Not banking on it

The other day I went to the bank to get some cash. There are just some things you cannot pay for with a card, although that seems to be the trend these days. Cards and online transfers. Since Covid, cash seems to be dirty word.   Both at the foodbank shop and the park information centre where I volunteer, customers invariably pay with a card. However, I cannot pay the window cleaner with a card or bank transfer, so need the odd bit of cash for things like that or for parking machines. My bank in the local High Street has closed down, so I drove 9 miles today to another part of London that does have a branch. I withdrew £100 in notes from the cash machine and then asked if I could change one £20 note into £1 coins to  be told "we don't have coins here".

Think about that for a minute. A bank does not have coins. I was so flabbergasted, I retorted "What?" and then "what has become of banks these days?" The poor woman offered a solution - I could either try the Post Office or buy something small in a supermarket and ask for coins as change. When I tried the Post Office, the initial response was they wouldn't be able to help, but someone else in the queue joined in to support me with the same tale of woe and the post office counter girl relented, went out back and returned with a £20 bag of coins for me.

We've had coins for over 2000 years, but I can see in years to come, my grandchildren asking whether we really used to pay for things with bits of paper and metal and making me feel like a dinosaur. 

Always the same

I was out with eight friends yesterday for lunch, celebrating my birthday two weeks early. There's a little artisan cafe near me, which also doubles as a florist and we often meet there to celebrate someone's birthday. I met most of the girls when Kay was a toddler and we used the same kindergarten. We only meet about six times a year when it is close to one or two of us having birthdays.  I call the group The Birthday Girls when I note the date in my diary. My birthday is towards the end of November, so it often doubles up as an excuse for us to exchange Christmas cards. I therefore have already received the first eight of my Christmas cards for this year, together with my birthday cards.

There's one thing on the menu I love having when I am there and always order it each time - crispy bacon, brie and cranberry toasted sandwich. Yesterday the girls were laughing that yet again I had ordered it. The melted brie just drips down the side of the toast and the crunchy bacon and sweet cranberry just completes the delight.  There are so many other yummy things to choose from including some amazing gooey gateaux, which I also order as a dessert.  What is your favourite when you eat out?

My grandfather

The photo above is of my maternal grandfather William. He was born on 19 April 1895 in East London to a relatively poor working class family and was the eldest of ten siblings. I am not certain when he left school but it would have been in early teenage and he got a job at a bank  (Comptoir National d'Escomte de Paris) in the City of London as a junior working his way up. In 1914, as a 19-year-old, he was called up to the Royal Horse Artillery in the First World War. The photo is of him in his uniform.

As a child, I used to hear him speak of Mons, Ypres, the Somme and Passchandaele, but it meant very little to me until I grew older. All I know is he fought in all those battles and must have seen many horrific things, but rarely spoke about the detail. He preferred to practice his French on me, when I started learning it at school, saying that he had learned it as he passed through Belgian villages asking for food.

In the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, he was badly wounded. He had a leg wound and lost an eye. He used to speak more of his concern for the gun carriage horse Smiler who was killed by the blast alongside him. He was moved back to England and into a military hospital until he recovered. He had a glass eye - his original one apparently donated to a museum in Northampton (so I am told). I used to have terrible trouble as a child knowing which eye to look him in, when I spoke to him, as it didn't occur to me that the glass eye was the one that didn't move. 

After the war, he returned to the bank in London to take up duties there again. However, he had to add up long columns of figures (no calculators in those days) and the strain on his good eye made it hard. One day, walking across London Bridge, a piece of grit flew into his good eye and he got a very bad eye infection which made things a thousand times worse. In the end the bank had to dismiss him, as he could no longer do the job. It was the early 1920s and the economy was not great. He moved his wife and small child (my mother) to Essex, where he set up a small-holding with goats and chickens, hoping to sell the eggs for a living, but times were hard and they often had no money coming in at all. Eventually he worked in his younger brother's electrical firm earning a pittance as a storeman. I recall he used to get very bad headaches as the shrapnel moved around his body and he was as thin as a rake. He never earned enough to afford his own home, so rented until the day he died in 1977 aged 82.

I always think of him on Remembrance Day and the sacrifices he and so many like him made. But for them, we would not be living the life we live now. 

Lowest of the low

I regularly help out at the local foodbank. It opens three times a week and  we see over 400 families a week. Fridays (when I volunteer) are probably our busiest day of all as not only do we hand out food, but also provide a 2-course sit-down meal. We have advisers  who can help with benefits or housing problems, counsellors for issues with mental health and the occasional visit of a dentist or optician to check teeth and eyes for those who cant afford the normal NHS routes.  There's also a cafe to provide hot drinks and cake on all three sessions.

I get involved with preparing the bags of food to hand out to the guests and actually handing them out to the long queue that forms. People start arriving an hour before the foodbank opens in order to get at the front of the queue and get the best pick of fruit and veg on offer. Since Covid and the general economic slump, the number of guests has swelled alarmingly, whereas the number of donations has relatively dwindled as donors pull their own belts in. We have a shipping container in the ground of the church which once was full from floor to ceiling with crates of donations, but that dwindled to a very sad few crates in no time. 

Just over a year ago, it was decided to open a charity shop in the local high street, all profit going to the foodbank to buy in bulk things like pasta, toilet roll, tins of soup and beans, shampoo, nappies and anything else we were low on. The shop has been a godsend and I help out with that too once a week. Sometimes I sort donated clothes, books and toys, price them up and put them out in the shop. Sometimes I help on the till. A paid manageress and deputy manageress divide the shifts between them and, apart from electricity and rent, all profits are ploughed back into providing food for the foodbank. We don't put any old rubbish in the shop and pride ourselves on being the sort of shop people love to spend time in as they know they will find quality items in there. Anything past its best (full of holes, snags or stains) still makes money as they are bought by a ragman for so much a kilo. Anything in between -that is too good for the ragman but not good enough for the shop - goes into a pile which is given to the foodbank itself for guests to rummage through for free. A lot of local people use the foodbank shop as they say it represents good quality compared to other charity shops in the neighbourhood.

Unfortunately, there are some unsavoury characters who think it is OK to shoplift. We have installed CCTV cameras to spot the culprits, although we have been told not to get involved in an argument in case these people carry knives or get violent.  We just make sure, if we see them again, we ask them to leave and say why. There are also some people going round deliberately getting rid of fake £20 notes too. We know how to spot the fake notes now, so again, we have to keep our eyes peeled. I really do despair of the human race sometimes. They are the lowest of the low to shoplift from/or con a shop trying to buy food for a foodbank.