This week saw Plough Monday which according to the OED sees the start of the ploughing season "traditionally celebrated by a procession of disguised ploughmen and boys drawing a plough from door to door to collect money."
Or as one website puts it they "demanded money with menaces".
This would have been for their own subsistence, but according to the English Folk Dance & Song Society if someone did not give money or food, their front garden might be ploughed up, outbuildings might be damaged or windows broken. The lads were not there to give a good performance - the show was almost incidental. Their intention was to do just enough for it to be called a performance, but it needed to be threatening enough to encourage generosity by villagers.
Before the Reformation, the Church sanctioned the collection of money (Older records indicate that the collection was for the benefit of the Church - so no surprise there)
The City of London had an annual custom of a Court of Wardmote which included an opportunity for the Lord Mayor to receive "any nuisances or grievances of which the citizens may have to complain". Given the impact of the banking crisis you would have thought that was a decent tradition to uphold but I guess hearing the complaints would have taken til Michelmas at least.
While bankers seem more than willing to follow the ploughboys and demand money with menaces from the taxpayer, the City went for the barking idea of blessing IT equipment, or to as they put it in their press release - Apples and BlackBerries. Did anyone think we´d be fooled by this blatant attempt to distract from serious issues?
On a related point, Sonim chief executive Bob Plaschke maybe could have been forgiven for seeking divine intervention when reporter Dan Simmons from the BBC's technology show Click managed to break a mobile phone marketed by the company as "unbreakable". To give him his due, his reaction is admirable. Watch here
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