O yeaz, I have been in a frantic mode this last day or two looking for my metro pass. Around these parts, it's possible to buy a pass for the Metro (think light railway/underground) for a whole year. Every year they do a sale in October where they knock two hundred quid off the price. That's when I get mine. Only if you lose it, that's a lot of money down the drain. Guess what I did.

Yes, lost it. So I turn my bedroom and my clothes out about 300 times in a vain attempt to find it over the weekend, finally giving up on Monday morning, and asking about a replacement. I need to pay 15 quid and find an insurance slip I'm sure I don't have. Pants. Rather pissed off with myself now, I decide to stomp off to Intermezzo for a coffee.

As soon as I'm there, the lovely Rhea (and she is lovely) descends from the cappucino machine to wave some small blue object in my face that transforms my mood. No, it isn't a cache of Viagara, it's my missing pass. Sometimes life gives you a repreive from execution. Not often, just sometimes.

Interior. Day. The inside of Peter's flat. Peter lies semi-concious on a chinese carpet, wearing a silk dressing-gown whilst inhaling sporadically from a huge hookah that dominates the unkempt room. Someone knocks on the door. Peter turns over and ignores them. They knock again. Peter continues to ignore the knocking. We hear the door being opened and two men in bright blue bellboys uniforms come in. Peter sits up and stares at them.

Peter: Where did you get the key to my flat?
Luiz: (for it is he) Dramatic liscence. We have a warrant for your arrest on the grounds of extreme lexical self-indulgence and negilent progtanonisting.
Peter: What?
Bruce: (for it his he) Your author complained to us about your disrespectful and lazy attidute and general unwillingess to participate in his plot.
Peter: The ungrateful bastard!
Luiz: You have no-one to blame but yourself.
Peter: Look, he wrote me this flat and this hookah, what did he expect? I thought the plot would be fine without me.
Bruce: You'd have to ask him. In the meantime I request you come with us.
Peter: Am I under arrest?
Luiz: Not if you come quietly. It has been decided that your dissapearence will furher the plot.
Peter: And if I don't come?
Luiz: Basinstoke, Slough and Reading.
Peter: No way! I'll come quietly.
Bruce: Good. We have a nice flat in Brighton for you. The neighbours are a bit mad, but that's ok. You are going to be in total isolation.
Peter: Total isolation?
Luiz: Only for a couple of months. Soon a gorgeous drama student will come and attempt to seduce you.
Peter: Sounds good to me.

Luiz and Bruce march Peter out of the flat.

But of course, she won't actually seduce him; she's *far* too good for him - she knows how to handle self - indulgence, and he doesn't. An important life skill, without which, we are totally maimed.

Money

The more you think about money the weirder it gets: it's a purely human construct with a science (Economics) attacted that tries to pose as something other than a statistical study of human behaviour and tries to confuse the stuff with a force of nature. Yet it is universal enough to be used in cultures spanning across space and time that have almost nothing in common, reinforcing this illusion. And it is an illusion. "I promise to pay the bearer on demand --" that's all you are trading, unfulfillable promises. Banks are the biggest con artists in the world. It's all held up by smoke and mirrors.

But human behaviour is so predictable it all just works, and no one has been able to dream up a working alternative. I'd love to know if a physical medium of exchange is something that multiple societies have developed independently, or it is just a human fobile, but have no other intelligent species available for comparison, so I'm not sure whether tobe depressed or resigned. I can't think of any potentially arbitary phenonemon so pursuasive among human society.