A Chicken in the Hand.

Money is a strange concept. After your bowl of fruit has gone off, your car become obsolete, the very blood and bone of your existence has gone the way of all blood and bone, your money, should you have any left over, will soldier on for your next generations. It has this attraction of immortality, a guarantee of future comfort. Yet we know that a gold bar in the desert is worse than useless compared with a map showing how to get to the nearest oasis, the latter being far lighter to carry. If though one can reach the water hole with both, one may still hold the advantage so long as there’s an American Express Office open, a Marriott to stay in and an airport to leave from. This is not always the case. Where the map and oasis provide for ongoing physical existence the gold bar allows entry into an alternative universe, an immense flywheel of exchangeable value as nebulous yet tangible as Saturn’s rings. The oasis exists in time, if you get there in time, and the gold bar exists out of time, as in if your bleached bones were found in the dunes a hundred years after your demise the finder would happily skip home with a huge smile on his face. We are faced with a dichotomy of ‘in time’ pragmatism and ‘out of time’ emotional value, where e-motion was conceived by some visionary who foresaw the world wide web way before we invented e-mail. E-motion is the movements of the physical realm transcribed into this same alternative universe. Now anyone who has been e-robbed of their e-money on e-bay will know that all this is about as tangible as the e-motions of a holiday romance, and as such this altered universe is open to the same fluctuations and untimely death as the Weimar currency in the 1920’s. So which is to be, a frozen chicken in the hand or e-£4.56 in the bank? (as in the English saying, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”)