Losing count

 

drinks

While travelling, I was fully occupied with the events of our travelling life. I did very little reading (just a bit of Daudet and a bit of Galdós) and, as you'll have noticed, I did scarcely any blogging. 

Another regular habit of mine, of which I'm somewhat shy to speak, fell behind too. This is a spreadsheet in which, for the past couple of years, I've faithfully detailed all my expenditure, right down to the merest coffee-and-croissant or trifling visit to a corner shop. I can't supply a defensible justification for this habit, but it apparently gives me a sense of security, the illusion of control over outgoings that, nevertheless, stubbornly exceed income. 

In ordinary life, I'm never more than a few days behind in my record, but while I was on the road the time to process the ever-growing bundle of receipts never seemed to arrive. Eventually I had to stuff a whole wad of them into a corner of my bag and start accruing a fresh batch.

Once back home I did a marathon session of retrospective spreadsheeting, but at times the usual detail defeated me. Arrived in the motorway services, cold and benighted, we would go through multiple rounds of hot chocolate and mint-flavoured green tea from the drinks machines: I noted the whole of this debauch merely as "drinks" and estimated a total. One part of me felt dissatisfied, the other part liberated. Isn't it important, sometimes, to lose count? 

Indeed it occurred to me that this one word, drinks, contained within it the implication, the intoxicating implication of uncountedness. Especially if the drinks are alcoholic (which in our case they were not). You don't keep tabs on drinks. And the stereotypic association of drinks with double vision emphasizes that "losing count" is itself a significant aspect of the ritual. It's a worship at the shrine of life, the aspect of life that resists control, measurement, being accounted for. . .

that money

This phrase (think of it as a spoken phrase) is a miniature drama. Doesn't our embarrassment grow at the mere thought of the scene it suggests? For here, evidently, is a sum of money recognized by two people, the person speaking and the person spoken to. It's a sum of money in which both have some kind of interest; for example, it belongs to one but is in the hands of the other; perhaps for some very laudable reason; but all the same, that's an awkward kind of situation. Both parties have a certain understanding of what sum of money is being spoken of; e.g. of whose money it is, how much it is, what the money is for and how this particular sum of money has come to be in question, as distinct from all the other money in the world. It will be a very good thing if both parties have precisely the same understanding on these matters, but that's as may be. In the mean time, things can easily go awry. The person addressed surely hears the accusatory undertone, I hope you haven't forgotten about the money, but it looks very like it. But the person who broaches the subject is embarrassed too. That money reveals only too clearly that it's on your mind, you're fussing, you have a tendency to micro-manage. 

Not too far beneath this phrase, the possibility of open conflict is already palpable; the time when people say "Hang the money!" or tell home truths or storm out of the room. We hope there will be no lasting damage. 

tracing

Out in the sticks, on the street, at markets and in most bars, cash remained the only form of payment.  Nevertheless, the dream of Björn Ulvaeus is coming ever closer to being realized. Cash is disappearing, it will become a distant memory; like hand-painted crockery, or the rows of religious statuettes that I still recall admiring in the souvenir shops of twenty-five years ago. 

Everywhere along the main road networks card payment was the default and preferred method, contactless especially. (On our return journey I didn't use cash once.)

Which adds another level of futility to my ham-fisted spreadsheet: because all I have to do is log into my banking app and there's all the information about my expenditure, ready-gathered and (unlike my spreadsheet) including all the transactions that have slipped my mind.

After all, it's not only "the parties concerned" who take an interest in that money. Government and business and police have long shown a desire to keep tabs on money, frustrated by its essential liquidity. The technology is all in place now, though cash itself isn't chipped -- at least not for now. (My bank statement is personal to me, they say, but that's only to soothe me.) 

When it began to seem permissible and even desirable to track the movements of human individuals, one of the quickest ways to achieve it was to leverage existing technology for tracking their spending. 

Sometimes it seems that human societies are dedicated to eradicating the wild human species. Arguably that's already happened, many times over.  But I understand why going feral might become a moral imperative.