THE HISTORY OF MONEY

Money is basically any fixed commodity which can be exchanged for goods or services. Thus, through the millennia, money has taken on many different forms - rocks, leaves, funny little hats, elephants, etc.

Money took on its present form when various world leaders decided to stamp their faces on money so all the peasants would recognise them and grovel, and give up their meagre wealth and female relations without (much) fuss, instead of picking a fight, and quite often winning.

When various wits had remarked that the rocks, and indeed the elephants, looked enough like their august rulers anyway, coins were introduced to see if the respective clever dicks would survive torture long enough to be rude about those.

The main disadvantage of this system in the leader's eyes was not that coins were easier for the peasants to hide from legal robbers (kings) and illegal robbers (robbers) but that the coins could not be trained to deposit several tons of fresh manure on the heads of insolent peasants. However they invented Taxes to compensate for this.

More recently, money has begun to be kept in Banks, and it has been suggested that anyone who wants to learn the real value of money should try to borrow some from a Bank, this is not so much getting blood from a stone as getting edible food from a British Rail Buffet. It's easier to learn the unreal value, by working for the Government.