On cash

 

I snatched up this battered note from the pavement outside a bookies in Trowbridge. For a split second I thought it might bankroll our outing, but of course it's a fake. All the fancy scintillations are missing, also the raised surfaces (e.g. dot patterns for the visually impaired). There are no microprinted lines of TWENTY20TWENTY20, which you can see with a magnifying glass in the dark areas of an authentic note. The RBS logo in the Spark Orbital image doesn't change colour, and isn't even print-aligned on the two sides. 

Still, we don't see many Scottish banknotes in the South West, so I enjoyed taking a look. This design was issued in 2020. The front celebrates Catherine "Kate" Cranston (1849 - 1934), creator of Glasgow tea-rooms at the end of the nineteenth century. Originally it was a temperance idea. Cranston's tearooms were elegant spaces. The most famous, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and recently restored, are the Willow Tea-rooms in Sauchiehall Street. A kind of ancestor of the provincial chain cafe where, 120 years later, we're now nursing our green tea and hoovering up the last crumbs of lemon drizzle. 

In Cranston's tea-rooms you didn't have to trouble the waitress. You took whatever you wanted from a nearby basket of cakes, and when you left you told the cashier what you'd had.

Kate Cranston withdrew from the business in 1917, distraught at the death of her husband, but the tearooms retained their proverbial reputation (appearing, for instance, in W. H. Auden's "Night Mail" of 1936).

The back of the note, amid a potpourri of red squirrels and blaeberries, quotes the first two lines of the sonnet Cupid and Venus, the only known Scots poem by Mark Alexander Boyd (1563 - 1601). (He also wrote poems in Latin and Greek. He was a Protestant soldier of fortune in the pay of the Catholic Henri III.)

CUPID AND VENUS

Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,
Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie;
Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree,
Or till a reed ourblawin with the win.
Twa gods guides me: the ane of them is blin,
Yea and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;
The next a wife ingenrit of the sea,
And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.
Unhappy is the man for evermair
That tills the sand and sawis in the air;
But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,
That feidis in his hairt a mad desire,
And follows on a woman throw the fire,
Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.

(The designers must have been aware of the sly appropriateness of the opening words.)

Like a lot of people these days, I make very little use of cash. My teas and cakes are all paid for on card, a flash of contactless. Or maybe you use your phone. As often as not, the street musician and the beggar miss out, I just don't have anything on me.

As a matter of fact, our favourite cafe chain stopped accepting cash payments during lockdown and they seem in no hurry to resume them.

Björn Ulvaeus, the ex-Abba man, was a strong early proponent of the cashless society. He thought it would rid us of crime at a stroke. I'm sorry to disagree with him so absolutely.

Because, not only for the street musicians' sake, I feel very concerned about cash being phased out. Cash is the only means by which, to a limited extent, we can give money to someone else without it being recorded as a transaction, that is, as data. That is, as something we voluntarily open to other parties' control and misuse; for, surely, to suppose that any digitized data is "confidential" or "private" is as naïve as Björn's belief that criminality today is primarily about rolls of crumpled notes. Though this fake note would, of course, bolster his case.

I haven't yet remembered about it on the day, but I really do intend to take part in "Cash Friday", the proposal that every Friday we make all our day-to-day transactions in cash. I might even have to miss out, one day a week, on that cafe chain.