Money is way cool.

Having it.
Spending it.
And doing it in London.
I like being a grownup.
Being able to dress in expensive clothes and eat what I want and take a taxi as much as I want and buy absolutely everything I want. When I want. Not having to eat everything. Or lick my plate clean.
I even enjoy their toadying. (If they only knew.)
Here I am in Brixton. Free and almost rich.
A stingy one. Cries when he takes a shit. I hate greedy types. They usually fall for sales and red sticker prices. Their houses full of industrial sized packaging from Ullared. Deformed sausages and massage sticks from Clas Ohlsson, sure, you can use them to screw in stuff too.
Brixton, with its hip folks. Rastas, Africans with scarred faces, designers from the country.
Anything is better than the hole I come from. Money makes you a grownup. Lets you not have to ask for anything, lets you pay your way. It’s weird when nothing is for sale. When you can’t find anything in the shops.
During the 18th century, Swedish farmers were forbidden to wear colorful clothing and drink coffee. The farmers weren’t supposed to look like anything but farmers. Gray was their color. They understood this in Moscow. The best department stores, which never close, are in Moscow. Herring and vodka, and a color TV, please, then you roll on home at four in the morning and make dinner and drink and watch your new TV.
The Siberian gold. It was the Russian stocks that broke Bobbo. He inherited a pile of money from his mother, but it wasn’t enough to buy the new car he wanted. He started playing the Russian market, his bank advised him to. Stocks and gold and Siberian minerals. All of a sudden he was really rich for a week. Then everything disappeared in 1998. Bye, bye, money. It was nice meeting you. He drives a rusty Mazda 323. Your own fault, Gold-Bobbo.
Money-is-dirty don’t put it in your mouth think of everybody who has had it. It’s like crap. Just crap it out. I know that this annoys the tired Mom in the suburb-single-with-small children and high rent and greasy hair and urine leakage. It’s not right that you should get the word solidarity shoved up your nose as soon as you say that it’s fun and grownup, yes cool, to have money.
Money is fun. It’s fun for people with greasy hair too. A penny saved is a penny earned. Piggy banks at school. It was hysterical. Me and my friend Eva were going to sell sweet rolls one year and cookies another and then we were to collect deposit bottles and everything would go to the class trip. How I hated the class savings andf then when we went to the zoo for the money I threw up in the bus. The boys in the class saw through this. We’re raising the GNP now, they said, and banged on the windows and shouted: we’re raising the GNP, we’re raising the GNP. The evil capitalism. It becomes an irritating mantra.
Money is therapy. If going into therapy wasn’t expensive, it wouldn’t help. You get what you pay for. In ancient Rome, debt owners had the right to quarter those who couldn’t pay. Today, there’s credit ratings. My father worked a digger, his name was Bosse. Digger-Bosse. My father was an artisan and a well-known worker on the side in the community. He had a big excavator. Anyone who needed a big hole in their yard had to call us. He couldn’t even spell the word receipt. Everyone, big or small, had to come with cash. The money was squirreled away in brown cartons in the attic. There were more and more excavators through the years, ans more holes. Foundations, pipes, septic tanks, swimming pools, later on fiber cables. Papa’s accountant did his taxes, and everything was fine. The taxmen couldn’t even tax him for the money he made on the books. I don’t know if he even told them he had an excavator. In any event, he didn’t advertise. People called , and they called almost all the time. Papa used to say that he saved people’s home life. During vacation time, catastrophe was always near in the waters of inactivity, but along came Bosse and dug a hole so that the fathers could put down new pipes or put in cables for the hot-water pump, or construct a veranda or swimming pool. The Moms were left in peace, and the sons were usually forced to take part in the eternal construction work. Idealism is chocolate pudding number 1. Not accepting payment means that you want to be rewarded in another way. In Vaseline, maybe. It’s an aristocratic ideal, like when they disqualified Olympians because they were professionals. I don’t have an account book. The account book. Each day of his life, my Uncle Bengt writes down the day’s exact in and out expenses. He knows precisely what I have cost him in terms of ice cream and dresses and postcards and Christmas presents; in his family, they compiled long lists every Christmas to see if their total expenditure on presents out balanced against their presents in. Their house turned out to be full of radon.

Hanna Nilsson is born 1965 in Sundsvall, Sweden. She lives and works in London since 1992. Journalist and writer. Latest book was "Who is afraid of Mrs Thacher?" by Orbit Publishing.

Translated from Swedish by George Kentros

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