When the first tip of your foreign holiday is called for , your never having any of the local currency on you

That’ll be when you’ve just arrived in your hotel room and your baggage-carrier has just struggled in behind you with your cases and is now hovering in the doorway asking “Is there anything else?” and taking his time about it while your slap your pockets despairingly. No, you won’t have been to the bureau-de-change at the airport or if you have you baulked at the exchange rate and thought ( wrongly) that you’d get a better one at the resort. Even if you did get cash out the denomination of your notes and coins will be either too small or too large to risk as a tip , not that you’d know because you won’t have got round to working out what the currency is worth in English. If you do manage to tip it’ll be either too small – in which case word will get round and you won’t be able to get a waiter to come anywhere near you for the rest of the holiday – or too large – and you’ll find the local Minister of Finance with a national debt problem camping in the hotel lobby. This will be your second experience of holiday quot in the last few minutes: the first was ‘ ‘Your hotel always being the very last dropping-off point for the airport bus’. The next one you’ll find will be :-‘ The longer you leave converting your money into the local currency the more unfavourable the exchange rate will have got ‘.  

(Trevor Munch, Redcar) - QQQQ*