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October 08, 2008
Losing it for 24 hours
I lost it for 24 hours. Money that is. Quite a lot of it. I was one of the many with savings in the Icelandic bank that went under. It turns out that it didn't really exist anyway. It was just a number on the screen of the internet bank. One day it was there, the next the website was not accessible and our money gone. Thanks to Mr Darling he promises that we will get it back.
It turns out that money is only a concept. OK there are notes and coins but most of the money changing hands in the world does not exist. It is just numbers on the computer screens of people working in the financial centres of the world. So if it doesn't really exist does it matter whether we have it or not?
I am surprised really that I did not lose it, mentally I mean. The money we lost and then found was money to buy us a house to live in. It included an advance on my inheritance from my parents. It had value for what it might have bought, what it might have become, but it had no real value in our present lives sitting in a bank.
We realised we were not much worse off. We had each other, nobody had died, we have jobs, we have a roof over our heads (OK it's rented but who cares), we have enough money to buy food. So basically our life in the present was still OK.
It was a hard way to find out what money means. Maybe I should have taken up Mr Bojangles offer of the BOMB after all.
Posted by Anna Dixon at October 8, 2008 08:26 PM