I said, “Tell me.  It’s yours and I don’t want it back.  You can keep it.”

He held it up to eye level.  “Watch,” he said and rubbed the note between his fingers and thumb.  I stared intently.  Like the asexual reproduction of an amoeba, the note went through a process of apparent binary fission to become two five-pound notes.

Ray was very pleased with himself.  “That happens a lot,” he told me, handing back one of the notes.  “They stick together when they’re new.”

The new fiver which entered circulation in September 2016, was the first note to be printed on polymer, a thin, flexible plastic and in Ray's experience, they do tend to stick to each other.

Ramble 2:

I had intended to give this post the title “Sticky Money” as not only do £5 notes tend to stick together but in the world of finance, this is a term given to money that stays around for the long-term rather than the money of those that tend to withdraw investments quickly.  Quite nice, I thought.

Then, I discovered that “sticky money” has an altogether different and unpleasant meaning and so now, the title is an acknowledgement of Andy Fairweather Low’s 1975 hit.

I left the shop and thought that as I had some cash and it was a sunny day with little likelihood of rain, I would get my car washed.

As soon as I pulled up in the area of the BP filling station where a team of entrepreneurial Romanians have been leased space to set up business, I was surrounded by six of them who set about their work with their usual gusto and enthusiasm.

My car costs £7 to wash and I was ready with a twenty pound note when they had finished.  If I tipped them a pound, I would have coins to tip the delivery driver next time he came.

When they had finished, their leader who has excellent English, approached me.  I wound down the window.

“Give me twelve please,” I said as I offered him the banknote.

“No need boss,” he grinned, holding out a wireless card reader for me to use.  

The world has gone mad.

*****

In my last post, I told you that I had been taking a photograph from the same place of the same view across my garden, once a week for the past year.  I'm not going to post all 52 of them but here are six that were taken at two monthly intervals, starting with the first in autumn.

November 10th 2018

January

March

May

July

September 2019

160. All the Leaves are Green and the Sky is Blue

At 11.15 on November 10th 2018, I looked out of our living room window at our garden and the fields beyond.  The sun was shining out of a cloudless sky and it looked so nice that I took this photograph:

I was sitting in my armchair the following Saturday when I had the idea to take another photograph so that I could compare it with the one I took the week before to see how autumn was progressing.  This is it:

 

In case you're wondering, yes it is always sunny in Wavendon.  The change was noticeable and consequently, I decided to take a photo of the same view at 11.15 every Saturday morning for a year.

It was a decision that caused us some problems.  With a such a commitment, it was impossible to be away at the weekend and that caused some tension.   It was with some reluctance that I agreed to a fortnight in France in August.  

Before we left, I spent an hour instructing an understanding and helpful neighbour on precisely where to stand and exactly how to frame the two shots he agreed to take for me while we were away.  He made a very good job of it and I am very grateful.

There are 52 weeks in a year and eight days ago on November 2nd, I took the fifty second photo.  Job done! 

But, it wasn’t done because yesterday, November 9th, I took one more.  I expected it to look very much like the one that started it all.  It doesn’t.

 Does it?

I Googled, “Why do leaves turn brown in autumn?” and found five different articles and they all said more or less the same thing.  

The main causal factor, apparently, is the length of daylight hours.  In autumn, the days become shorter and production of chlorophyll slows and eventually stops.  Existing chlorophyll in the leaf breaks down and the green colour fades, turning them brown.  The cooler temperatures play a part but it is daylight length that is most important.

The amount of daylight on specific dates is the same every year and so that can’t be responsible for the fact the leaves here are still very green this November.  It must be the temperature.  Was October this year warmer than last year?  Back to Google.

October 2018, Average October temperature: 11.1 °C

October 2019, Average October temperature: 10.2 °C

October this year was actually colder than last year and so it would seem that autumn should be more advanced but it isn’t.  Why?

If it isn’t the daylight hours or the temperature that has caused it, there’s only one thing it can be:

B R E X I T

159. On The Run

I broke the law a couple of months ago.  I stole some money and I seem to have got away with it.  Maybe, now I will have a hobby in retirement I’d never considered before.  

Instead of watching the BBC News Channel all day and becoming more and more depressed about Brexit, I will embark on a life of crime instead.  I seem to have an innate talent for it. 

That day, I had swapped cars with Caroline.  I was ferrying older patients to and from the doctors’ surgery - something I do from time to time and I needed her car because it’s bigger and more comfortable for frail passengers than mine.  

I had finished my journeys by mid-morning.  In the afternoon, I went to Isleham, a village about 70 miles away, near Soham in Cambridgeshire.  

I went to see someone who was advertising some Wisden almanacks for sale.  It turned out to be a fruitless journey because the books were certainly not in the “Good” or “Very Good” condition that he had advertised.

I reached Isleham by setting my sat-nav to the fastest route but coming home and in no rush, it was set to avoid all motorways and where possible, ‘A’ roads.  Somewhere along the route home, I stopped to fill Caroline’s car with petrol.  It was an uneventful journey.

That evening, after I had told Caroline of my largely wasted day, she asked if I’d remembered to fill her car with petrol. I told her I had.

“How much was it?” she asked.

“Twenty pounds.”

“But I asked you to fill it right up,” she said.

“I did,” I assured her.

“You can’t have done,” she said.  “The tank was less than half full when you started off and so it must have been more than forty pounds, maybe fifty.”

“Well, it was twenty and why do you want to know anyway?”

She explained that she was keeping a record of fuel cost because, as the car was nearly four years old, she was thinking of changing it for an electric one and she wanted to know how much money she could save on fuel.

“Was it exactly twenty pounds?” she probed.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you think that was a bit odd?  A nice round number like that?”

“Why should I?  It must happen sometimes.”

Caroline went out to check the fuel tank in her car.  When she came back she was mystified.

“It is more or less full but there’s no way you only put twenty pounds of petrol in.  It would have been at least thirty pounds to fill it up at the start of the day before you went anywhere.  How many miles did you do, morning and afternoon?”

“About a hundred and sixty.”

Caroline was puzzled.  I was puzzled.

About a week later, I was still thinking about it occasionally but when I went into a local garage to buy some windscreen wash fluid, I found the answer to the conundrum - I think.

I parked some way from the pumps but as I walked past them to the sales point, I happened to notice the first pump sign and it looked like this:

That is a number 1 but to someone with other things on their mind, or thinking about something, it could register as a 7.  I remembered that when I paid the cashier for the petrol in Caroline’s car, all I had said was, “Pump seven,” and he had asked for £20.  Perhaps I’d actually been at pump 1.

As it was exactly £20, I’d paid by cash and so I had no record of the name of the petrol station I’d inadvertently defrauded.

How did the customer who really was at pump 7 react when he was told that his bill had already been paid?  I wonder how long it took the garage to understand exactly what had occurred.

The following day, I retraced my route as well as I could but despite making the journey twice, there and back, I couldn’t identify or find the place I was looking for.

Until this incident, I’d never fully realised the value of the cross stroke as in the continental way of writing the number seven:

I’m publishing this in the hope that if I am ever tracked down, I’ll be able to use this post as evidence that I really did try to make amends. 

For now, though, I seem to have got away with it.

158. Conversations on a Wednesday

I had three very strange conversations on Wednesday.

Our local Garden Centre has a Food Hall.  Until about a year ago, there was a section in it that sold fruit and vegetables.  Then, they allowed a local trader to set up a greengrocery stall outside the building and converted the space inside, that had been occupied by apples, potatoes, leeks etc into a bakery/patisserie area.

When I first went to the new greengrocer, I had something of a surprise.  I asked the man running the stall for some potatoes.

“Don’t sell ‘em sir.  Fruit only.”

“But your sign says you’re a greengrocer.”

“That’s right sir.  Finest fruit in the area.”

“But not vegetables.”

“Not at this time of year, sir.  It’s not the veg season.”

I was speechless and so, that conversation ended there.

On Wednesday this week, I wanted some cooking apples and I went back to the “Purveyor of Fruit but not Veg”.

I asked for some Bramleys.

“What are they?” the man asked.

I was amazed that a man whose job was to sell fruit had never heard of Bramley apples.

“They’re cooking apples.”

“We only sell fruit,” he told me.

“Yes, some cooking apples please.”

“Cooking apples are veg.”

“No, they’re not," I said. "Apples are fruit. They have seeds.”

“Sorry, to us they're veg and we don’t sell them.”

“So, let me get this right.  You have decided to reclassify cooking apples as vegetables?”

“No, they’ve always been vegetables.”

“That’s nonsense.”  I was becoming exasperated.  “How can they be vegetables when they are apples.  What about Granny Smiths?”

“Fruit.  Do you want some?”

“No, I don’t.  Look,” I said, “I must be a bit thick.  How can Granny Smiths be fruit but Bramleys are veg?”

“For the same reason that potatoes, parsnips and leeks are veg.”

“And what’s that?”

“You cook ‘em.”

I was beginning to see a certain weird logic in his assertion.

“What about tomatoes?” I asked.

“Either,” he said.  “Or both.  If you eat ‘em raw they’re fruit but if you cook ‘em, they’re vegetables.”

*****

An hour later, I was in Waitrose and decided that for the first time, I would have a coffee in the cafeteria.

I was greeted by a large, matronly woman with a huge beaming smile spread across her face.

“Hello, my darling.  What can I do for you, sweetheart?”

“I’d like a coffee please.”

“Certainly, lovey.  What kind would you like, poppet?”

“An ordinary one with milk please.”

“That’s an Americano, my darling.  Anything else, my lovely?”

“Yes please.  May I have a piece of flapjack?”

“Absolutely, my love.  Anything else, sweetie?”

I was somewhat taken aback, realising that in the last 30 seconds, I’d been bombarded by more terms of endearment than I’d previously received in my whole life.

*****

Having recently been showered with words of love, I was feeling better about myself than I have for a long time when, an hour later, I went into a hardware shop that I visit quite often, to get a key cut.

As I was about to leave, the owner told me that he’d just put in an offer on a house that was for sale in Stony Stratford, near to where the Queen lives.   As Stony Stratford is on the western edge of Milton Keynes and nowhere near a royal residence, I was a little perplexed.

“What do you mean?” I asked.  “The Queen doesn’t live anywhere near there.”

“Yes, she does.  She’s got a house on Church Street in Stony.”

“What do you mean?  What kind of house?”

“Just an ordinary one but I don’t think she’s been there for some time.  She used to be there quite often though.”

I wondered if he was attempting to be funny but he was serious and seemed to believe what he was telling me.  The thought of the Queen living in a semi in Stony Stratford took a bit of getting my head round but I tried.  

“How do you know all this and why doesn’t anyone else know?” 

“I heard that it started about 50 years ago,” he replied. “She wanted to know what it was like to live like an ordinary woman.  That’s why it had to be kept quiet.”

“They wouldn’t have been able to keep that quiet,” I argued. “Someone would have gone to the press.”

“My brother found out and he didn’t.”

“How did he find out?  Did he go round and have a chat?”

“Yes, more or less.  He knocked on the door once and it was answered by a bodyguard.”

“How did he know it was a bodyguard?  Did he say that he was one of the Queen’s bodyguards?”

“No, but he was wearing a suit and a tie.”

“That’s not proof.  Loads of people wear suits and ties, even in Stony Stratford.”

“Not on a Saturday morning, they don’t.”

“Oh, of course, you’re right,” I capitulated.  “That tie is the definite, conclusive proof that the Queen has a house in Stony Stratford.  She was probably in the kitchen at the time when your brother called.  She would have been washing up and that’s why she couldn’t answer the door herself.  She’d have had wet hands and so she asked a bodyguard to answer it for her.”

“Yes, it could have been something like that.”

“Come on, this is ridiculous.  There’s probably a woman there who looks a bit like the Queen.  Do you remember that woman who used to make a living out of looking like her?”

He just shrugged.  “Think what you want,” he said.  “But I know what I know.”

And now, so do you but please, keep it to yourself.  Give the poor woman some peace.

157. Awkward!

I received a phone call the other day.  “John Vautrey from Hartman’s about your order for  hinges.”

How helpful of him because in just 9 words, he gave me all the information I needed: who I was talking to and what it was about. There was no need for me to ask any supplementary questions or make follow up enquiries to find out exactly what the call concerned.

There are 14 Johns in my contacts list and if John Vautrey ever rings me again, I’ll immediately know who I’m talking to.

There is a danger in not knowing quickly who is on the other end of the phone line and that danger is real and potentially embarrassing, as I have discovered.

Last week, the phone rang.  “This is Lucy.”

“Lucy,” I thought.  “Which one?  I don’t recognise the voice.  It’s not my daughter, Lucy.  I’ve worked with three women called Lucy and I haven’t seen any of them for years so it could be one of them.  I’ll let her talk and while she’s talking,  I’ll work out or discover which one it is.”

“Hi,” I said.  “How are you?”

“I’m too hot,” she replied.  “It’s 32 outside but it’s got to be more than 40 in here.  I wish we had air conditioning.”  

I still didn’t recognise the voice and what she said gave me no clue at all.  I opened the lap top and went to my contacts list to see how many Lucys I know.  I became vaguely aware that this Lucy - the one on the phone - was talking about climate change deniers but I was busy searching and so I wasn’t really listening.  Oh no!  I’ve got seven contacts called Lucy or Lucie.  Time for some subtle delving.

“It’s been a long time,” I said.  “What can I do for you?”

“A long time?”  She sounded mystified.  “You only rang yesterday.  I’m calling to tell you that the engineer to mend your printer will be arriving some time between two and three this afternoon.”

“You didn’t tell me your name was Lucy when I rang yesterday,” I grumbled, feeling slightly embarrassed.

Caroline and I moved away from London in March 2012 to an estate in Wavendon with 39 other properties and of course, when we arrived, we knew no one. I got to know our immediate neighbours but by our first Christmas, there were many on the estate I hadn’t met and still haven’t.  It’s not really the kind of place where you just bump into people. 

Graham is someone I used to play cricket with in Finchley in North London and he established a tradition over a number of years, of inviting some club members to his house every Boxing Day morning for drinks etc.  It was an occasion I always enjoyed very much.

Sometime in the middle of December, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from Graham and I supposed that either his drinks party was not to happen this year, or he thought that as we now lived more than 50 miles away, we wouldn’t come even if we were invited.

Caroline is more gregarious and much more sociable than I am and she had met neighbours.  

“We’ve been invited to Sally’s on Boxing Day morning for drinks,” she told me a couple of days before Christmas.  “Shall we go?”

“No,” I said, firmly.  “I don’t want to.  Who is she? I don’t know her.”

Caroline told me that Sally and her husband lived on the other side of the estate.  She had met her once or twice on the estate grounds before but had bumped into her at the supermarket that morning and got chatting.

“That’s what happens when you’re friendly and talk to strangers,” I grumbled.  “You get put in difficult situations.”

I listed the reasons I didn’t want to go to Sally’s.  “I don’t drink and I can’t stand for long before my knee hurts and anyway, we still might hear from Graham.”

“Graham would have rung by now,” Caroline insisted and I knew that she was probably right.

Eventually, I agreed very reluctantly that we would go. “An hour at most, though,” I stipulated.

On Christmas Eve morning, the phone rang.

“Hello, is that Terry?  This is Graham.”

“Oh, bloody hell, Graham.  I wish you’d rung sooner.  I’ve got to go to some bloody woman’s house on Boxing Day and it’s going to be hell.  I really wish we were coming to yours instead.”

“This is the bloody woman’s husband,” the voice said.  “Perhaps, I’ll see you on Wednesday.”

That was a little awkward.

156. Count on Me

Seven years ago, in May 2012, I posted “One Two Three”, in which I wrote about my Arithmomania.  It was Arithmomania then and it was Anatidaephobia in my last post.  I am a psychological mess!

Arithmomania: a morbid compulsion to count.  

I wrote at the time that I was unhappy with the word “morbid” in the definition as that means an “abnormal and unhealthy interest in something” and counting isn’t unhealthy.  It can be fun.

While surfing the internet I came across a site that’s new to me called “Infoplease” and saw that someone had asked the question, “How long would it take to count to a million?”

The answer to that question, began with this absurd statement:

Let's suppose, for the sake of the argument, that on average you could count one number every second.  

Then, it went on to say that counting at a rate of 60 numbers per minute, it would take roughly 11½ days to count to a million.

That opening statement is ridiculous because there comes a point relatively early when you just can’t count one number every second.  Eventually, the more you count, the numbers become too long and with too many syllables to say in just one second.

There are only ten one-syllable numbers and just twelve with two syllables.  Beyond a thousand, almost all numbers have at least seven syllables while most have eight or more: 100,001 has 7 syllables and 677,567 has 19.

Being alone all day, I’m able to do things I would be far too embarrassed to do in company.   For God’s sake, grow up! I’m trying to be serious here.

Out loud, I counted to 100 as fast as I could while still being intelligible, timing it with a stop watch.  It took me 40.89 seconds.  On a different website I read this be done in 25 seconds but in my opinion, that’s baloney.  The key word is “intelligible”.

It’s obvious when counting, that as the numbers increase they tend to contain more syllables and so take longer to say.  

The only person ever to have been recorded counting to a million and therefore the world record holder, is Jeremy Harper of Birmingham, Alabama in the USA.  In 2007, he counted for 16 hours every day taking 8 hours off for eating and sleeping.  It took him 89 days.  

That’s around 11,000 numbers a day or about 700 an hour.  Overall, he counted at a rate of 11.7 numbers per minute.  Counting at that rate, it would take him 243 years to count to a billion, defined these days as a thousand million.  In reality, it would take longer than that as you will see.

I don’t think most people realise how much bigger a billion is than a million.  Even if it really were possible to count at the rate of one number a second, it would take nearly 32 years to count to a billion.

In 2024, Elon Musk, cemented his position as the richest man in the world with cash and assets worth more than $486 billion.  That is more that the combined wealth of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerburg, the second and third richest people in the world. 

If Musk cashed in all his assets and collected the cash in 4.8 billion, $100 bills and then counted them at a steady rate of 200 bills an hour, it would take him more than 2,700 years of continuous counting (no toilet breaks) to make sure that it was all there.  

He might want to put all that money all into a nice, safe building society deposit account with no risk and so would have no financial worries ever again.  With only a 2.5% interest rate, he would receive about 12 billion dollars a year or $390 every second. 

But is he happy?

You might assume that if it took Jeremy Harper 89 days to count to a million, it would take 89,000 days, or 244 years, to count to a billion.  But, say 777,777,777 out loud.  That number has 35 syllables and when I say it aloud in a conversational way, it takes me just over six seconds.

I wanted to find out how “numbers per minute” decrease as the numbers get larger and take longer to say.  One morning, certain that I was alone and no one could see or hear me, I locked the doors and spent four hours counting out loud.  Putting it another way, I spent four hours talking to myself.  

I tried to imagine that I had at least 8 hours counting ahead of me and I would be doing the same thing tomorrow and for many days to come.  Consequently, my counting was steady and relentless.  

(Don’t you wish you could have been there?)

With a time scale of hundreds of years, the first ten thousand numbers are irrelevant.  They could be said in one day.

From  10,000 to 100,000 I averaged 27.3 numbers per minute (n.p.m.).

100,000 to 1,000,000 - my average n.p.m. is 11.2

1,000,000 to 5,000,000 - my average n.p.m. is 6.9

5,000,000 to 1 billion - my average n.p.m. is 6.1

The following table shows that it would me 294 years to count to a billion.  Someone else might do it faster or slower than me.

Range	Numbers	n.p.m	Hours	Years
10,000 - 100,000	90000	27.3	55	< 1
100,000 - 1,000,000	900000	11.2	1339	< 1
1,000,000 - 500,000,000	499000000	6.9	1205314	138
500,000,000 - 1 Billion	500000000	6.1	1366120	156
			Total	Years:  294

That’s 294 years of non-stop counting but if I were to copy Jeremy Harper’s practice of only counting for 16 hours a day, it would take me 392 years.  

It would actually take me longer than that as I would only be prepared to count for 8 hours a day (I do have some kind of life, you know) and so counting to one billion would take me at least 490 years.  

However, on a matter of principle, I absolutely refuse to count at the weekends or on Bank Holidays.  Also, I insist on having four weeks holiday every year.  That means I will only be counting for 233 days a year.

As there's no rush, I’ll probably start some time after Christmas, maybe on January 3rd.  Then, the day I shout out, “One billion!” will be on September 22nd 2788 and that’s a Thursday, 769 years from now.

If you’d like to see Jeremy Harper finish his count to a billion, click on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aqCC2PVNcA