The Fiver Project begins

I’ve pretty much given up on hearing from Sheila Sergenson’s golf club about the £5 note I found with her name written on it.

I’ve thought long and hard about what to do, and although I am convinced the note came into my hands for a reason, I’ve decided that that reason is not so I can become a stalker and be barred from Cumbernauld’s finest golf course.

Instead, I’ve begun to think about what would happen if I signed bank notes and released them into the wild. Would they float around the monetary system until they fall apart and are removed from circulation? Or would someone see my name on one of them, do a google search, and drop me an email to say where they found it?

I certainly hope it would be the latter – and it would be fascinating to see how long it took and how far each note travelled before I heard any news about it.

So today, I pledge to sign and photograph every £5 note I receive, and spend it again as I normally would. I’ll put the pictures on my website, hope someone inquisitive comes across them, and wait for their email. Which could potentially be a very, very long time.

And my first act will be to add my name to the note which already bears Sheila Sergenson’s name, and release it back into circulation.

Not the end of the story for that banknote, but hopefully just the beginning…

Off to Latvia

The proposed trip to the Faroe Islands has been put back to next year. We couldn’t all take a full week off work and didn’t feel it was a trip we wanted to cram into a weekend, so we decided to go in the springtime instead, giving us more time to plan and longer to spend out there.

Justin and I, however, were still up for doing some sort of trip this autumn, even just a short one. We put a pin in the European Championship qualifiers fixture list and came up with Latvia.

Our reason for choosing the Faroes were numerous but one of them was the lure of the totemic clash of Faroes v Lithuania, in Scotland’s group. So the Latvia trip will allow us to see a match from another qualifying group as the home side take on those giants of European football, Iceland.

I’m looking forward to the trip already – Justin has booked the flights and we’ll now start investigating accommodation options for our two nights in Riga and one in Berlin en route.

However, my knowledge of Latvia is entirely limited to my undergraduate dissertation at university, which was about the influence of identity on the security policies of small states, using Latvia as a case study.

That should be something to break the ice in the pubs and bars of Riga…