Author: humanist55

Postscript to Fighting…

humanist55
This morning, after posting F is for Fighting, I read a piece online in the Financial Times by the wonderful writer Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) written five days ago. It tells of the tragic events unfolding in India under the [monstrous] Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister – Narendra Modi. The usual catalogue of bad decisions based on early denial, but in a country of teeming millions of poor crammed into slums, this will be a human disaster of epic proportions.

In her preamble, Arundhati says, and I can’t quote for copywriter reasons and so must paraphrase, but please go and read the full work – that governments who are in charge of the response to the virus pandemic are fond of referring to it as a war and that they mean it literally rather than metaphorically. But if it was really a war, then the US, which has been woefully unprepared for the virus, would be the best prepared with guns and planes, soldiers and bombs.

Arundhati Roy spells out in much more detail than I and with far greater eloquence, the dangers of poor leadership and the human costs that are being engendered. At the end, she describes pandemics throughout history, as portals to a different future where-through we will have choices to make about whether we return to the same old systems which have been revealed  as broken, such as capitalism – or choose another direction…

F is for Fighting…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Fighting a war, fist fighting, fighting for your rights, fighting off an attacker, fighting the good fight, fighting for peace, fighting off an infection, fighting boredom, fighting flab, fighting sleep, fighting insomnia, depression, a sense of failure, fighting old age, fighting for recognition, justice, fighting to be heard, fighting an election, fighting the war on drugs, fighting terrorism, fighting for the environment, fighting for survival, the uses of the word fighting are legion but in this list, and I am sure you can think of more examples, only the first four are literal fights – the rest are metaphorical. When one activity carries such a plethora of metaphors, it must surely say something about our humanity.


It’s not exclusively a human trait to fight, animals do it to win a mate or in defense of territory and in many cases it may not even come to blows – elaborate posturing, special apparatus designed to impress may do the trick although in other cases real and sometimes mortal damage is inflicted. These are legitimate causes for fighting – reproduction and territory are about survival – short and long term but as a species, humans have raised fighting to a planet-wide, all-life-threatening status. For a species that prides itself, defines itself even, on the size of its brain, this activity does not make sense.

The United States of America, of it’s 242 years history, has been at peace with no wars ongoing, external or internal, for just 16 years. Former President Jimmy Carter allegedly pointed this out to Donald Trump in 2019 and added ” We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion [on] military spending. China has not wasted a single penny on war and that’s why they’re ahead of us in almost every way.” One imagines it made little impression on a man whose stance in life is, more often than not, belligerent. I said that animals fight in defense of territory and like the metaphor above, fighting for peace, this sounds a contradiction in terms. Just as the military wing of the government is usually called the Department of Defense or similar – rarely the Department of War as this would imply that waging war was an aim of government – not a response to potential outside aggression.

In George Orwell’s classic novel of a political and dystopian future “Nineteen Eighty-Four” we see how the use of the right terms is vital for the control of the masses by the few. “Great” Britain has become Airstrip One and is a mere province of the superstate Oceania which tells its citizens that is in (perpetual) war and exhorts them to greater effort, greater tightening of the belt (remind you of austerity?). Published just after the Second World War when the Tehran Conference had divided the world up into zones of influence, the book has as many warnings today as ever about the scrutiny we need to place on those who govern…

The other day I heard someone saying on the radio (in the plethora of discussion about Covid 19 I am afraid I didn’t clock the speaker) that we keep referring to the National Health Service workers as the frontline workers in this fight against the virus but that it would be better if the people at large regarded themselves as the front line since it will be the degree of their adherence to not going out that will determine the reduction of deaths at the final reckoning. So we should be the “Home Front” a term that came about during the Second World War to give unity and focus to a population only some of whom were experiencing the direct effects of bombing whilst for those out in the country, there was little immediate evidence of the war raging across the world. Rationing, inventive cooking, improvisation and substitution – all the things we are experiencing under lockdown.

Here is the disconnect at the heart of our mass response to Covid 19 – for most people it is not serious and even if they do catch it it will not feel serious – we can’t see the crisis in the hospitals, only empty streets, shutdown shops and we experience a sense of unreality. Even when we watch the nightly news reports with the climbing death tolls, we do not connect with the reality, over 5000 people in the UK now, that’s a stadium full! If we could have taken it seriously, then we would have started preparing earlier when we heard the reports coming out of China. Logic dictates that if you can pass on an infection before you show symptoms, a pandemic is inevitable but human beings are not notably logical and so the fact that this virus is not evenly fatal fuels the disconnect.

We find ourselves living in the movie set of a post-apocalyptic event (such as a pandemic) but there are no rotting bodies in the streets and no feral gangs of survivors breaking into shut down shops. In this respect, barring some early hoarding of toilet rolls and flour (I blame the Great British Bake-off for making everybody believe they should bake their way through the crisis) the majority of people have responded with the best that humans can be to this strange challenge. Imagine though, how things would have been without the internet to inform and entertain us, to share tips and memes and love.

In the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, things were very different. Coming at the end of the First World War, starting out, it is thought, in a military base in Kansas, the troops heading out to Europe spread it and 20 to 50 million died – more than the 17 million who died in WW1 and this may not be accurate as there was no means of testing the many victims or recording data accurately and even with all of our advanced technology this current pandemic still presents some of the same problems. We do not fully understand why Spanish Flu was so lethal and we have much to learn about why Covid 19 is so lethal for some and not for others. Incidentally, the name Spanish Flu came about because most of the countries involved in WW1 had censorship in place for military purposes and the powers that be suppressed news of the pandemic, afraid of public panic except for Spain which was neutral, had no censorship and freely discussed the disease, including the Spanish King becoming ill. I say this on the day that Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister is reported to be receiving escalating treatment in Intensive Care…

Returning to the metaphorical use of the word fighting – in the world of religion, we have “onward Christian soldiers” and we have Jihad a term which modern Moslems struggle to re-interpret as a metaphorical personal battle for spiritual development and not in its apparent, original meaning of a battle to forcibly convert non-believers. It goes to show how careful we need to be with metaphor – especially those based on images of war and fighting and we need to be especially vigilant that we do not give the latitude to right-wing leaders to take excessive powers under the cover of crisis sending us back to the future of 1984…

I am going to give the last word to that great storyteller and observer of his times – Charles Dickens in his opening to A Tale of Two Cities – almost a perfect metaphor in itself –
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Roundup 2 – other blogs on the A to B 2020 Challenge

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I am working my way through the list of participating blogs which is now over 500 of which I have opened 120 now – phew! Here are the more of the those i have decided to follow:-

I may be a man but I am first and foremost a designer so I have done an evening course in dressmaking and can make a shirt. I crochet but mostly Tunisian crochet which is slightly obscure. I help my partner with her sewing machine projects and this site Quilting Patchwork Applique appeals for a couple of reasons. First of all the selection of images in the banner are unusual including a wolf hiding in the forest. Secondly, the site is bi-lingual, everything duplicated in French and English – not just trusting to Google translate if people want to be bothered. For us English speaking peoples, it’s easy to forget that there is a whole world of other-language internet and this is a refreshing window…

Mk1 and Mk2 of a Tunisian Crochet handbag I made as a sampler of all the stitches I could find…

Sharon E Cathcart is a novelist but instead of using the Challenge to promote her writing directly, or practice writing to a theme, Sharon is sharing her research into Pompei which she has done for a future book and she is revealing some interesting details – hope she makes it to Z!

Jane Turley over at “The Witty Ways of a Wayward Woman” – what can I say – your description of making cabbage soup had me laughing out loud (I will not brook the acronym for that phrase in a blog) – does what it says on the tin!

Tommia’s Tablet – favourite things of a 50 year old woman – a photograph and a poem, what’s not to like!

When I look down the list of blogs, a name like Zombie Flamingos gets me going and this site’s theme for the challenge is to introduce us to the life and work of Female Photographers. Sadly, in our still too male-dominated world, the names here will include those who are not so famous so watch this space. Having said this, the first up is Dianne Arbus – a favourite of mine ever since she was featured in a Sunday colour supplement back in the 70’s. Then we have some names I didn’t know though I had seen some of the work, Margaret Bourke-White, Julia Margaret Cameron (see below) and Rineke Dijkstra.


John Herscel by Julia Margaret Cameron – see Zombie Flamingos


E is for Editing…

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Editing do you love to hate it?

Does anybody love editing as much as writing the first draft? I have had to train myself not to push the “Publish” button as soon as I have finished writing a blog because past experience has taught me that there are always mistakes.

Novels, (two on the go for longer than I can bear to declare) are different – you fully expect there to be many drafts – not least because – if it is your first novel and it’s taken a very long time, then your skill as a writer not to mention your ideas, will have changed by the time you are xxx% of the way through.

I like to write in longhand because it stops the temptation to edit as you go along which slows the flow but also because I can write faster than I can type which also holds back the creativity. Then the only problem is typing up because then I will edit as I go along so it is VERY SLOW.

One thing that has become easier in this digital age, is spell-checking. If using a word-processing programme, I like to have the Paragraph button active because it then shows all the extra spaces and the difference between paragraphs and line returns, but using some apps like Blogger, this button is not there. I also use Grammarly which not only spellcheck but checks grammar as well. In fact, Grammarly also asses your writing style which, annoyingly, always marks me as “Formal”.

With Blogger, I have to remember to add all the Tags which means at least one read-through but I do realize that waiting ten minutes and reading it through a couple of times does give the chance to remember those bits I thought of lying awake in the early morning planning the next post.

Blogging is not the throwaway smatterings of Twitter, birdshit on the bonnet of life – here today, washed off tomorrow (sorry if Twitter is your thing though you are here on a blog site!). Blogging offers a place to be more thoughtful, to develop and launch ideas out into the world, so it demands a little more attention to detail, a little more of the polishing which is editing…

A roundup of other A to Z blogs

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I have been looking at some of the other A to Z blogs and here are a few of my favourite things…

Over at the Garden of Delights – Deborah Weber is spreading positivity and has a lovely quote “from the late poet Jack Gilbert. It seems especially apt for these times.
“We must risk delight . . . We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.” "
 Interested in the Twenties? Sarah Zama at
 https://theoldshelter.com/deco-living-the-twenties-atozchallenge-2020/
Your only woman for the job!
If you really get stuck on a letter... Jess Wright gives writing prompts so you could wait for her post and and follow her lead!
Some soothing Chamomile is available from msjadeli over at Tao Talk where her theme for A to Z is essential oils…
There are lots more A to B 2020 Challenge blogs and I am gradually working through the list…

D is for Death

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Does Death give Meaning to Life?

My mother served in the Second World War as a signaling Sergeant and she said that over the course of the war, there were six men, any of whom she might have made a life with if they hadn’t gone off to where the action was and never come back. In that sentence, I have not used the word death, but you know what I mean. Death is the elephant in the room. My mother had certainly had enough of it and so, when my grandparents died, the first people I knew who died, my sisters and I were not allowed to go to the funeral – my mother did not want to expose us to death. Those funerals were the proper hole in the ground in an English country churchyard funerals. Soon after that though, funerals in England moved, mostly, to being cremations. A poll in 2016 showed that 75% of people in the UK prefer cremation. Whether it is the cost, £1000 more on average, for a traditional funeral; the move away from religion and thus church burials; the lack of space in churchyards – I don’t know the answer to why we have moved away from burials to cremations. But I do know one of the effects of this switch and that is the waiting list that means it can be three or four weeks between a person dying and the catharsis of a funeral.

Why does this wait make a difference? Well in 1995 I went to live in Ireland and at first I was deceived by the fact that everyone spoke “English”, into thinking that the culture was also similar. I mean if you went to France and had to learn to speak a different language, then you would also expect the culture to be different too. So the first thing that made me appreciate the difference in Ireland, was the way of death, or rather, what happens when someone dies. Firstly the word goes out to all relatives and significant friends. Everyone drops what they are doing, all over Ireland and even abroad and by the evening, everyone is at the deceased’s home in time for a service where the body arrives at the church. The night will be spent remembering the person and the next day, everyone goes to another service and the coffin is processed by all the mourners to the local burial ground. Another difference – the burial grounds are usually multi-denominational and the churchyards are not usually used for graves. The party or wake may then continue for the next night or more… Now the Postmaster whose mother had passed at that first Irish funeral I encountered, told me he had been going to funerals in his village all his life but this was the first time he had been at the receiving end of one. For the first time, he realized how supportive it was to have all the family around him so quickly. Contrast this with the three-week wait in England and a quick service at a crematorium in whatever religious denomination you require and another group of mourners lining up outside as you complete. It might only be my opinion, but I feel that in England, we are particularly detached from death.

My partner, on the other hand, feels that the Irish are naturally more demonstrative and that the English have always been more reserved rather than any effect of the war and that children were not taken to funerals because they were not regarded as mature enough for the experience – take your pick or any other answers on a postcard (comment box)…

So different cultures respond differently or if not differently, then in degree, to death both in terms of emotion, practices of remembrance and of religious rituals – but is there some essential similarity? Well, evidence of burying the dead is often taken to be the sign of transition from ape to hominid – a sign that our big brains had developed to the point of self-consciousness where we could imagine an afterlife or conceptualize the preciousness of the Ancestor or simply identify with a corpse and not wish to leave it unburied and prey to animals. All these things require acts of imagination, feats of language and co-operation, all signs of big brain development or to put it another way, funereal arrangements are fundamental to being human.

The Covid 19 is having a very distressing effect as people are essentially dying alone, being buried without ceremony and as so often, when we are deprived of something, we appreciate what we have lost much more. Will we find new ways to celebrate the passing of relatives and friends and strangers?

At the end of the last post, I suggested that life has no intrinsic meaning and I stand by that, but the way that we treat our dead shows that humans create their own meanings, light their own flames of imagination, art, scientific enquiry and philosophy in the dark vastness of the universe. How long that flame will burn given the way we are treating the planet is open to question but as the warnings of Greta Thunberg are temporarily eclipsed by the Covid 19 crisis, there is a little hope in that crisis. Pollution is down, businesses being re-configured, priorities are being re-assessed at all levels from the individual to governments. We are pausing to draw breath and consider where we find ourselves. It’s not all good news though, the forces of repression are trying to claw more influence through emergency powers but then more people have time to scrutinize everything. Who knows where we will be on the other side of the crisis, but we live in interesting times…

C is for Covid 19

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. Since I didn’t discover the challenge till April 1st. – the first day of the challenge, I missed the pre-challenge post where you let readers know what theme your A to Z will be outlining. As this is day three, I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


What is the point of a virus?

Our lives have been turned upside down by a virus, an object so tiny it is invisible to the naked eye. I say object, because although some commentators have referred to Covid 19, a Coronavirus, as “living” on different surfaces for various lengths of time, a virus is not really alive in the usual sense – it is a parasite that cannot exist long outside its host cell nor reproduce on its own. Scientists still debate whether the many viruses should be included in the “tree of life” for they do contain DNA and/ or RNA which are the building plans for all life and the chances are that they have accompanied us closely on our evolutionary journey. But if they are not really alive and their only capability is replication – in the process, damaging or even killing their hosts – what is the point of them?


Darwin, who gave us the Theory of Evolution, was originally training to be a clergyman but far from debunking the ideas that geology was spreading about the Earth being millions of years older than the Bible indicated, Darwin disappointed the devout Robert FitzRoy, Captain of HMS Beagle by postulating the theory which would explain the progression of life to be found in the rocks. After the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin settled down to marriage, family and working on his theory, holding back from publishing his work until the last minute, when others threatened to get there first, out of a touching desire not to upset his friend FitzRoy’s religious sensibilities. But during this period, Darwin’s beloved daughter – Annie, died of Scarlet Fever (a bacterial rather than viral) and Darwin’s own belief in God took a terrible knock. The final nail in the coffin for Darwin’s beliefs was his learning of species of parasitical wasps that lay their eggs inside a living caterpillar so that when the eggs hatch, the wasp young feed and grow – eating their host from within. For Darwin, the idea that God could create such cruelty not to mention take the innocent life of his daughter, was too much to bear.


So Darwin would have been fascinated but appalled had he been around to see how the development of our understanding of the parallel evolution of viruses and animals, reveals something so pointless and so potentially devastating for the animal kingdom. We sit transfixed by daily news broadcasts announcing death tolls reaching and exceeding thousands in different countries but this is nothing compared to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. We think that 50 million people died worldwide but it could have been up to 100 million – our means of recording the deaths in that pre-global village world was simply not adequate enough to know. Given the ease of the spreading of the virus by modern transport and mass travel, we might think that we are doing very well to have contained the pandemic as well as we have, government failure to act notwithstanding…

So what is the point of virus? Well there simply is no point, they just are because they are. They hone our immune systems but if they didn’t exist we wouldn’t need such defenses. They are not living organisms such as bacteria (though we could do without some of those little critters too). If you believe in God, you would have to ask yourself why he would create such a thing. If you don’t believe in God then and you accept evolution as the roller-coaster ride that has brought species and their attendant parasites, including viruses, to the place we are today, then, ironically, something which is arguably “life”, is a metaphor for life itself. Life appears to have been, likely, accidental though probably inevitable given the inconceivable multitude of planets that exist in the universe. Life, apparently, exists for no purpose other than to exist and reproduce and as the mathematician  Augustus De Morgan, said in his short rhyme “Siphonaptera”, from his book A Budget of Paradoxes (1872), (Siphonaptera being the biological order to which fleas belong)

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
(Wikipedia)

If that analysis seems a little negative, stay with me, it’s not the whole story…

Now to the technical stuff:-
If you want to understand what a virus is, there is a good article here. This excellent article explains the body’s defence mechanisms – in particular B-cells and T-cells. A very technical article explains the body’s immune system over-reaction called the Cytokine Storm which is mostly the cause of death with Covid 19.



B is for Blog

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge

Why do we Blog?

I love blogging, both writing and reading and hopefully, interacting with other people, bloggers or not, through comments. What makes a good blog for me? Words like interesting, quirky, fresh, well written and, mostly, personal come to mind.

What do I mean by personal? Well even if someone is writing about some thing, I like it if, in the way that they tell it – I learn something about that person. As I said in the previous post, blogs were conceived as nothing more than dated entries – diaries in effect, and though they have gone in many other directions since then, some people still use them as diaries. If you read such a blog, then you don’t need to ask the question which you might ask upon reading an old-school paper diary. Did this person write for themselves or did they have a view to publication and a wider readership? If a blog is published, made public it’s author hopes to be read. Those that are published privately are equivalent to the old private diaries – anyone keep one of these? Please, comment and tell us how it is for you and why you use digital to diary… One group who keep private diaries but with an eye to their future readership, are politicians who mine their diaries for their autobiographies. Do you use your blog – refer back to past posts – do tell!

I have no time for those who say they don’t read or watch fiction because fiction is the one way we have to see what it might be like to be someone else and some blogs can offer this too. I would go so far as to say that story-telling is one of our fundamental human characteristics – “Look! These paw-prints show that a lioness, oh and her cub, passed this way say, 3 days ago and she was limping.” A story formed in our big brains. They say that 80% of our big brains developed to work out what other people were going to do next – that all the other things we accomplish are byproducts of those big brain capabilities – transferable skills! I think that storytelling whether aural, novel, short-story or blog, is one of those defining characteristics of humans that emerged as byproducts of our need to understand “the other”. Never be afraid to share your stories…

Many blogs fall by the wayside after a few posts, a few months, and that is reminiscent of those New Year’s Resolution to “Keep a Diary” but then sometimes you catch the habit, your life’s schedules permit the space to write without struggle and best of all you find it rewarding either for yourself or because you get feedback from others. We all like interaction, but building an audience is hard work and it has to be said that Blogger does not make it easy to find other people – only by searching one “interest” at a time and sometimes it would be nice to conflate two or more – for example, science buffs who also play the ukulele and crochet…

I was spoilt by the experience of my first blog Ripple, hosted on Mo’time. Mo’time was a small blog operated by the manager of a large Italian blog which he used as a testbed before incorporating new wrinkles into the main one. I say small but if I remember correctly, some 10,000 bloggers had started blogs but due to the aforementioned rapid attrition factor, it seemed like there was quite a small core of stalwarts. A more accessible listing made it easier than Blogger to connect and befriend other bloggers. Sadly, the main Italian blog was sold and after a couple of months, the new owners closed down Mo’time. We were bereft at losing our eclectic community bunk-house and some of us tried to find alternatives and a few have ended up staying in touch via Facebook – a scattering of friends around the world…

So! Here I am having picked up this blog again after a few years when writing didn’t seem to fit, liberated by the lockdown and determined to complete the A to Z 2020 Challenge and hoping to make some new friends – hit that comment button, please!

A is for Alistair Cooke

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Part of childhood Sunday mornings back in the 1960s, was my father switching on the radio on the upstairs landing of our house whereby everybody in the house could listen whilst having a lie-in. After “Hymns from the little chapel in the valley” – a precursor of Songs of Praise and before the omnibus edition of “The Archers” there was “Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America”. I am starting the A to Z 2020 challenge with this seminal broadcasting giant because for me, this is where my love of the blog form begins.


There may be some among you who ask how a long-running radio series which began before blogs were conceived of, before PC’s were dreamt of and in fact before mainframe computers were invented, could be considered a Blog! Well in the beginning, Blogs were conceived as a simple sequence of dated posts – ideal for say, a diary. One of the hallmarks of a truly great piece of new technology is perhaps the degree and breadth of mission-creep which accrues to it as people explore it and blogs have moved from a diary to documentary, educational tool, club forum, therapeutic vent, political rant, and blogs cover every subject imaginable. But for me, the classic form is a missive from the individual to the world which reveals their thoughts, reflections and most enjoyably, their personality and it is in this respect that Alistair Cooke is the model for the form. In 2,869 episodes over 58 years, the longest running, spoken word broadcast ever, he spoke with a mellifluous, mid-Atlantic accent that gave his observations on America, explaining it if you will, not only to Britain but to the world via the BBC World Service, but as well, to Americans themselves. They were already used to Alistair’s voice because before he emigrated to America from Britain in 1937, he had delivered “London Letter” for NBS explaining British ways to America.

You can read the quite astonishing history of this prolific broadcaster and writer here and you can listen to the best of the broadcasts here but it’s the style and tone of Alistair Cooke which I love and aspire to channel in my own writing and although he read his broadcast aloud, – his material was, in the first instance, written. You can find the scripts here. He might begin with some observations about squirrels preparing for winter and then take you around the political action in Washington, the reaction of the people before returning effortlessly to the Fall, and the squirrels. The political content would be teased out and explained for the world in a way that was comfortable, reassuring without any hint of patronage. And when you needed to hear about the gravest moments in American history, such as the assassination of JF Kennedy, there was no safer pair of hands, no more moving commentator to describe the events and the reaction of Americans.

That radio on our landing, itself an object of Americana which my father adapted to UK voltage by mounting a light-bulb on top, took us to another country each week – to Alistair Cooke’s America as we lay in bed and listened.

2,869 letters – blog that!

Published as part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge

The Death of Cash?

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One of the recommendations for businesses operating during the Covid 19 pandemic, is that they should encourage people to pay by contactless debit card. I say encourage, because whilst we and many other countries are rushing headlong towards, if not a cashless society, at least a much-reduced role for cash and yet there are still some obstacles – hence the reason they were recommendation rather than enforced restrictions. Last weekend, before the lockdown was more strident, my partner and I decided to head for Filey and a walk on the beach where we hoped we could be sufficiently socially-distant. Imagine our shock ar finding that everyone seemed to have had the same idea, the weather being fair if breezy and the seafront was almost as crowded as a summer day. Okay, we could keep reasonably distant from other people and the brisk off-the -sea breeze whisked any miasma emanating from others swiftly away. Besides, at this stage, it was a numbers game and the chance of catching the virus seemed but a small percentage as long as we kept our distance and touched nothing. Nevertheless, we risked ordering a cup of tea, paper cups naturally, from a cafe where I paid with a contactless debit card. I remarked that it was fortunate that they had the facility but the woman behind the counter said that the majority of their customers, local, elderly and not enthusiastic about card payments let alone contactless, prefer to use (filthy)cash still.

So there is the first issue – resistance. But in China, a country also well on the way to a cashless economy, the lag is more of an urban/ rural split though this might also equate to an older generation of peasant society since the youth have often left for the cities. This is not just a resistance issue but an internet access issue since all payment systems depend on internet coverage for universal availability. Wait that’s not quite true – on another continent not hitherto noted for financial innovation, things have taken a different direction altogether – in Africa, they have developed mobile phone apps to make payments. Where China has skipped over the whole Debit card stage and gone straight to the smartphone using 3D barcode scanning, in Africa, they have skipped over the whole banking stage because they don’t have enough banks and like China, they especially don’t have enough banks in rural areas. Also, Africa does not yet have enough smartphones to do QR Codes but it has a thriving market in secondhand mobile phones which together with necessity, the mother of invention, has created a uniquely African solution. Africans also demonstrate the highest rate of peer to peer payment – that is paying another person by text.

Top of the league for a cashless society, closely followed by Canada and then the UK, is Sweden where many people cannot remember using cash in the last month. But here another warning note has been sounded, the government has asked the Swedish people to envisage what would happen if there was a prolonged internet outage due to solar storm or more sinisterly, due to cyber warfare and they have suggested that citizens prepare emergency packs including – yes you guessed it – cash.

What Sweden and indeed most societies that are going quickly cashless demonstrate, is that the adoption is people-led – grassroots up not bank or government down. People like using apps for their convenience and if spending money was easy, perhaps too easy, with a Debit or Credit Card – then waving your phone at a terminal doesn’t seem like spending money at all – at least until the bill arrives…
One of the things that accelerates the adoption of whatever form of cashless purchase, is when the associated charges are reduced to the point where small traders, busses and toilet payments, all small, become viable. But there is a downside when, as in Sweden, even banks no longer want to handle cash either in or out, and the number of branch closures increases. This is also due to online banking, but again, the rural, elderly, internet poor and disadvantaged suffer first and most.

Another reason often put forward by those who wish to encourage the race towards cashless, is the potential reduction in crime – no bank robberies, no safes necessary, no pilfering of cash by staff, no money laundering. However criminality rarely goes away – it just shifts to new opportunities so cybercrime includes identity theft, new forms of fraud based around digital payment methods. Like the fight between humans and viruses, each side tries to stay ahead. For example, a new generation of payment cards will incorporate ultra-thin fingerprint readers which means my partner and I will have to stop paying with whichever card is appropriate to our budgetary arrangements. Once again, poor and older people often use cash to physically allocate spending – the rent jar, the shopping jar etc. and these people are the least likely to have time, means, understanding or inclination to use those natty apps offered by banks to assist you to manage your expenses…

Other aspects of crime might be that those who deal outside the law such as drug dealers can hardly use digital payment systems because they leave a trail (though not a paper trail!) and whilst some might cite this as a way of squeezing such activities out of existence, it would more likely create alternative illegal currencies or barter systems. Even the Bitcoin, a virtual coinage much touted as being impregnably secure, based as it is on blockchain technology, turned out to be hackable if criminals could muster sufficient encryption busting computer power. Interestingly, the method for tracking down these robberies was to trace the extreme power consumption required by such computing power.

Another huge area in the debate over the pro’s and cons of cashless is the aspect of control. There are no bank charges for keeping your money under the mattress and at the other end of the scale, once you are totally digital banked, you are at the mercy of bank charges, interest rate changes – once there is no physical cash, the banks don’t need to work so hard to incentivize you to choose their bank to keep it in. Furthermore, it is easier for the government to keep track of citizen spending and indeed the citizen themselves with digital. China’s government are rumoured to be entering the market, currently dominated by two large phone payment apps, with their own offering and where will citizens hide from the police or the taxman then? Of course, the answer given to that one, is if you have nothing to hide…

So. the current virus crisis might push a few more people to finally adopt payment by card and contactless but as a society, we perhaps need to question our unconscious slide towards cashless, be it for fear of solar storms, cyber crime or overweaning government control. Remember, its not for nothing that the rich have always placed their trust in gold and land…