Added Value

Our bank has written to say that they will pay back into our account 5% of anything we spend in most of the major supermarkets, including the ones that we normally use. So far, so feelgood. I have not been able to discover how this is to be funded - maybe they are getting some of it back from the retailers, maybe it is coming out of profits (since our bank is a mutual society, that would be my profits it is being paid with). I assume this is part of the ongoing war between all the financial institutions, trying to bribe customers to switch their current accounts. Our account, like most people's is already free of charges, so now we are being paid to use a service

What is more, we are being paid to buy our groceries from one of the large supermarket chains, not the village shop or the village butcher, not the local wholefood place where we regularly buy things, not the farm shop between here and the apiary, not the organic grower we will be visiting tomorrow. So much for wanting to keep high streets alive and support independent retailers

And zooming out a little, it's great that if I'm dissatisfied with my bank I have a fairly easy job to move to a new one. But did we really set up this system so that these institutions can indulge in a beggar-my-neighbour auction, trying to buy customers with crude cash handouts? Who exactly gains from that in the long run? In what way does it add value or contribute to a better quality of life for anyone? Ultimately, the money to fund this has to come from lower savings rates or higher interest charges or higher fees for special services. So Peter may gain and Paula may lose, but not for any good reason, and not with any relationship to who actually needs it. It does of course contribute to growth in GDP, which we all know is a good thing; don't we?

After a grey drizzly day, we got a half hour of gentle light before sunset, coaxing a glow from the stones in the stable wall. There is a joke here somewhere about the horse that didn't bolt keeping the stable door closed, but I'm so tired you'll have to make it up yourself. The groom is actually working in the stable while this one waits patiently outside. Shortly after I took this he needed to get out. I'm not sure he even spoke to her - she just understood she needed to shuffle sideways, and did so just far enough for him to open it and squeeze out. This little interchange - the intimate understanding between a man and an animal - didn't do anything for GDP, but it added more than 5% to my day