In other news, yesterday morning I walked into my bank, closed a savings account, and walked out carrying its entire contents in cash.

That felt like a very romantic thing to be doing. In fiction, it's the sort of thing people do just before quitting their tedious daily grind, leaving their home and life, and fleeing to a sunnier country never to return.

Well, quite apart from the obvious incongruity of me deliberately moving to a sunnier country, where fiction departed from reality in this case was the fact that the contents of the account totalled 22 pence, on which if I was lucky I might just about have managed to flee round the corner. In fact, I subsequently blew the whole account on a small fraction of a cup of coffee.

(It was an archaic savings account with such a useless interest rate that I hadn't been using it for real money in years, but until now I'd had to keep it open because it was the nominated account for some shares I had to pay dividends into, and nobody seemed to know how I could nominate a different account. Recently the company concerned sorted out its share management systems, so I was finally able to redirect the dividends at another account and close the obsolete one. I had of course more or less emptied the whole thing into a more sensible savings account in advance by electronic transfer, which was why only a few odd pence were left. But saying all of that spoils the fun.)