Promissory Note.

The financial director of the Roslin Chapel (hereinafter referred to as the FD) is throwing a strop, as the saying goes. Way back on the first of March, when the paper five and ten pound notes were withdrawn from circulation, she stuck a notice on the till saying that staff must not accept the old ones as the banks won’t take them. Mrs TD promptly wrote on the bottom, “Oh yes they will.” and it’s not even the pantomime season. Herself has taken the law into her own hands and, at the end of her shifts, removes the obsolete notes and replaces them with new-fangled plastic ones. On her way home, she stops at the post office, the village’s surrogate for a bank, and the nice lad in there who we’ve known since he was a toddler, kindly changes them. It’s not an onerous task as, during the previous month, the press was recklessly warning its readers that they only had four weeks left to spend their obsolete notes.
 
Yesterday, the FD noticed that her notice had been defaced.
 
All bank notes that I know of carry a statement to the effect that the bank promises to pay the bearer on demand, the sum of whatever. I have always assumed that these words constitute a legal contract though, these days, they will take your old note and give you a new one rather than give you a block of gold to the equivalent value. The Bank of England, on their web site, says that it will honour this promise “in perpetuity.” The Scottish banks are more circumspect; being strictly commercial organisations, their websites concentrate all their resources on selling their services rather than frittering their time away on disseminating interesting information.