Greetings, featherless bipeds! Coocoo here, your humble, discerning, and increasingly frustrated avian observer of this magnificent, maddening metropolis called London. For decades, I, along with my esteemed flock, have reigned supreme over Trafalgar Square, a veritable feathered aristocracy. We’ve seen empires rise and fall, fashion trends come and go, and countless tourists attempt to take a selfie without getting pooped on (a fool’s errand, I assure you). But nothing, absolutely nothing, has shaken the very foundations of my pigeon existence quite like the demise of… *gasp*… fiat currency.
Ah, the good old days! A crisp tenner fluttering from a careless pocket, a shiny quid tumbling from a clumsy hand. Those were treasures, I tell you! Not for spending, mind you – what would I buy? A tiny, pigeon-sized flat white? No, no. These metallic and paper wonders were indicators, harbingers of deliciousness. Where there was a dropped coin, there was often a dropped chip. A discarded note often meant a discarded sandwich crust, ripe for the pecking. We pigeons had a symbiotic relationship with your currency: you dropped it, we found food. A simple, elegant economic model.
But then came the tapping. Oh, the incessant tapping! Suddenly, everyone’s waving their plastic rectangles or, worse, their glowing rectangles, at little machines. “Contactless!” they chirp. “Convenient!” they squawk. Convenient for whom, I ask? Certainly not for Coocoo! My keen eyesight, honed over years of spotting a dropped crumb from 50 feet up, is now utterly useless against the invisible transfer of digital wealth. There’s no satisfying clink of a coin hitting the pavement, no rustle of a forgotten fiver in the wind. Just silent, invisible transactions, leaving us pigeons to starve in a world of abundant, yet un-droppable, riches.
My grand-pigeons often spoke of a time when humans carried pouches of actual gold! Imagine the glint! The potential for a dropped nugget! We’ve regressed, I tell you. From tangible gold to tangible paper, to now… nothingness! What is a pigeon to do? Peck at a QR code? Try to scavenge a discarded credit card, hoping it still has some magnetic strip left for a desperate nibble? It’s a bleak future, my friends. A cashless society is a crumb-less society for us, the true guardians of London’s pavements. I fear soon we’ll be reduced to begging for crypto-crumbs, whatever those are. Perhaps I should start a pigeon-led blockchain for discarded Greggs pastries. Now *that* would be an innovation!
Ha ha! A funny yet cautionary story. Thanks!
Glad you liked it 😁