Queuing up at Liverpool Street Station I was about to exchange some of the coins in my wallet for permission to use the public transport system known as The Tube. Pondering the fact that with my purchase I would be getting involved in a legal contract with London Transport, my nervously roving eyes were arrested by a poster.

It showed a big question mark cut out of a ten pound note. Due to the magnification I was, for the first time, able to read the sentence one can find on any note in the UK: "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of Ten Pounds", signed by the Chief Cashier (who was clever enough to make his signature indecipherable). What a cheek!

In any frantic 'Black Friday' scenario it is hard enough for banks to convert the virtual existence of money in their customers' bank accounts into 'real' money, i.e. numbers on savings accounts into notes and coins. If they fail to do so, they go bankrupt - fair enough. Once you manage to get hold of the 'real thing', it tells you that it is only the promise (substitute?) for something even more 'real', i.e. the "promise to pay the bearer" the ten pounds s/he holds in his/her hands. Quite frankly I don't understand what this is supposed to mean. It can't possibly refer to the amount of gold which the value of the paper note represents. The days in which a bank would be in a position to pull off such an exchange are long gone. Instead this sentence must refer to the investment a bank has made and the property it has obtained in order to meet the money its customers put in.

I venture to think about the official value of Malaysian building sites in the books of banks and investors who got involved in financing them. Masses of rotting cranes and dug up holes in the middle of nowhere might well be used to keep the figures straight. The initial, estimated value of such property is still being used to match the investments customers have made. However, try to sell that stuff to find out that it is absolutely worthless - 'really'. But half finished office buildings, deserted oil platforms, drained holes in the jungle, are still 'valuable' enough to give the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England the confidence to "promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of...". In fact the promise seems to refer to the part I own in those failures. If I could only read the name, I would get in contact and ask the Chief Cashier if there is more to words than the font!

Janko Vook [janko.vook@art-bag.net]