I re-read the last post today and for the sake of completeness I should point out that I have neither a 'walk in refrigerator' nor a 62" plasma TV - I have NO TV - and I haven't sat behind the wheel of a car in 20 years - horrid, horrid things! If the good Lord had intended us to get about that way he would have given us axles instead of ankles!
I don't quite know why I went down this particular track today, probably something to do with the global financial crisis. "Crisis? What crisis?" I hear Citicorp, BoA, Fannie/Freddie, HBoS, Lloyds, collectively exclaim. WE've got pots of (government - YOUR) money and we're doing fine, thank you! Our balance sheets are looking so much better since you pumped in those billions of Matabele Jumbo Beads (current exchange rate 1 MJB = $1, £0.55, €0.89 and falling) but we're still not lending :) After all, there's dividends to pay and we mustn't disappoint out shareholders!
The track I went down was the community 'savings and loans', the 'tally man' (septic knuckles :) Now these were such a feature of my childhood, and yet, outside of loan sharks, do they still exist? I grew up in era before credit cards; an era when whole swathes of the population had no bank account; when getting access to money you didn't have was actually quite difficult and usually involved my father in a little 'creative stock taking' (usually translated as 'theft' in English).
Every week, I would toddle (literally) on my little 'reins' to a gloomy and depressing Church Hall and would wait patiently on those awful tubular steel and canvas chairs while my mother queued amongst, perhaps, 100 others to hand over £1 perhaps £2, seldom more, to the man seated at a table. He would dutifully enter the amounts in the wee, red book my mother clutched in her hand and would copy the entries in his big, red, leather bound ledger. And then in June or July, we would pay in the £1 and withdraw £50, a 'loan' to pay for the family holiday. There was only one rule, and nobody defaulted, all loans had to cleared by 31st December. No carry over! If you didn't get your balance into credit or at least zero by year end, you couldn't play the following year.
I do not know if interest was ever charged on these loans - I was far too young to be a banker - but I suspect, if it was, I think it would have been very low - the moneylenders would after all gain interest at prevailing rate on all the 'savings' on deposit. While I have no doubt that the people who ran this scheme made a handsome profit, I have a soft spot for them. Without this community savings and loan my mother would never have been able to have afforded the £93 (1966 prices) it cost to kit me out for grammar school! And no, we didn't go on holiday that year!
And the 'Tally Men'? Do they still exist? They were essentially 'travelling salemen' employed by a local department store who would go from door to door with useful 'household items', saucepans, plates, cutlery, that sort of thing. They usually had a nice line in sales patter and would persuade the unsuspecting householder that they really did need a new set of saucepans now but could spread the payments over a number a weeks. In one sense, everybody won. The store shifted more units than they otherwise would have done, probably at a higher price too, to cover the cost of the 'instalment plan', and the householder got a relatively painless way of buying cheaper items for which credit was not generally available but which they could not afford to pay for outright.
So why was the Tally Man (so called because he kept a 'tally' of payments made in the ubiquitous 'little book') known as 'septic knuckles'? You have to remember all this is from an era when spending money on anything but essentials was simply impossible and door chimes or bells were unheard of outside of the affluent, chattering classes. So visitors banged on the door. If you'd had a not particularly good week, then the children, in this case me, would be told not to answer the door on particular evenings (the days the tally man would call). As a result, they would be banging on doors constantly, often all evening, as householder after householder resolutely refused to open the door.......because they couldn't pay. After all that, there was needless to say a certain degree of 'scraping' around the knuckle area :)
It's funny writing this because in many ways it's hard to imagine that people I might converse with, or work with, on a regular basis, would have no direct knowledge of this. Of outside lavatories, no plumbed in bath (bath-times were a 'tin' - galvanised zinc - bath, hauled out from under the stairs and placed in front of the parlour fire and filled with endless saucepans of boiling water), hauling coal from the coal shed in the garden, running your washing through a mangle, chicken as a treat not as a staple, television screens no bigger than a laptop (but a box the size of a fridge), most times smaller. It's another era but one that seems more suited to a pre-war, Great Depression, era not a booming post war UK economy.
Perhaps our grandchildren will tell their children of the time when the internet was just a lot of text and a few videos not the immersive, virtual reality they inhabit with the same sense of "have we really come so far in such a short time?" It took 10,000 years of cultural evolution to get to Babbage's 'Difference Engine'. It's taken 20 years to get from a way of sharing research papers using 'Mosaic' to Twitter and blogs like these.
No wonder the older we get, the more we can't cope with it all! So why do I go along with it?
I've been playing with computers as part of my job for over 20 years (I remember when hard drives did not exist outside of mainframes, although I don't go so far back to when they didn't exist at all!) but I engage because this is doing what I remember doing as a child, only on paper, with a pencil.
"Dear Auntie Eva,
Thank you for your lovely birthday present. We have been doing a lot in school recently, especially with paints and things. I am sending you a picture that I drew for Mr Russell, my teacher, of a Roman in a toga. I got a reward card!
Love
Malcolm"
It's not so different is it? Except you don't need to keep sharpening the pencil!
See, when you write like this, I think you should be an author, and screw the technoworld. You can write magnificent books to teach children like mine about a better day-- well, at least it sounds better.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry if that note sounded flirtatious. It was meant to be caring because I think anyone who is about to lose their job needs a little care. Other than that, nothing was meant.