The picture is a giveaway. It’s 200 years today, that Karl Marx was born in Trier, in Germany. And what do the Germans do? They issue a euro note with his picture on it! There is a bit of a discussion about what you’d be able to buy for it, but overall, I don’t think it’s such a bad idea. After all, he is not just the (co-)author of the Communist Manifesto (“A spectre is haunting Europe…”) but also of Capital (“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails…”).

Maybe what this note is telling us is that “money” is not worth the paper it’s printed on. Maybe, money is not worth anything. Zero. Zilch. Nada. The money we are using today is ‘fiat money’ and its value is determined by supply and demand. But its value is not linked to anything physical like gold, for example. It’s an artificial artefact created and controlled by governments.

The idea of giving it zero value or to abandon it altogether sounds really appealing to me. For some, this idea works; some, for whom humanity took a wrong turn some 10,000 years ago when they invented agriculture and a society where “belongings are more important than belonging”.

Our bags are packed, we’re ready to go… off to Pforzheim in the morning before dawn.

Last year, a woman (was) paid €30,000 over having to travel for abortion to England by the Irish Government. Every year since Pádraig’s accident, we had to go to Germany to get neuro rehab for him. The first time we went just before Christmas and left his two sisters behind back in Ireland. For nearly two years. And we are not the only ones. We are doing this because neuro rehab is not available to him in his own country. I wonder whether that’s comparable…