How not to deal with foreign currency

I just got back from a week in Norway. 

On the way there, at Heathrow, I got some Norwegian Krone and now I'm home, I went to my local currency exchange to turn what I had left back into pounds. 

Out of interest I looked at the figures for buying and selling - and it wasn't good news. 

At Heathrow, I got 2000 Krone for £232.26. 

Just now, I exchanged the 1550 I had left for £122.13. 

So, the 450 Krone I'd spent cost me 232.26 - 122.13 = £110.13.

Now if you Google 450 Krone in pounds, the answer, amazingly, is £38.90.

The 'service' offered by both currency exchanges cost me £71.23. 

Phew!

And, just because they were sure I was an idiot, they both boasted of being 'commission-free' - and, yes, I liked the idea of that!

But the two businesses were not equally expensive:

Google tells me that £1 is 11.57 Norwegian Krone.

So let's have a look at the exchange rates I got: 

At Heathrow (Travelex Foreign Coin Services Ltd), Krone were sold at a rate of 8.8002 to the pound. 

At Thomas Exchange Global (on my high street) the rate was 12.691. 

So, Travelex at Heathrow was 2.76 per pound different from the Google rate, while Thomas Exchange was only 1.121 different. In other words, Travelex accounted for more than two thirds of the costs of my transactions. 

Does that have something to do with the difference between buying and selling? In other words, is it always more expensive to buy foreign currency than to sell it back? I don't know. 

The moral of the story is: don't get foreign currency at the airport. And preferably, don't get it at all. You may not need it, and having it will cost you most of it anyway. 

PS: Travelex has a better offer if you go online: 

Online, my 2000 Krone would have only cost £179.85 (instead of £232.26), at a rate of 11.1202 to the pound - closer to the Google rate than either of the in-person services I used. 

But I would have had to order early enough for the cash to be delivered to my home and that service would cost £7.49. Still, not a bad option if you are organised ahead of time. 

 

A sketchy life of Turner

 

Turner by Peter Ackroyd

Ackroyd delivers on the promise of a ‘brief life’ (as in the title of the series of which it is a part), but the portrait of Turner that emerges is sketchy. I found myself wondering how much of a hurry Ackroyd had been in as he wrote it. The constant refrain of “this year he exhibited x pictures at the Royal Academy, called a, b, c and d”, found every few pages, suggests the author had a comprehensive list of painting names and dates on his desk as an aid to filling out the sequence of chapters to which he had committed himself, named only by ranges of dates from Turner’s birth to his death.

To be fair, the book includes some nice anecdotes and insights into Turner’s character, work habits and unsettled domestic life. But themes which could have been developed, albeit at the expense of other details in order to keep the book to its 148 paperback pages, are no more than hints. The relationship between the elderly Turner and his young and increasingly influential fan John Ruskin, for instance, sounds worthy of more attention.

On the question of Turner’s emergence as an important artist, Ackroyd gives us a range of contemporary reactions to his work, both positive and negative. And he tells us about Turner’s extraordinary ability to work hard and sketch fast. But we don’t hear much about how Turner’s art was revolutionary or what made his detractors upset.

If you want a quick overview of the main facts of Turner’s life and an impression of his character and circumstances, this is useful book. But you may, like me, find yourself distracted by matters that you don’t want to be worrying about – such as the mistake on p. 131, where the date 1824 appears in the chapter called “1833-1834”, even though the previous paragraph includes the correct date, 1834 and later in the same paragraph, there’s a correct 1835. Also, wouldn’t a decent subeditor have changed the opening words of a chapter from “In 1833 he exhibited…” to “In 1833 Turner exhibited…”? Small points, I know, but once you lose faith in a writer or publisher’s attention to detail, it’s hard to be fully absorbed in the subject.

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How to succeed in Victorian journalism

New Grub Street by George Gissing

Published in 1891, New Grub Street tells the story of a group of struggling London writers winning or losing in a world of journalism and publishing that was rapidly modernising - from the days when learned papers on obscure aspects of classical literature would be ‘accepted’ by fusty periodicals to one in which magazines addressed a growing working class and female audience.

The trend is exemplified by the broadening of the appeal of a magazine called Chat by renaming it Chit-Chat and giving it a Twitter-like format: “no article in the paper is to measure more than two inches in length, and every inch must be broken into at least two paragraphs.” The audience will be “the quarter-educated …the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy themselves in trains and on ‘buses and trams.”

Gissing provides authoritative detail on the expenses of living in London, the requirements of the publishers of novels (three volumes preferred) and the exact pay for various literary endeavours. Against this is set a discussion by his characters of the right way to conduct themselves: whether to churn out ‘rubbish’ in the hope of better sales or to maintain their artistic integrity like the tragic character Biffin who is determined to complete his social realist novel depicting every boring detail in the daily life of a grocer and who likes nothing better than discussing “a difficulty in one of the Fragments of Euripides.”

Money is the perennial theme and New Grub Street becomes more like many of its contemporaries when wills, inheritance and marital prospects dominate the plot in the second half of the book. But its characters are so well established and their responses to somewhat conventional dilemmas are nuanced - with Gissing avoiding the temptation to make each represent a type - that even the somewhat melodramatic events which energise the story towards its conclusion keep the reader fully engaged and guessing who will come out on top.

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