Thursday 1st December 11

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Gill woke me at 9 with an apology.  She’d sent our eldest to school without something important, rang him and said… on the spur of the moment, that I’d bring it in to him for 10am.

So I got up and had breakfast and took the thing in, came back via a woodpile which made the trip doubly worth it.

I spent a few minutes doing my computery stuff and having a coffee, and then got busy out the front, chopping up pallets and splitting logs, did some stacking too.  I also did some compost heap loading, and spent some good times outside, good for my mental health!

I was out the front with my chainsaw when Gill and the boys got home, and our eldest asked if I’d be able to take him to a meeting tonight at 7.30.  It was a visiting speaker, Anton Kimpfler.  He is an author and workshop leader, and this was a talk at The Stables.

So we cycled down together.  Anton Kimpfler is German, and needed a translator which made things interesting.  His talk was called ‘Might and Misuse of Money: what can we learn from the worldwide financial crisis?’ It was apparently based on a book he wrote 25 years ago.  He said that money itself was neutral, but the people who trade are capable of misusing it.  He told us about an Anthroposophical Bank, which he said was founded in 1968 but Wikipedia says 1974, and was the first ‘ethical bank’ and was a template for Triodos and The Co-operative Bank.  He also told us about a voucher-money system in Argentina where the design of the system meant there could be no speculation, and money circulated faster. And then there is the Chiemgauer Currency, started in a Waldorf School, which has seen huge success.

At the end of the talk, I was able to explain how LETS worked, and there was a bit of discussion before we cycled home.