Spot the Frippet: the readies.

Have you got the readies?

Probably not, nowadays, because most of us are using cards instead of real money - and to make things even worse the cards aren't even made of card, but plastic.

It may be convenient, but think: what is a miser to do?

Or the tooth fairy?

Money has been round longer than there have been any history books to record it. It probably started off with clay tokens issued by warehouses in China, India, Babylon or Egypt, but the idea of money didn't spread steadily around the globe. The trouble is that money depends upon there being someone you trust to issue the stuff - and that isn't a given even nowadays, as can be seen with the rapidly increasing worthlessness of the currencies of countries such as Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

If you do have someone trustworthy in charge, then what is likely to happen about money is this: you start off by giving someone a block of something valuable, like metal, in exchange for goods. The block of metal gives you a bad back, and so the trustworthy person in charge puts his mark on smaller pieces of metal and tells everyone that counts just the same as a bigger bit. Everyone is dubious, but they're all fed up with having bad backs and so they try it out, and on the whole people find it works.

What the money has looked like has varied over the years. There were cowrie shells, of course, and, later, bronze copies of cowrie shells. There has even been money in the shape of small spades; but in the end the bad-temper of the people who had to mend people's worn-out pockets tended to encourage coins to be made as small flat discs.

It's been lovely to carry small but exquisite works of art around with us for thousands of years:


British crown (quarter of a pound sterling) photo by Jerry 'Woody'

Ah well. Perhaps soon our plastic cards might start being beautiful.

And, really, why shouldn't they be round, as well, and made of something precious?

Spot the Frippet: the readies. This is short for ready money. The Old English form of the word ready was rǣde.