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Bullseye
The slang term for a fifty pound note is bullseye, but I’ve never actually heard anyone use it, and why would I? You can’t actually spend a bullseye anywhere.
At the end of 1994, the average price of a pint of beer in the UK was £1.61. Thirty years later, it’s £4.82. You’d be lucky to pay that in London, but it’s not impossible, and I know a few places that still sell pints for under a fiver.
Thirty years ago, you could have paid for that beer with a £20 note, but no one accepted £50 notes. The cost of inadvertently accepting a counterfeit was too high.
However, today’s £50 doesn’t even buy you as many pints (10) as £20 did in 1995 (12) and yet it’s still the case that no one is willing to accept a £50 note. Even with all the new security features in the weird plastic banknotes, no one trusts them enough to take them as payment.
Somehow, £50 has remained anchored in the public consciousness as a dangerously large sum of money. Even as the price of beer has trebled, and the price of a house has more than quintupled, people haven’t noticed that a £50 note doesn’t actually buy you all that much any more.
And that’s why I’ve been carrying around two £50 notes for months, waiting for the elusive convenient moment when I happen to pass a bank branch that is still operating and is open for business at that time.
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Week 210: Back to work
Starting back at work was a bit of a shock after two weeks off, but at least my first few days weren’t too strenuous. I worked from home on Monday and even managed a lunchtime nap. I needed it, as my sleep pattern had diverged significantly from normal working patterns over the holiday.
Generative AI is the end of knowing things
Do you know what a pink fairy armadillo looks like? It’s a small mammal with whitish fur, big scaly claws, and a squirrel-like face from which a flat cloak of armoured scutes extends all the way to its hindquarters.
Week 209: Squared
Happy new year! It’s a numerically interesting one:
Week 208: Festive arrangements
We had to change our Christmas plans in a hurry. We had intended to have a Christmas Day meal with some friends who live locally, with each of us cooking some of it. But then, on Christmas Eve, one of the couple who were hosting the meal fell ill. She spent most of the day in hospital, and even though she was able to go home by the evening, they had to cancel.
Older entries can be found in the archive.