Announcing that she would be a more humane chair than the norm, she then asked where I was looked across to me among the 30 gathered and offered as a peroration of her speech to the multitude, “Oh, and Toby, we’re not renewing your contract.” These were the first and last words she spoke to me. We are used to being told how many times we must retrain in our lives, that secure employment no longer exists, and so on.īut it hadn’t happened to me since late 1987, just after “Black Monday” on the Stock Exchange.Ī new head of sociology, who had been on leave during my year there, got up at a farewell lunch for someone in a vaguely fancy restaurant. Losing jobs has happened to most of us - whether as short-order blue-collar chefs or short-order national-security chiefs. Thankfully, the Bank of England caved in quickly, consenting to return to vegan currency.īut then things got even more complicated in terms of money in my pocket.Īlready locked in an oleaginous divorce, I was removed as director of the Institute in London where I worked. Plus, the new five-pound note initially contained tallow, which led to protests by animal-rights activists. I don’t want that person staring up at me each time I open my wallet, any more than the unelected, uneducated, et cetera person. But she was replaced by arch-imperialist and staunch 1930s fan of Hitler and Mussolini, Winston Churchill. From 2001 through 2016, the five-pound note featured the 19th-century social reformer Elizabeth Fry. Ordering currency in a billfold became especially complex recently. ( Jane Austen, for instance, is on the tenner.) So I try to look exclusively at the obverse of pound notes, which represents people who are prominent for what they did, rather than who their papas were. I SPENT MUCH of last fall worrying how to put pound notes in my wallet.īecause I live most of the year in the United Kingdom, I must deal with the fact that an unelected, uneducated, uninviting, and undistinguished monarch is on one side of the currency.

Animal money cisco