Give me real money any day (From The Northern Echo)

Give me real money any day

5:42pm Friday 5th August 2011 in Sharon's View By Sharon Griffiths

I’VE been trying to get my head around a trillion. You know – as in our national debt being about a trillion pounds and the US debt being $14 trillion.

I mean, just how much is that?

How much exactly is a trillion? I looked it up and definitions seemed to vary, which is a mite worrying. I think it’s a million million. Or is that a billion? So it could be a million million million.

Either way it’s a lot and far too much for us to hold a picture in our heads.

Some websites told me that to count to one version of a trillion at one a second would take more than 30,000 years.

Which means you’d have to go back to the Stone Age when people were using flints and hadn’t discovered farming, or iron, or invented Stonehenge, swords, guns, the printing press or an international banking crisis. And if they’d been sitting there doggedly counting to a trillion, they possibly never would.

Such sums are meaningless to most of us and even to the bankers.

No one is ever going to turn up at the Bank of England with an infinite number of wheelbarrows and demand £1 trillion in used fivers.

But maybe they should.

Because that’s the problem – a trillion pounds isn’t real money. It’s just figures on a computer, arbitrarily exchanged from one country to another, from banks to governments and back again. It’s like playing poker for matchsticks only on a much grander scale.

Now if the Government had to trot along to the banks every year – with those wheelbarrows again – and physically count out the £43bn a year it costs us in interest on the national debt, then they might realise just how much it really is. Real money – that you can hold, weigh, stick in your wallet or hand over to someone else – is what counts. Literally.

Everything else is just figures on a screen and not real at all. First-time students off to university next month are already inundated with offers from banks for credit and debit cards.

Maybe we should make them wait and just let them deal with real money, preferably always in coins, until they realise its true value.

Could be their most useful lesson.

Meanwhile, across the centuries, our Stone Age man will be just about be getting there now Nine hundred and ninety nine billion, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety eight; nine hundred and ninety nine billion, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine...

A lot, isn’t it?

Rich, but daft

SUPERMODEL Linda Evangelista – yes the one who once said that she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 – is demanding £28,000-a-month-child support from the father of her four-yearold son.

She needs it for all the childcare as she has to work, keep herself fit and beautiful for her job and because, she said, she never wants to be alone with her son.

I blinked at that last bit. Weird.

Then I remembered a businesswoman who’d gone back to work within a few weeks of giving birth to her two children. She once rang me in a panic early one morning saying, “Help! The nanny’s ill, my husband’s away and I’m alone with the children. What do I do?”.

Maternal dimness isn’t confined to the super-rich.

SARCASTIC bosses make us work harder, says new research.

Of course, we should work willingly and happily for kind and understanding bosses and it’s understandable that we’d want to avoid the fury of the shouters, screamers and telephone throwers.

On the other hand, my first news editor at a radio station where every other reporter was a) male and b) had worked on papers since the age of 15, always inspired me to go the extra mile to get people to talk to me.

Otherwise, when I got back he would just say with a deadly quietness: “Ha, next time, I’ll send a proper journalist.”

Public humiliation isn’t nice. But sadly, it works.

THE post-holiday glow wears off after a week back home, says a Dutch researcher.

I bet she was talking to men.

In my experience, once I’ve driven home, opened the bills, dealt with a couple of hundred emails, put the first of about five loads of washing on, slung the suitcases back in the attic, and sorted out something for supper, I’m lucky if the post-holiday glow lasts as long as an hour.

Unaccustomed as I am

MANY years ago, I received a letter of apology from the Inland Revenue, as Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs was then. I was so stunned, I framed it and hung it in the loo.

Time to redress the balance.

HMRC has been coming in for a lot of criticism lately – my husband’s tax code has been wrong for two years – but has held up their hands and is trying to do better.

Well, two weeks ago the accountant worked out I was due a tax rebate (thank you Bernard). He sent the paperwork off and just ten days later I had a cheque from HMRC in my sticky little hand. Pretty good, wouldn’t you say?

Mind you, I still rushed to the bank to cash it – just in case there’d been a mistake.

It's not clever

MANY years ago, I received a letter of apology from the Inland Revenue, as Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs was then. I was so stunned, I framed it and hung it in the loo.

Time to redress the balance.

HMRC has been coming in for a lot of criticism lately – my husband’s tax code has been wrong for two years – but has held up their hands and is trying to do better.

Well, two weeks ago the accountant worked out I was due a tax rebate (thank you Bernard). He sent the paperwork off and just ten days later I had a cheque from HMRC in my sticky little hand. Pretty good, wouldn’t you say?

Mind you, I still rushed to the bank to cash it – just in case there’d been a mistake.

Backchat

Dear Sharon,
I AM sure you were as appalled as I to hear that one in three children are leaving primary school at age 11 without a fundamental grasp of the three Rs, and that one in ten boys at age 11 has a reading age of seven.

Going into primary schools during the Seventies, I was taken aback by what had happened since the Fifties and early Sixties. Gone were the rows of desks with pupils looking towards the teacher, replaced by an open plan scattering of tables, with children looking in all directions, chatting, no doubt being encouraged to “express themselves”.

There is time for such luxury after the basics have been taught which, like it or not, requires discipline, dedicated teachers, and lots of hard work by children at times made to pay attention to those teachers.

The liberal thinkers were under the illusion that tough methods implied unhappy children – far from it. My primary school, Dean Bank, was extremely disciplined and hard working, but the vast majority of us really enjoyed our time there and reaped the rewards.

To add insult to injury, governments of all persuasions have constantly put out the lie that standards have been improving year on year. The current Government does appear at last to be honest about the situation, and determined to try and put things right.

Geoff Carr by email