The Great Five Pound Note Furore, And What Happened Next

Tallow in the fivers didn’t last so palm oil came in instead. That wasn’t as stable, so the Royal Mint did a deal with Vietnam, hybridising the paper with bahn da nem. That had a bit of a crackly feel in the pocket, according to market research. Ascorbic acid, phenols and tocopherols helped with the longevity of the new notes as did a gentle smoking process. 

It was found that rosemary was the most effective at this, which also gave the fivers a lovely woodland aroma.

People started to collect them; the money made wallets and houses smell more friendly. Banks were suddenly beset with tourists just wanting to sit there and inhale the pleasing memory of late summer in the forest. Pop-up fiver cafes started to appear in disused shops, where people paid in coinage to drink awful coffee and factory floor-scraped tea and just let their noses get away from the stress of the grimy streets, whilst projections of childhood-memory playing in copses flittered and fluttered across hastily-whitewashed walls.

The median cost for a 15 minute seat was £6, and waiting times were measured in hours.

Greengrocers, in a kind of Ui-esque dip, could sell their cauliflowers for a quid each, or four for one of the new fivers. There were fewer and fewer in circulation, so in demand were the notes. People weren’t getting rid of them; they were beautifully-scented and brought a sense of permanence to any home. The power of the suggestion of the aroma of nature seemed to wrest meaning away from the financial value of the notes, and put it back into altogether more nebulous, but somehow more real, terrain. The cities, in particular, could not get enough: people began to use them as modern nosegays as they wandered the filthy, three-weekly-collection streets, stepping over increasingly desperate nonfives without a second look.

By now, the upgraded five pound notes were changing hands for ten pound coins or more.

When the plague hit, and the food went bad, and the imports’ costs soared, and the caulis cost a tenner a pop, the Mint added monosodium glutamate to the notes. Aroma cafes added edible notes to their menus; the taste was irresistible. For those who could afford it, breakfast would be five pounds, lightly toasted, with irredescent GM-butter; lunch a five pounds soup with irradiated Nu-water. The evening meal was usually cat. There were always plenty of those; so quickly do pets become pests.

Most people didn’t have time or the inclination to wonder what the moral of all this was, so it was just left on the side, a dollop of indigestible fat amidst the fibre.