Counting the cost

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Life is full of strange numbers.  But mostly we ignore the subtle groupings and structures that shape the way we think our world.  How many of us are aware of the effort of putting 60 individual seconds into each minute, or of the seven-dayness of the week?  Has no one noticed that four always seems to divide into 12 but never 13?  As our daily acquiescence in the world's fictive homogeneity shows, by learning to count so glibly we have lost the rich granularity of existence.  We are numb to numbers.

Anthropology lets us retrace the gradual erosion in awareness which took place as civilisation evolved.  The simplest societies count one, two, many.  Earliest humans probably found only one.  Each object in their world was unique: it did not surrender its specialness by being rudely classed as like another.  The pebbles on a seashore were not numberless; instead, they were individual components of an immense experience we have now forgone.  Instead, we see only a beach.

As society progressed, the successful warriors and rising merchant classes demanded bigger numbers to cope with more cattle, more bags of wheat.  Already the sense of what five or fifty entailed was bleeding out of the words: fifty became a rich man's flock.  By the time a hundred thousand Persians marched against Greece, the concept of a soldier, a man, one, had been hopelessly damaged.

The loss of the purity of numbers went hand in hand with the rise of money.  Objects were converted to values which soon had only a weak and arbitrary sense of quantity:  one shilling was twelve pence, but how many is a penny?  With money came the need to manipulate figures by themselves; hitherto they had been regarded as incommensurable entities rooted in real things.  Mathematics was born the day six sheep first equalled six goats.

The Roman number system proved hopelessly inadequate: you cannot multiply DCIII by XLIV.  The logic of the Arabic system which supplanted it led to  revolutionary concepts like zero and negative numbers.  With the arrival of a notation for less than an absence of cattle, the last links between numbers and their origins in the external world had been cut.

Commerce was quick to seize the opportunities opened up by this untethered arithmetic.  Freed from any grounding in physical objects, numbers became amoral.  The abstract intricacies of double-entry book-keeping allowed ingenious frauds - literally unthinkable for the Sumerian clerks drawing up their inventories in cuneiform.  Present-day trading in currency futures is only the latest manifestation of counting's promiscuity and perversion.

In the computer, the neutral number attains its acme.  The whole world - its sights and sounds, our thoughts and emotions - can be reduced to a seamless string of 0s and 1s.  Paradoxically, there is now no sense of number in anything, even though everything is a number.  And ironically, the hidden figure that lies at the heart of all experience is 1, just as it was at the very beginning.  But on the way back we have lost entirely the richness of that original, particular vision.

(1987)

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Thoughts for your pennies

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First, the doll-like farthing went.  Then the twelve-sided brass threepenny bit, the halfpenny, and finally, in an orgy of numismatic vandalism, the shilling, the florin and the half-crown.  At a stroke, two thousand years of monetary history were swept away, a victim of ephemeral economics and a fetish for decimals.  The penny coin alone lives on, its nominal value increased, though otherwise pitiably reduced.

Holding an old penny today is a curious experience.  It feels so large and so heavy compared to the footling tiddlywink counter we so aptly call a 'p'.  It is a marvel of classic design, with its proud image of Britannia, and its stylised, cryptic inscription - itself almost a summary of English history over the last five hundred years - garlanding the monarch's head.  Moreover, it is not an isolated example like our current coin, which feels like a litter's runt: the same majestic form can be found in a great series which tracks centuries of Royalty in England.

Nor was this a theoretical assemblage.  Until decimalisation - that long, mincing weasel word for British money's equivalent to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria - nearly two hundred years of the past was to be found in your pocket, every day.  Searching through each handful of change made even the most mundane of financial transactions an adventure, a chance to stumble across a treasure subtly hidden by being everywhere.

Coins of Elizabeth II and George VI predominated; but those of George V and Edward VII were common too.  The former looked like the last Russian tsar, or perhaps Tchaikovsky, while the latter had the bald head of an all-in wrestler and the facial hair of an Airedale.  With characteristic formality each succeeding king or queen faced in alternating directions, partners in a regal pavan, making some look back to their predecessor, and others gaze ahead, as if trying to descry the future and the features that would one day in turn look back at them.  

But more exciting than any of these were the coins of Victoria.  In her sixty-five years as queen, billions of pennies were issued.  Though most were recalled to the Mint, surprising numbers survived down to our own day, and were to be found occasionally amongst the coinage of her descendants like an immortal old dowager turning up unexpectedly at a family gathering.  The length of her reign meant that her portrait changed several times, from the delicate young girl at the start - looking like something out of a Jane Austen novel - to the stout and dour old woman at the end, when the empress of a third of the world lived out her long widowhood in sadness and comparative solitude.

Finding any of her incarnations always sent a thrill through me.  This coin, I thought, has seen a hundred years of the world, been handled by half the nation, bought a million objects; what a story it could tell.  And I remembered one of those immortal school essay topics - 'The life of a penny' - which seemed so pointless then, but which now acquired a deeper wisdom.  A wisdom cut off now, just as that great metal river of coins pouring down through history has been cut off, dammed, diverted, and turned into the feeble trickle we know today.

(1989)

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