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not to travel

BACKPAGE Nury Vittachi can be contacted at nury@vittachi. com or through his Facebook page

Why I’m happy

Award-winning author Nury Vittachi looks back on the month

At the time of writing this, no one is allowed to travel. As an extreme miser (“a dad”) this is not entirely bad news.

Travelling is expensive and stressful. I vividly remember first going to the UK as a child. In those days, the main currency was the pound. A “cluster” or “herd” of pounds was pronounced “sterling”, which was shortened to GBH. A pound could be divided into 240 pennies or 20 shillings or 10 florins or eight half-crowns or (and this was really confusing) 16 ounces.

The system made no sense.

When I complained, the locals said it used to be worse. They used to use penny-farthings, coins which were so large they were used in Britain as bicycle wheels. The British also had a huge variety of coins, such as guineas, half-crowns, ha’pennies, grands, optics, drams and snifters. If you spoke colloquial English, you didn’t use the word “pound” but the word “squid”. So if someone won the lottery, they’d say “He’s squids in.”

Even more confusingly, everything in the grocery stores was labeled in L.B.s. “I would like to buy one ‘L.B.’ of apples,” I told the fruit shop man.

“Wot?” he said, baffled.

‘I pointed to the sign right in front of him, which clearly said: “Apples: 10d a LB.”

‘“Oh,” he said. “LB stands for pound.”

Naturally, I said. It made no sense. Neither did the fact that D stood for “penny”.

Later, I visited my brother in New York and found the United States currency system equally complex. In Asia, we knew about the US dollar, but in the US it was known as the “buck”.

My research at the time revealed that the buck (which seemed to be short for “greenbuck”) was divided into dimes, nickels, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, pieces of eight, semi-colons, jots, tittles, and iotas. The most common coin was the quarter, colloquially known as “two bits”, despite the fact that the phrase applied to only one of them. When I asked locals to show me “one bit” they looked at me as if I was mad.

“Why is dollar abbreviated to ‘S’?” I asked. “Shouldn’t it be ‘D’?”

“It’s not ‘S’,” a New York child (named Wayne) explained. “It’s ‘S’ with an ‘I’ on top.”

I thought about pointing out that the word “dollar” did not include the letters “S” or “I” but I said nothing. By that time I had given up expecting any sort of logic in Western civilization.

Pundits are forecasting “a vicious cycle of competing currency depreciations” (Fortune magazine) following the coronavirus crisis.

Currency exchange is a fascinating topic. Thousands of years ago at the dawn of recorded history, when the Rolling Stones had just released their 20th album, the Phoenicians invented travel, and the practice of changing one form of money to another began.

This was particularly bad news for people living in South Asia. The currency where I lived was set at a very low exchange rate: one rupee was equal to one speck of dirt.

I recall my father’s long face every time we used an airport money-changer. We got a handful of dirt. And those were the GOOD days. Other times we just got a laugh.

Today, everything has changed.

The various brands of rupee are still worthless, but thanks to financial terminology, the situation is expressed far more elegantly. We now say 0.9897 rupees equals 0.9897 specks of dirt or 1.075 seconds of laughter, which I think you’ll agree sounds better.

That reminds me of the first transaction I ever had on a visit to London, at Heathrow Airport, which went something like this:

Me: How much is that? Airport shopkeeper: Two grand, a guinea-halfcrown, half a snifter and tuppeny-ha’pencefarthing. Me: Oh. Do you accept rupees? Airport shopkeeper: Yes sir. That’ll be forty googillion rupees, but I will have to give you the change in dirt and sneers.

Anyway, what do the pundits mean when they say that they expect the currencies to depreciate? Well, it means that their value will go down in relation to one another.

But if they all go down, what they are going down in relation to? This makes no sense at all. Naturally.

Send ideas to our columnist via his Facebook page or that of Hong Kong Living.