PRICE WARS

Images from the British Museum's exhibition LEGION: life in the Roman army (remaining on show until 23 June 2024), reminding us of two premiere forces that have fashioned every culture across the centuries of recorded time...

WAR...

 

 

...and

 

MONEY...

 

[Photos: Brian Sibley & David Weeks]

QUESTIONS OF SECURITY

The following staggering tale of bureaucratic bonkerness comes from our friend ANDY STOKES who traded life on the Isle of Wight for that on the Greek island of Kalymnos...

I recently had cause to write a letter of complaint to Barclays Bank. I ended the letter by telling them to close my account and transfer the balance to my Nationwide account.

Yesterday I received a telephone call from Customer Services dept at Barclays. I was asked a number of questions for security reasons, one of which was "What was the content of your letter to us?"

Having answered the security questions to his satisfaction the conversation continued like this:

"You have asked us to transfer your balance to Nationwide; unfortunately we are unable to do that as we do not have a copy of your signature to compare with the letter."

"So what happens now?"

"What we need is a certified copy of your passport faxed to us."

"So who do I get to certify it?"

"Your bank manager in Greece."

"Do you know my bank manager in Greece?"

"No."

"Do you know who my bank manager in Greece is?"

"No"

"Do you have a copy of his signature?"

"No."

"Do you know which of the Greek banks I use?"

"No."

"So, let’s get this right. You have a letter which you accept was sent by me and I have answered your security questions so you are quite happy that you are talking to the person who sent you the letter?"

"Yes."

"And at the end of the letter I ask you to transfer my funds to another bank and you accept that is what I want done?"

"Yes."

"But you cannot transfer my money because you cannot compare my signature with the one on the letter?"

"That’s right."

"But you will do it once you have a copy of my passport signed by a person you don’t know, have never met and whose signature you have never seen before?"

"Yes. It’s security."

"So, if I were to just photocopy my passport and send it to you with a signature that I made up you would be none the wiser?"

"Ah yes, but it has to be certified."

"How?"

"With a rubber stamp from the bank."

"Do you know what the rubber stamp from my bank looks like?"

"No."

"So, if I had a rubber stamp made up you would not be in a position to check whether it was genuine or not?"

"No."

"And when you receive this faxed certified copy of my passport, what checks will you be able to make to ensure that it is genuine?"

"Well, none, really."

"So, why don’t you just transfer the money?"

"We can’t. It’s security."

Thanks, Andy, and if you ever manage to get your money out of Barclays, good luck in your negotiations with Nationwide!

OLD CHESTNUT

That horse-chestnut from the Anne Frank Tree being sold on ebay finally went for $10,240.00

It was not the wisest investment as it turned out, since the tree (due to have been felled today) was granted an eleventh hour stay of execution by an Amsterdam judge who said that the city had not considered other solutions and asked all sides to sit down and come up with alternatives to cutting down the 150-year-old tree.

No doubt the lucky purchaser of the world's most expensive chestnut would now like to see the seller "roasting on an open fire"...

CONKERING THE MARKET

A post-script to today's blog about the Anne Frank Tree: the person living next door to the house where the tree awaits execution is selling one of its horse-chestnut on ebay.

The bidding on this item of entrepreneurial opportunism currently stands, at the time of writing (with 10 hours 23 minutes to go), at $10,240...

That's one hell of an expensive conker.

ROYAL HEIR

The recent photographic portrait of H M Queen Elizabeth by that absurdly talented photographer (herself the Queen of Vanity Fair) Annie Leibovitz has had it's critics, but then what portrait of QE2 (from Annigoni to Rolf Harris) hasn't?


What I find interesting is that a portrait by a 'colonial' and, what's more, one who has not only photographed John Lennon and Demi Moore in the nude...


...but has also recently taken to doing PR snaps for Disneyland with David Beckham, Scarlett Johansson and the like...


...should have managed to get a detail about Her Majesty right that seems to have eluded One's staff at One's Bank of England.

I refer to the fact that when they came to design a nice new £20 note (bizarrely dumping Edward Elgar from the backside --- and in his centenary year!) they not only managed to make it look convincingly like a Euro note, but also obviously missed the fact that Mrs Windsor now has silver white hair as opposed to sporting a rather vulgar purple rinse!


Is it, I wonder, a matter of protocol? Do monarchs' likenesses only get up-dated every 25 years or so? Or is Mr Andrew Bailey, the current Chief Cashier, so busy signing notes that he never quite gets around to asking Her Majesty's Personal Private Secretary whether Her Majesty would mind awfully if she started looking her age on the national currency.

If the "I promise to pay the bearer..." inscription means anything, shouldn't the piece of paper on which it is printed at least carry images that suggest that the people involved go in for Truth rather than Fiction?

Besides, supposing, one day the Aliens really do land and ask to be Taken to Our Leader? Well, if they happen to have seen a £20 note are they conceivably going to believe that the occupant of Buckingham Palace is the same person? I think not...

It may rankle with royalists, but a realistic portrait of the British monarch doesn't seem such a bizarre thing to request... After all, it's not as if Queen Liz had suddenly turned into the Crone from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is it?

Maybe someone should rummage through the 'British Penny Production Records' in the Bank of England archives and find out how and when they persuaded Queen Victoria to stop looking like an 18 year old young girl with her hair in a bun in favour of resembling like an 80 year-old pug in a tiara...

HOLED UP!

Until recently, the banks have called it a cash-dispensing machine, but now one of them - Barclays - has decided to adopt the name by which the rest of us have always called it --- the "Hole in the wall"!

That, of course, is literally what it is, but I can't help wondering whether there isn't also a subsconscious connection with the legendary (and notorious) outlaws known as Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, which - in the days of the wild west - operated out of the Hole-in-the-Wall Pass in Johnson County, Wyoming, and which included such famous desperadoes as Jesse and Frank James, Kid Curry and - if you remember the movie - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.


Unfortunately, of course, the notion that when we ambush today's holes-in-the-walls we are robbing the banks is pure fantasy. In fact, of course, it's just the other way around!

SEXPENDITURE

Frankly, I've no idea...

What is the going rate, these days?









The things I pick up in the doctor's waiting room...

Actually - at very real the risk of sounding like a grumpy old git - this is a far cry from the days of my youth when there were no National Heath Service leaflets to tell you What's What and when items of this nature were only obtainable from pharmacies (and if they didn't have a male assistant, you simply had to purchase yet another toothbrush) or from the hairdresser's salon - then called the barber's - where you might possibly be asked if you needed "something for the weekend" - presumably on the basis that sex was an exclusively Friday and/or Saturday night affair!

Run by St Pancras Hospital, the freedoms-shop.com web site -- No! You really don't have to check it out... Oh, you just did! --- is, for a fogy born in the Dark Ages, a somewhat startling experience! A kind of Amazon.condom, it has a cheery sales pitch that is up front and proud of it! For example: "Check out our popular freedoms box, which offers fantastic value for money, and looks pretty damn good too."

Seriously, whilst my mock outrage conceals a deep-seated jealousy that today's generations are so better catered for in the sexual knowledge department and lack most of the hang-ups that hung over those of us of an earlier generation, I fear for them in that the worldwide statistics on the AIDS & HIV epidemic show a rise from 8 million people in 1990 to 38.6 million in 2005 and the figures are still rising.

If only there were a way for those of us who lived through the Reign of Terror - especially those who loved and lost in that era when knowledge was sparse and fear was rife - to explain to today's generation that the price of freedom is always responsibility and, in the case of sex (whatever your particular cup of tea might be) that means a responsibility to health and life...

That said, the NHS and St Pancras Hospital have probably got it right...

THAT’S THE WAY THE MONEY GOES…

Every family has its little sayings… My family had one that was used endlessly and which (even though I am now the last survivor of the line) I still find myself saying from time to time - unintelligible though it may be to everyone else!

I was five or six years old and on holiday with my parents at the blissful Kentish seaside of Broadstairs.

One Saturday, my paternal Grandparents joined us for a day by the sea and it was on that afternoon that my Grandfather famously insisted on taking us all out for "A really nice CREAM TEA!"

The tea-shop - along the road to Dumpton Gap - was the usual kind of Olde English establishment: chintzy curtains, chequered table cloths wheelback chairs and copper kettles hanging from the old oak beams.

The cream tea, however, was decidedly not up to snuff. It was, of course, during the austere 1950s, so maybe the scones were a little dry or the cream a bit thin or the portion of jam somewhat measly.

All I know is that my Grandfather - a generous man who never penny-pinched in his life - was deeply unhappy with the quality of our Cream Tea and downright scandalised by the bill when it eventually arrived!

Today it seems amazing that a cream tea for five people (however indifferent its quality) should have cost as little as seven-shillings-and-sixpence (in today’s money, a mere thirty-seven-and-a-half pence!) but for my Grandfather it was far too much for the far too little that we'd received!

All the way back to the beach he stomped along, shaking his head and snorting in disgust: “Bang goes seven-and-six!”

And that is how I remember that day and my Grandfather and if you ever hear me say “Bang goes 50p!” - or “£5” or any other amount - then you’ll know the reason why!

SUPERBLOG!

A reader writes:

“I have to say that it is one of the most delightful and surprising blogs around - the sheer variety of content matter is mind-boggling...”

Well, thank you! How very kind!

I’m genuinely flattered.


The only question now is, "How the Hell can I make some money out of it?"