There wasn’t even a farewell note.
Loyalty to a bank was something we used to be proud of.
It started back in school, when a class teacher encouraged his charges to put even 10p now and then in a savings account in the Aberdeen Trustee Savings Bank, as it then was. One lad’s pocket money was only 50p for the week then, but this wasn’t yesterday.
They gave him and his classmates blue passbooks, and encouraged them to prepare for adulthood. They were assured they would never regret it.
Years passed, and that wee boy grew up, left school, became a man and went out into the big, wide world. As a very handsome chap, he always dreamed about getting cool wheels to take himself back and forth from home in Great Bernera at the weekends, and to be a boy racer the rest of the week, roaring endlessly around Stornoway from Newton Street to Manor Park in a souped-up Lotus after work.
Then he discovered Lotuses cost a lot of money, so he ended up looking at buying an old minivan for £750. It had been resprayed and had new carpets in it. Wow, the dames would love that.
Despite getting a bank loan from another bank, he was still short £50. Wait, he would check the Trustee Savings Bank passbook. It had £36.73 in it. That will do for me, he thought. He somehow scraped it all together and, with the help of two great banking institutions, he eventually roared along the Cromwell Street main drag in his wee van, with the immaculate carpets, but which sounded like a hairdryer that was about to explode.
Bye bye, bank
A few years later, he put all of his money in the trust of his favourite Aberdeen savings bank. They got along just fine, and he could use their branches or an affiliated bank anywhere in the world. In Stornoway, they had the best staff. Genuinely good people.
He had loans for other big buys, insurances for this and that, a critical illness policy that he never got a penny back on – because he was lucky and had no critical illnesses. No refund? The bank made a few bob out of him on that one, you bankers.
What do you mean, who was this? Yes, I do mean myself. Who else did you think I was talking about?
Then, last week, came the bolt from the blue. The TSB, for that is now the bank’s name, was closing another rake of Scottish branches, including in Stornoway.
They can’t do that, surely? I have all my spondulicks in there.
They didn’t write; they didn’t phone. They didn’t consult. No one asked me. That was so painful. That bank was like family. I had to read about our divorce and when it would happen in the newspaper.
So, the trust in the trustee bank has gone. They can’t be trusted to stay around and serve this community, me and my meagre savings accounts.
Did you see the northern lights?
Like the northern lights on Friday night, which I regret I didn’t see. They didn’t stay around either, although I was out all Saturday evening and saw not as much as a shooting star. It was a bit cloudy, though.
Yet, some people were lucky enough to see the aurora borealis, those heavenly sheets of pink, green and blue, cascading like shimmering dancers in the night sky. The Gaelic phrase for them is “fir-chlis”, which literally means nimble or merry dancers. Some people described the sights at the weekend as spiritual, memorable and ethereal.
I like the word ethereal. It conjures such interesting imagery of the soft glow of galaxies in the night sky over the Callanish Stones. It also sounds like a person with a lisp telling me to eat cereal.
The French have a saying: “Après moi, le déluge.” It is a sort of expression of indifference to whatever happens when one shuffles off this mortal coil. Do they have a phrase for “after the northern lights, the déluge”?
It has been many years since we had such violent thunder and lightning, followed by heavy rain dancing off the pavement on Sunday evening. Was it connected to the aurora? Some say yes, some say no. I don’t know which answer to trust.
Fatherly financial advice
My father had trust in both banks and a strong work ethic. He always said: “They go together.”
I remember what he once said to me: “Life can be easy. All you have to do is open another savings account – your career account. Then just work as hard as you can, and do not stop until the balance of your bank account looks like a phone number.” Thanks, dad. So, I did exactly that.
I’ve just checked the balance in my career account. Yep, it looks like a phone number: £9.99.
Iain Maciver is a former broadcaster and news reporter from the Outer Hebrides
Conversation