How much?

Ginger Gerald takes a bit of a trip down memory lane remembering how cheap things were "in the olden days". And remembers what it felt like to get paid in foreign currency before the arrival of the Euro into most of Europe. But, to avoid being too much of a Complaining Old Git, GG also comes up with three absolute modern day bargains to look for and take advantage of.  So listen up for some financial advice!

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Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome back to Ginger Gerald You Lucky Barstard. I hope your year has got off to a great start just like mine and that you´ve been keeping your New Year Resolutions – whatever they were!

Now we´ve got a couple of ongoing matters from last week´s minutes so let´s deal with them first of all. Let´s kick off with an update on the GGYLB coffee mug sale.  Interest has been tremendous but we´ve not quite reached the minimum order numbers required to make this a reality - but thanks to those who have, rather tongue-in-cheekily I believe, placed your orders nice and early in time for next Christmas. Let´s see if we hit that magic number this week ..…btw, you know you can drink beer & wine out of them too if you like, or even vodka and red bull if that´s what you like (that might just broaden the reach of my promotional campaign!)

And the other pending from last week´s episode was the Great Big Royal Survey. If you´ve not yet participated, don´t worry there´s still time, you need to head to my FB, Instagram or Twitter account where you too can join in the Great Debate. It´s very simple. There are two photos side by side: one of them is me, your very own Ginger Gerald, and the other is Prince Harry. But the question is – which is which? Most respondents so far have got it right – so well done to you (there´s no prize by the way – this is purely for academic research) but it´s not as easy as you might think. I´m still waiting on a response from the main man Hazzer himself…I´ll keep you posted on that one. I´m thinking that this Survey might get a mention in the sequel to his new book “Spare” – maybe it could be called “Stare”.

Moving on……..You know I´m always blathering on about wanting your feedback, ideas and observations on what to talk about and what you like or don´t like about the show. Well, following last week´s episode “2022 is dead. Long live 2023” I got exactly what I asked for. I got called a “Miserable, Complaining Old Git” and there was even a suggestion that I should consider changing the name of my pod to “Ginger Gerald – You Miserable Complaining Old Git! Now, I shan´t be doing that as I´ve invested, well, millions of marketing dollars on the Global GGYLB Brand and anyway GGYMCOG just doesn´t roll off the tongue so well. Now, due to Data Protection laws, of course I can´t tell you who provided this valuable feedback (for which I am genuinely very grateful) but, let´s just say that the contributor, an avid pod listener I´m assured, shares the same surname as myself! Anyway, all feedback is good feedback, or so they say, so I´ll take it on the chin and move on ……………although I´m not quite sure how I´m going to avoid being a “MCOG” again today as the theme of the week is: the Cost of Everything these days! 

Now then, if I really was an Old Complaining Git then now would be the perfect time to blather on about how expensive everything is these days and how little things used to cost when I was a whippersnapper. So that´s exactly what I´ll do for a while if only to keep the perception going. A pint of beer at my local pub in England when I was almost allowed to drink it used to set me back 39p. Petrol when I got my first car, a luxurious brown Austin Allegro, an absiolite classic, was 40p a gallon, and my breakfast on the way to early morning classes at Uni (a king size Twix bar) was only a few pence. I could just go on and on – and I bet most of you could too. I can hear those of you out there who are a bit older than me will be saying “39p a pint? It was only 10p in my day” or “half a shilling”. But the average weekly earnings were probably only 40 or 50 quid too so good job everything was “cheaper”. And as for Public Transport – I remember paying 2p a journey in the late 70´s - you bought your nice pink ticket from the conductor and you chewed it in the hope that an Inspector wouldn´t get on and ask for proof of payment (if he did, you had to jump off the back of the bus at the bottom of the stairs where fortunately there was no door, and do a runner!) Well, that´s actually 2p more expensive than buses are at the moment here in Mallorca – yep, the local government has introduced free buses for the year for residents as long as you go and get your pass….so not all is doom and gloom and old gittedness.

Now we´re getting warmed up, let´s stick with the nostalgia about costs and payments and money for a bit of fun. I´m sure most of you had cheque books no? Now, own up, did any of you ever send a cheque in the post but purposefully forget to sign it? Then they´d reply, alo by post and returning your original cheque, saying – we note that you forgot to sign your check to which you react with huge surprise and embarrassment having just bought yourself a week or so to find some money. And then, a bit later, just a cheque wasn´t enough – they were too easy to steal and forge a signature, you had to have a Bank Card as well. So now when you wrote a cheque you had to write your bank card number on the back of it – or in a shop show youre card so they could write the number on the back of it. Sand sometimes your home address, phone number, height, weight…..! That was a great invention! My dad refused to go to shops or petrol stations where they asked for a Bank card as well as a cheque. He saw it as a lack of trust and he´d drive miles out of his way to go to the same Esso station every single time he needed petrol. I don´t think he ever had a bank car, and definiotely not a Credit Card, if he did have either of them he certainly didn´t use them.) And I used to write cheques for a pound because I´d never have any cash – so for me this cashless society is not entirely new – but maybe it was of my own making!  Lots of places, of course, were cash only, almost the opposite of now, like pubs for example. Imagine, back then, ordering a couple of pints and a pie and then flashing a mobile phone at a machine in the hope that it would magically extract money from your account.  So you can imagine the queues for ATM´s on a Friday night in the centre of towns was horrendous. Now, you can barely give it away. A few weeks ago (and I have to say there are no Weatherspoons in Mallorca or México – or at least not to my knowledge) I was  in Cardiff and I had my first ever experience of being in a pub and ordering and paying for a round of drinks on an app from the comfort of my own chair. And that round of drinks duly appeared promptly and efficiently at our table without me having to fight my way to the bar and play eye tag with the bar tender in my efforts to convince her that I was next in line. Not very personable or traditional I grant you – but for those of us who belong to the slightly-shorter-than-average-brigade, not such a bad development one might say! 

But let´s move the conversation on a bit. How many of you lived overseas before the Euro took over most of Europe? Quite a few of you I bet. Well that was much more fun wasn´t it? Tons of people in Spain still translate Euros into pesetas and I guess they are doing the same sort of thing in France, Greece, Belgium, Holland – all over the now Euro Territory. I suppose that will slowly come to an end as the generations move on. Now I´m hardly qualified to make judgements on the pros and cons of the Euro but, being the sad (and lucky) barstard that I am – I really liked paying for stuff in French Francs or Belgian francs or Pesetas or Escudos and all of that lot. It felt a bit special, a bit different. Maybe a bit privileged even. I know we always got ripped off at money exchange booths but it made being overseas that little bit more different, not just the language, the food, the smells – but even the money was different. It certainly doesn´t feel like that any more – in fact, to be honest, it just feels a bit painful having to spend pounds when I´m back in the UK although it´s a great opportunity for the banks to make a few extra quid off me. And those different currencies provided endless sources of conversation about how much your breakfast cost, or a beer or whatever and how that compared to having it at home. You´d look in your little wallet and try to work out how much money you´d really got and how much you could afford to spend when you were in different places. You´d get a bit nervous handing over large sums in case your mathematical mind´d played tricks on you and you´d right messed up. And as for checking your change……  

But it´s not all about Europe and the Euro is it? In the days of 2 and a half dollars to the pound I always thought the USA was really cheap for everything. I remember hiring this huge car there once, in the mid 80´s, a New Yorker it was, white, open top, probably with 2 or 3 times as many cylinders than it actually needed and a bonnet so long I couldn´t see the end of it (even sat on a little cushion to make me look a little bigger haha). I didn´t really need it I just rented it out as I had a couple of days to fill, it was super cheap, and I could just swan about looking and feeling great and looking extremely cool - which made me feel great with my little Coop plastic bag on the passenger´s seat. And filling it up with gas was next to nothing either.  Now apologies to you all – I now know that hiring a petrol guzzling car of that size and for no real reason wasn´t very environmentally friendly of me – but we really weren´t so clued up then as we are now were we?

And for all those of you who live or used to live and work overseas, how exciting and weird was it the first few times you got paid in local currency? I loved it. My first foreign earnings were French francs – and my first ever overseas job was in Versailles when I was a student in Paris and I used to coach hockey on a Wednesday afternoon. I remember nonchalantly popping my first earnings into my pocket the first time I got paid and, as soon as I was out of sight of the Boss man, I quickly opened the little brown envelope and worked out how much I´d just earnt. At that time it was pretty easy to work it out Francs to pounds as long as you knew your 10 times table! But not all currencies are as easy as that was at 10 francs to the pound. Take Mexican pesos for example – well, that was a bit trickier and the value against the dollar and the pound seemed to change hugely almost on a daily basis so you never quite knew where you were half the time. Rich or poor! But, to start with, I definitely felt like a millionaire every time I got paid – until I´d paid the rent that was! And as for Venezuelan Bolivars – well we were all millionaires there but you had to spend it pretty quickly cos by the next day the price of your beer and arepas would have doubled!  You literally needed a backpack not a wallet or even a bumbag to carry cash around in Venezuela – and definitely not something I´d recommend that you do too often. I used to stay in a hotel near to Caracas airport quite regularly, not out of choice but for some reason the flight timings were a bit crap and forced you to fly in, stay overnight and then out again the next day. Anyway, it´s the only place I have ever been advised to move the heaviest piece of the furniture you´ve got in the room and shove it up against the door as soon as you got into your room to make sure nobody could get in….and I know for a fact that it worked a few times when I was there.

And as for Swiss francs, they´re still going – so congrats to them! The opposite was true when I worked there. I couldn´t believe how few I was getting! I´d count them up every time I got paid hoping I´d done my sums wrong and I then worked out just how many cheese sandwiches my pay check would buy. And the answer was not very many – definitely not enough to keep me alive until the next pay day that´s for sure! The beauty of working in travel is that you, often not always, live in beautiful places, fantastic resorts which people dream of coming to, and when they do some, it´s the highlight of their entire year or decade or even life. And the likes of us call that home. That´s quite a blessing it has to be said and a huge privilege. I try not to forget that. It´s not  “lucky” of course, and as you all know, because at some point you made a choice and decided to make that your life direction – but it is a massive plus. However, when it comes to income versus cost of living well, letñs just say that the Travel Industry is not famous for its high earnings – and the destinations we tend to be based in, as that´s where the work is and where people want to go, tend to be the most expensive in their country! 

Anyway, the cost of living goes a little beyond cheese sandwiches, in fact it stretches to all sorts of sandwiches, and maybe even food in general, not to mention housing and energy. Leaving politics aside, along with the reasons why things are so outrageously expensive these days compared to the average person´s income, things are indeed outrageously expensive and I think that those of you in the UK have maybe had it the worst. 

So let´s not focus our negative energies too much on the well-publicized and monstrously priced things like fuel for example, let´s pick out 3 absolute bargains kicking around – that should cheer us up a bit and stop us worrying about our bills for a few minutes. Ginger Gerald tries to be a cup-half-full type of a guy – so here goes:

My starter for 10: Street Food. In México, for example, you can get your very favourite tacos of carnitas or cochinita pibil or tinga de pollo for very, very little money and they are absolutely delicious. And I bet the same is true in so many places around the world – Thailand, India, Turkey you name it, local food, made to order right in front of you, no posh restaurants with air conditioning – absolutely fantastic, authentic and great value. You just need a well-trained constitution sometimes or the after effects could just outweigh the benefits of the great value!

And second up are flights. Not all of them of course – some are an absolute fortune! But there are some absolute bargains out there - when you only take a small backpack that is and don´t care where you sit, or what day or time of day you travel. For €10 you can get yourself to the other side of Europe on a 2 or 3 hour flight if you have a good look around. It´s really quite absurd and I know there is a very strong school of thought that says that it´s not right that flights can vary so much in price – but that´s what they are so flex your dates and times, pack very lightly, and head off for the same price as, well, a cheese sandwich and a coffee at an airport while you´re waiting! And if you´re a Spanish island resident – then you got a massive 75% off the fare for flights between the islands or into mainland Spain. Amazing! Do anywhere else give you this sort of discount or are us lot over here just very lucky barstards? Again!

And at Number 3 (and maybe a controversial choice this one): the internet – that´s such a bargain too isn´t it? Most of the time when you´re out and about, eating, drinking, at a sports club, in a public building, at an airport, even on an aeroplane – access to the Internet, and so connectivity with the entire world, let alone to your tictocs and your Instas, is absolutely free! Imagine that! In the olden days you even had to pay (not very much admittedly) just to get a Library card! And then the equivalent of the “Google search” was an hour long search through a million cards in a pull-pout draw or, slightly later, you could try to find the book you were after (as long as you knew what book you were after) using the infamous microfiche system. If you don´t know what I´m babbling on about – then look it up on Google haha! Every shop and café you go into has its own WIFI password and it costs you nothing at all – unless of course, you´re the cynical sort, and assume it´s costed in to everything you purchase. Or, even worse, that they sell on your personal data so you get overwhelmed with adverts for a load of crap that you don´t want – typically insurance and electricity suppliers in my experience. And maybe they do – I never look at the small print I sign up to I just say yep, that´s ok if it means I can get the Stoke commentary live while I have my beer or coffee! Having said that, there are still hotels which insist on charging for Internet access by the day – outrageous considering the logon requires you to accept all of their own conditions about marketing to you! Anyway, that´s not most places I´m pleased to say – so you´ve no longer any excuse not to call your Mum when you´re away – no longer any need to find and queue up for a phone box – with a massive bunch of coins to hand! 

And, if I´m allowed to mention a 4th bargain – this podcast! Haha. It´s absolutely free (providing you´ve got free wifi!) So, folks, there´s great value all around you – let´s focus on that when we need to avoid a bout of financial depression with the world we live in – wherever we live!

Right, that brings us to the end of this week´s little episode. I hope you´re feeling more upbeat now than you were at the beginning when GG was living up to his newly defined reputation as an Complaining Old Git.

Next week we´ll be back with more fun, games, insight and observations for you……and as it´ll be the last week of January – we are going to debate the subject of Dry or Wet January. Who did it and why did you bother? Do you feel any better about yourself? And at what point did you go back on the sauce. And we all know what that´s going to lead us onto don´t we? .oh yes…it could get a little messy when we get into some overseas drinking anecdotes so if you don´t want to be named and shamed next week you´d better get a little brown envelope sent over to me very quickly. Anyway, I´m really looking forward to that one….but right now it´s time for a glass of tonic water. Maybe with a slice of lemon haha