C is for Cats, Cash, and China: a catastrophic mix.

 

Music has just 8 notes. Those 8 notes are used in works as diverse as Schubert’s String Quartet No 14 in D Minor… and the always invigorating David Bowie’s classic “Rubber Ducky”.  He may never be forgiven for that particular song.

How much luckier are we letter-slingers! We have 26 letters to spray around! The same number as Hemingway, Burke, and Blyton! The following may well be my Rubber Ducky.

 

Cats are curious creatures. Indeed, curiosity can be fatal to cats. Not cars, cucumbers, or calliopes, just curiosity. I like cats much more than I like dogs, and I like dogs quite a lot. I just don’t want to live with one.

Cats allow me to live with them. They share themselves, sparingly. Dogs are in your face 100% of the time, needy and unhappy unless you’re throwing something away so they can bring it back. 

Stupid dogs. That’s why the homes of dog-owners are filled with stuff: they just cannot throw it away.

Fortunately, it’s now impossible to throw Cash away. Who carries Cash anymore? Money was always an idea, a theory writ large, a notion that sort of worked for those who had the imagination to be able to manipulate the idea so they could accumulate a lot of it. Even though it was only ever a representation. With the slow but steady elimination of Cash, though, we don’t even have a physical representation of what money is. Now, it’s just a notional number on a computer screen. How many of us look at the EFYPOS machine to see how much Cash we’ve just PayWaved away?

Banks used to be places where you squirreled your money. You could take your Piggy Bank full of change and the odd note to a bank, and they’d give you a little passbook showing you how much Cash they were looking after for you.

Now, Banks don’t give a damn about people saving with them. They don’t want to see a successful saver, someone who decides they’d rather save for a thing before buying it. They are debt-sellers. Want to buy a house? The bank with create the money for you to pay for it with, then ask you to pay it back, but doubled. Cash will never change hands. Zeroes and Ones with flicker blindly in a computer, and your life will be forever manipulated by numbers on a screen. I love banks.

So does China. China, I am sure, is a cool place. Any place that is called home by around 1.5 billion people can’t be all bad. And they’re becoming richer! Yes, they’re all, like us, held in thrall be the idea of money. They also pay lip service to sharing the idea of money around so people have a more equal amount of the idea. Or something.

China is also an aggressive society, we’re told. Their navy is getting better, and that’s a Bad Thing. The Admiral in charge of the US Navy’s war-fleet in the South China Sea, just a hundred miles off the Chinese coast, warns of the Chinese Navy “escaping” and going to cruise the water a hundred miles off the coast of the USA!

But I reckon we’re sweet. Because the Chinese also like cats. And when people are ruled by an animal that sleeps for 20 hours a day, or is golden and lives on a shelf, waving happily… well, what could possibly go wrong?