| The Art of Reflection (3) |
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As far as rearing my daughter is concerned, the scoreboard at half-time indicates that we're coming along nicely: earlier this week she remonstrated that owing to the newness of the money, surely there wasn't any need for her to go wash her hands.
But she is not the only one to see an entirely new world opening up. I now know that one of the main characteristics of coins destined to become rare in future is that they are manually collected at the end of the production line. If this isn't diametrically opposed to any work ethic one could mention, I don't know what would be - of the coin, I mean, not of the person charged with its end-of-the-line collection. But my train of thought didn't stop there. Assuming that all these coins will find themselves being freely passed on from one person to the next all over the various countries, surely they will be collecting many more bacteria than the national coin would ever have been capable of. This can't be that much of a problem as far as the neighbouring countries are concerned - after all, water taken in from a Parisian tap won't upset your system, nor will tap water consumed in Italy or possibly even Greece or definitely Turkey. I hasten to add that I'm not talking about harmful bacteria resulting from a grubby lifestyle, but about the fact that bacteria will vary from one part of the United States of Europe to the next. Nothing to do with dissension or anything like that, but why would everything be the same regardless of one's location of the moment? Let's therefore stick to the statistics for the time being, and establish that the opportunity has been expanded for considerably more exotic cultures irrespective of the euro to pass along their rare bacterial cultures together with the change, whose actual purpose is to pay for our daily groceries. Nothing to do with xenophobia but rather, with the evolution techniques practised by bacteria and viruses. And before my observation of this phenomenon inspires anyone to point the finger at me for being a bigoted rabble-rouser, I would point out that I haven't yet finished my story, as we will eventually benefit from this very process, which should in due course provide us with resistance against more than just our national diseases, thus enabling us when embarking on our exotic travels to skip at least some of the currently inevitable inoculations - on condition, that is, that you should personally lick any small change you receive, starting today. |