The teller said “Good morning “
and I asked to pay my credit card bill. “Before I do this” she said” I should tell you that this branch is closing in September.” I said I was sorry to hear it but the news was not unexpected. Would they be re- employed ? Yes. I said I thought it was very short sighted in a blue collar area, with a lot of ethnicities and a preponderance of the elderly. “The problem is” she said “ we have this big building and a terrible pest problem, so it’s easier to let it go.” If a bank can’t maintain an obviously valuable property,
it doesn’t fill me with confidence about the bank.
I banked with Lloyds for years until they declined to let me have my branch locally – “it doesn’t fit with our system.” Tough. I am your client. So I left. I went to the Halifax which slowly closed this outlet and that branch. Last time I was in the branch where I opened my account, it looked as if they were just about to take the clock off the wall, pack the filing and leave. The branch now closing was more convenient.
The first bank I remember was the Yorkshire Penny
and it had a wonderful curving staircase at the bottom of which I would wait as a small child while my mother paid a bill. I left Barclays many years ago when they asked me for a guarantor and I knew they wouldn’t ask a young man in a similar situation. They currently have some advertising spiel about helping you with your money, the week they declined to let an old friend of mine manage his money the way he always had. It “didn’t fit with our system”. We are living through the rise of the machines.
Wal has a bank with people and resources of which you have never heard but then he has a car – he can get to it. Nobody wants to go far to go to a bank. The whole idea was you walked up the road with your money in your pocket and put it where you wanted it to be and of course I hope that one of the big banks will turn round and offer a service with a human face. Don’t tell me how much it costs – property , staff, standard outgoings – they make money. They wouldn’t be in the industry else. The rise – not to say deification – of the machines fills me with horror. And increasingly loaded through everything from government to health services to the expansion of energy and education, those machines falter – are less and less efficient. One day we are going to wake up and be unable to access any of the money we think of as ours, benefit payments, prescriptions, standing orders. I am looking for a loose brick
or a floorboard I can manage.
There are fewer sure things in life. We used to have three terrestrial television stations and always something to watch. Now we have 327, very rarely a programme to watch and have apparently stopped teaching the art of programming which is why certain films are on a loop and occur twice a week for three months at a time, series that were not meant to be seen more than a couple of time are up for the twelfth and there is a kind of ruthless bonhomie, holiday camp comedians on acid, which makes you want to clean your teeth and try again.
But I did see – by chance -part of the Senate hearings on Robert Kennedy Junior – a living example of how to throw away every advantage you have ever had – and a wonderful plain elderly man, a senior Senator from Oregon
re elected several times on the platform of public health, take him apart without noticeably raising his voice. It was magnificent.
I saw a former helicopter pilot, obviously a man of wide experience, explain the shortcomings of night flight goggles in a way which had nothing to do with chromosomes, Mr.President – while yesterday, early to the supermarket, I listened as three middle aged working women disparaged the President in much the same tone of voice in which they used to clean their front step. Rinse with cold water.
Annalog 