Visiting the bank

A chance comment from a friend of mine led to me finding out that British £20 and £50 notes without the plastic inserts were no longer going to be accepted after September. As I had a few of them squirreled away in suitcases from trips (ah! How I remember travelling) I thought I had better go into the bank and get them changed.

What a mistake that was.

Ideally, I wanted to just change them for £20 notes that had the plastic insert in them. But this proved too complicated for the bank to do. In fact, the concept of sterling raised an eyebrow or two.

The teller hummed and hawed about whether it could be done, then told me it could be. Would I hold on for a minute? I said I would, and off he went to rummage through whatever shoebox my branch keeps its foreign exchange in. I had £200 in sterling – and so he came back with four shiny 50s to replace it. Except, it wasn’t sterling. The four shiny 50s were Euros. Off he went again. This time he came back with my £200 and apologetically said he couldn’t do it. He’d “got confused” with the difference between Euros and pounds and the best he could suggest was that I just deposit the cash in my account.

FFS. Anyway, that is what I did. Then came my next shock. When did sterling become so worthless? It’s essentially just over 1:1 with a Euro and a US$... and for my £200, I got a little over $300 Cdn. I had an idea that things were bad, but that’s ridiculous.

How do people manage to travel outside the UK?