THE ANCIENT FAT CAT

Have you ever wondered how capital and finance and interest rates came about? If not, read on...

THE ANCIENT FAT CAT

Back in the desperately peculiar prehistoric times when my distant and long-forgotten ancestor Owongo walked the Earth in his African homeland there also lived Otwallop, a wastrel of a fellow who chanced on a fine idea one lovely August day. (In actual fact, he may well have called it August, but he probably didn't because everyone knows that August was named after a Caesar and there hadn't been any Caesars back then, and there wouldn't be for around 98,000 years.) In fact, he didn't call that month anything at all because, to tell the truth, not so many months had been discovered and the whole idea of calling them by names was faintly ridiculous. Why, folks had barely noticed there were seasons, and as the weather was generally balmy all the year round there was no reason why they should.

But to the saga. Otwallop was out, supposedly hunting, but a year or two back he'd made a discovery that he'd kept entirely to himself.

There was a glade in which there grew a concentration of apple trees. Now, if I climbed into my TARDIS and brought a basket full back you probably wouldn't call them apples because they were crabby and somewhat bitter, with all manner of insects thriving in them. But they were apples all right and had the womenfolk known they were there they would have picked great baskets of them and turned them into apple crumbles. But they didn't know and Otwallop didn't tell them. Instead, he kept their presence very much to himself because he had discovered that, when the fruit finally ripened and turned juicy the juice made him sing and shout the ancient for “hurrah” and generally stagger home with a hangover.

You and I, of course, being superior in most things, including knowledge, know what had happened. Nature had created alcohol with a dangerously high proof out of the ripe fruit that chanced to combine with colonies of wild yeasts that flittered about in the air, and Otwallop was spending a great deal of most Augusts getting pissed out of his prehistoric mind on that proof.

But only August! By September the fruit and its rather noxious juices were all gone. Mind you, Otwallop didn't use the word “September”, and if he used a word at all it's been lost to memory.

Then he had his idea.

He could plant some of the trees nearer his home, where he might keep an eye on them and ward off nasty things like the creatures that liked to share his mind-warping bounty. That way he would be able to get drunk for maybe two months of the year! But he would have to keep the womenfolk off because apple crumble had never given him a hangover but occasionally precipitated an upset stomach, which was less desirable than the euphoria produced by the rotten fruit. And if he tried to do this on his own his excursions into the hunting grounds for meat would become even fewer than they were now, and he needed meat in order to maintain a decent amount of strength for his drunkenness to sap.

He needed to actually pay someone for meat whilst he tended his (a new word here, so be warned) orchard.

But what would he exchange for the meat? Money hadn't been invented, and the last thing he wanted to do was let on about his glade of euphoric deliciousness every August.

He sought out the Chief, and that chief was my ancestor Owongo.

“I need capital,” he began in his own language, and bit by bit he explained to Owongo all about the little orchard a day's good march away and the things the decomposing fruit did to his head every August. “I feel I might be able to fly,” he enthused. “And I imagine my willy is at least twice its real size and I have a craving for any woman, even ugly ones. I even sometimes crave for your Mirumda, and that's saying something!”

Owongo might have been offended by this reference to his lady wife, but he wasn't. You see, being my ancestor he had an idea. A brilliant and mind-blowing idea that has wrecked the lives of everyone who has lived ever since.

In a flash of inspiration he invented banking and interest rates and corporate taxation and loan accounts, and went on to make a mint whilst Otwallop proceeded to work his socks off and die, not so many years later, utterly destitute and with a diseased liver.