Ian McMillan: All change when the money machine stops

Unless you live in Lovely Fable Land of course, where a trout swallows one of the coins and years later you’re fishing off the sea in Grimsby in a bobbing boat and you catch a fish and when you cut it open there’s your pound coin, gleaming like new, next to that gold ring you lost in the mid-seventies.

Sadly, Darfield isn’t Lovely Fable Land and never has been. Round here the grate is the last resting place for the rolling quid and rings, as a general rule, don’t turn up in fish.

The other day, my man-purse felt really heavy and bulgingly full so I tipped the change out on the table and counted it. Disappointingly, there was a lot less than I thought; most of the money was copper and I’d have found more pound coins if I’d slit open a passing trout.

There was £6.42. I piled the coins up as high as I could before they fell over, then slipped them back in the purse.

Later that day I found myself, as I often do, on a station fancying a cup of tea and something sticky and lovely. I patted my pocket for a note because I wanted to hang on to my change for smaller items.

No notes. I had no folding money. I was just about skint. No problem: I strolled over to the hole in the wall to retrieve some of my hard-earned. A man was turning away from the cash machine with a gesture of disgust.

“Out of order, pal!” he said, as though it was my fault. I followed him to the next one of the three cash machines. Also out of order. And the third one: out of order. He punched the cash machine as though he was living in a cartoon and one blow would cause the hole in the wall to cough and splutter and then begin to spit out twenty pound notes like a fruit machine in a casino. No such luck. The man rubbed his knuckles and stormed off into the afternoon sun.

I looked at my card which was, at this precise moment in history, useless. It may as well have said Bank of Toytown on it. I fingered my man-purse: £6.42. I wondered where the nearest cash machine was, and I vaguely remembered that it was quite a stroll from the station, a long walk up a deceptively-steep hill.

I remembered that, after the financial crisis of 2008, people said that we were hours away from all the cash machines ceasing to work, all the holes in the wall becoming simply walls. Or holes.

I recalled a writer I knew in Argentina telling me about the time a few years ago when their banks stopped giving money out and nobody had anything to spend so, being flamboyant Argentinians they ran onto the streets flamboyantly, bashing pots and pans rhythmically with spoons and forks. I couldn’t see that happening in Yorkshire somehow: you wouldn’t want to dent a good pan, or scrape your best fork.

Suddenly I was poor. Suddenly all I had was £6.42 in copper and silver. Suddenly I realised what a fragile world we’re living in. What if, through some worldwide electrical fault (and hadn’t I read that there had been lots of storms on the sun lately, that were supposed to trigger off unspecified electrical events?) all the ATMs suddenly stopped working and all you had left was the jingling change in your man-purse?

I had to make decisions. The cup of coffee had to go. The sticky bun was out of the window. The paper I was going to buy would remain unbought and as for the book I was eyeing in the window of that shop, well “har har har”. Maybe the cash machines wouldn’t work for a week and then where would I be? I’d have to make the £6.42 stretch like elastic, until it snapped.

But of course I was just playing at being poor, which is somehow disgusting. I’d got my return ticket in my pocket and I knew I’d be able to get home from the station. For a second or two, I’d succumbed to the glamour of poverty, to the romantic idea that sometimes it’s chic to have nothing at all. There was a man outside the station begging, sitting cross-legged next to a paper cup, and I was seized by a sudden desire to make myself properly poor by rushing over to him and giving him my £6.42, tipping my man-purse into his cup. Then I’d be poor and he’d be, well, richer than me. And a lesson in economics would have been learned.

And did I do it? Well, what would you have done?