A couple of days ago in the UK they celebrated Guy Fawkes night. As a child I enjoyed the bonfires, the fireworks and the marshmallows. Burning in effigy a figure of Guy Fawkes once a year strikes me as a bit strange these days. He was part of a plot to blow up the houses of parliament, get rid of King James 1st, and return a catholic monarch to the throne. Since then he has become a blank slate onto which people have projected many different agendas. Some prefer to burn an effigy of the houses of parliament, in general I’d say more creative (ever tried building a cardboard effigy of the Houses of Parliament?), and more about challenging institutions rather than attacking individuals—a big up yours if you like to the power of corporations and government, or powerlessness of government given that corporations hold the purse strings. Currently his visage is popular within the Occupy Wall Street movement. Why is harder to answer, a question I’ll leave others to try and answer for now.
Meanwhile today is /Leave Your Bank Day! I’m feeling a little shy on this front, torn even. As not only my dear bank manager and mentor, you are also my nemesis. That I bank with you, one of the big five banks, is a source of deep embarrassment. You know all to well how complicated it gets for people to simply up and change their accounts over to a credit union. Online banking is both a convenience and something of a trap. Life is complicated enough without diving in to the sisyphean task of trying to swap out all that information, let alone find ATMs when you need them, if one should choose to move over to a credit union, none of which are easily to be found in my neck of these troubled woods.
Yours remaining reluctantly loyal,
Art O’Connor
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