By David Aitken
A lifelong liking for warm weather, cold cash and tax-free employment meant that I frequently earned my bread and Bollinger in currencies ranging from Cyprus Pounds to Qatari Riyals to UAE Dirhams and Hong Kong Dollars.
Money is one of the foremost international languages, its two major dialects being the Pound Sterling and the US Dollar. For many years I kept some old farthings in a bedside drawer, but my optimism eventually gave way tearfully to reality.
When people say money is no object, they are speaking almost the literal truth these days, since most of us rarely clap eyes on our actual cash thanks to online shopping, credit transfers, and electronic payments of all kinds. Money is the modern equivalent of barter, whereby you would exchange a sheep or a cow for a sack of lentils, and you were the loser in that transaction, by the way, unless you are a vegan.
For someone who is colour blind, as I am, it can be inconvenient when colour and money are mentioned in the same breath. “I don’t have a red cent,” is both literally and figuratively true in my case. Greenbacks mean nothing to me except strangely pale pictures of presidents, and I never plant a lawn when I move into a new house. Purchasing clothes is surprisingly easy, although my family members still laugh at a trendy suit I thought I bought in a London boutique, which turned out to be a jester’s motley.
Most difficult of all, perhaps, is trying to follow a football match on my black and white television. Why would I pay for invisible colour?
I am a curious individual — no, let me explain! — the sort of man who would stop to gaze at a window with ‘Watch this Window’ written on it, even if I was being pursued by all my creditors at once. So in Mexico City, when I heard someone ask, “Why are all those pavements painted pink?” I made further inquiries, only to discover I was in the ‘Zona Rosa’, or Pink Zone, where tourists needn’t fear to tread, in those days anyway. For once I could claim to be in the pink, even if I wasn’t aware of it.
On every French river, rowers used to be obliged to wear a certain colour to warn more leisurely floating boaters of potential peril — white was the Seine’s colour, as I recall. And in old-style westerns, the hero always wore a white hat, as opposed to the villain’s black headgear, even if the bad hat was yellow when it came to a fair fight.
We began by discussing money, but you distracted me somehow. And one of the properties money must have to fulfil its function is scarcity — the supply in circulation must be limited. I think most of us can certainly relate to that. Which is why I prefer to treat my own supply as a liquid asset. I’ll leave you to guess what colour the liquid is.
