Happy New Year!
I really miss reading books on money and writing about them here. 2021 was a year more devoted to 'doing' rather than 'thinking' for me. I expect 2022 will be similar.
The highpoint of 2021 was, of course, the three Church of Burn events at The Cockpit, Marylebone over the first weekend out of lockdown in July. The performances were a significant step up in terms of their production values. An expanded cast and crew meant 30 of us were involved in creating Church of Burn in 2021.
It was utterly thrilling to see something that had existed in my imagination since 2019 finally be brought into reality. I am profoundly grateful to all involved. We have images, audio and video of the performances but we've been a little coy about sharing them. A few exciting things have happened since July 2021 and we want to keep our powder dry for the next time.
Administration
So, although I feel we gave Covid a bloody nose by managing to stage the event as soon as humanly possible, it did nevertheless have an impact on how we did things; for theatres, opening up in July was not as simple as 'anything goes'. Church of Burn had to (as much as possible) keep a 2 metre distance between cast and audience which made it too tricky to record the serial numbers of the notes that were sacrificed in Ritual. As a result we have no accurate record of the amount burned.
As there were plenty of witnesses to confirm that multiple money burnings took place though, it did seem appropriate to request a declaration from the Office of The Holder of The Staff [ All Hail, The Staff! ] in order to make an entry in the Record of Burn. The declaration has been granted and an amount of £1000 has been duly entered in the Record of Burn.
Not recording the serial numbers did remind us of how important this part of the ritual is. I was pleased that several members of the Church wanted to know that it would be re-instated in future. [ Check out this thread on how the recording of serial numbers on the destruction of a banknote mirrors how they were originally brought into being at the Bank of England - paper it links to is excellent ]
Ritual
Just before Xmas I asked my Twitter friends for some help with a magical problem. You can explore the thread here but to summarise: I like to burn some of the tips I get from work. I can't give you a precise answer as to why tips are a favourite burn. I think it might have to do with the fact that they are freely given (or at least more freely given than money that is exchanged for my labour). Some people feel a social pressure to tip at xmas, but even so, there is still less pressure to pay (I'd argue) than in a contracted financial exchange. There is also the fact that tips are made in cash - and even for a committed money burner like myself, I simply don't tend to have cash on me these days. It's pretty much all contactless for me when I spend.
Anyway, this year my tip haul was around £80. As usual those who tip, tip well. But most people don't tip at all. Of that £80, £20 was given to me by an older couple. They told me verbally (twice) and in the card that accompanied the money, that it was 'for me and my colleagues'. By doing this they created a BIG problem for me.
I don't want to get into the rights and wrongs of attaching conditions to gifts. It's not my personal practice. But I think many feel that if you 'gift' money to someone, it's acceptable to say 'don't spend it on' whatever, or share it with 'so-and-so'. And despite my personal feelings, as I accepted their gift, I felt bound by their conditions.
Now, the practice at my day job is we NEVER share tips. It's just not practical. If we tried to do it, it'd have to be an informal arrangement (because of the tax issues the company would not want to know about it) and very quickly that'd cause a huge free-rider problem and risk massive resentment. The idea of buying say, £10 worth of chocolates, and sharing them with my 700 colleagues also seemed incredibly lame. The company provide little xmas treats anyway. Buying a gift in order to share the £20 with my colleagues would be about me 'just' fulfilling my obligations (and would mean I'd look like a total arse-licker to boot).
And to be honest, from the moment I got the £20, I knew I wanted to burn it. I was intrigued by the problem of how I could honour the spell the couple had placed on the £20 note and also sacrifice the fuck out of it. So it took some thought!
I'm not going to tell you everything about the ritual. But here's the gist. On the 2nd of January 2022, I burned £40 in total at a ritual by a pool in Froggatt Wood in the Hope Valley in Derbyshire. My point-of-pain burn is about £30 at the moment. I've suffered a little from burn-flation because £20 doesn't quite cut it for me nowadays. However, £40 is probably a bit too hurty. But I figured that my burn was £30 and £10 was 'for my colleagues'. (This Ritual has been entered into the Record of Burn)
So a few points:
I decided early on that it would be in keeping with the conditions that £10 of the £20 was mine and £10 was earmarked for my colleagues. This was not specified by the couple, but it seems reasonable to suppose a 50/50 split. If they'd wanted a greater share for either party it would be down to them to specify - whereas what they did was name two distinct entities i.e. me and my colleagues.
Now you may argue that my colleagues would NOT have wanted my to burn their £10. This is a fair point. However, there was no specification as to whether my 'spending' of the note would promote pleasure or displeasure among my colleagues; only that it should be shared with them. And clearly, I believe that burning £10 'on their behalf' is a good thing even though they may disapprove.
Once I'd decided that I'd burn their £10 though, I did feel that I needed to add something meaningful that connected my colleagues to the Ritual. I could have announced on the work intranet that I'd performed a money burning ritual and that would have served to give them knowledge of the event. But first up, it would have created all sorts of difficulties at work (I'm not sure the couple would have wanted that) and second it wouldn't have really 'connected' them to the ritual experience. So instead I made a promise and wrapped it around the burning/burned £20 (which of course is itself a promise) like a ritualised 'smart contract'. This is literal. I have a very scorched piece of paper with my promise written on it, which is now tightly wrapped around the remains of the money.
I'm not going to share with you what was written. It is a promise directly concerning my colleagues. I need to fulfil it (if at all possible) rather than talk about.
I don't think I've talked at all about my day job on this blog. Deliberately so. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I'd rather not be doing it (this is an understatement!). In fact, I'm pretty sure that even if you don't know me personally you could figure out that I'd much rather spend my time reading and writing about money - and doing Church of Burn and all the other cool things - than driving van delivering stuff.
But, despite my wishes, I still find myself at 56 having to grind it out at work. I was very very down on work after Church of Burn. Major comedown after such a high. Take the following seriously, or don't - or do both at different times. But I was feeling so much hate and negativity toward work, after Church of Burn, that those emotions managed to sublimate themselves into the possibility that I wouldn't have to work anymore! Albeit, by getting sacked! A series of bizarre incidents - for the most part completely out of my control - led to me being called into meetings everyday for about two weeks solid. I ended up telling the universe that while I appreciated its efforts to grant my wish to leave work, getting the sack might not be hugely helpful for my wider ambitions.
I do constantly have plans about how I will escape my fate. I'll be putting the latest one into effect very soon. But in the meantime I want to recognise (as that older couple reminded me) that I should value and honour my colleagues in my day job. We've all been through the trauma of the last two years together. Not all have survived. Some colleagues I've known for over a decade. And even though I have no social contact with any of them, many I'd be honoured to call friends.
So despite the temporary existential crises that the conditions the couple attached to their tip caused me, it served to make me recognise that the magical/spiritual/religious aspects of my being (or whatever label you want to put on them) don't disappear when I put my work uniform on. And that even in the relationship with the institution itself, allowing for it to be deeply embedded or perhaps constituted by a financialized mode of production, the relationship is necessarily underpinned by something beyond measure, profit and contract.
I have survived my time doing my day job (so far and in large part) by adhering to a set of simple principles about how I do my job - about what I've committed of myself in return for my wage. I drive safely, keep customers happy and deliver on time. At work there is a book of rules and regulations longer and more complex than Simmel's Philosophy of Money (if you don't know it, trust me, its very long and very complex). But I ignore all of that stuff and just take my promise to the company in all seriousness. While they pay me, I keep my promise. This approach has kept me (relatively) sane, doing I job I really don't want to do, for eleven years.
Phillip Goodchild's koan-like phrase in Theology of Money often rattles around my head when I think about this stuff. The promise of value is not the value of a promise.
Thanks to all those who suggested solutions on twitter, and to Anwen, Michelle and Tommy for their wise advice for witnessing the ritual and the promise.