Sir, - As a simple person whose experience of large sums of money is, alas, extremely limited, I find it increasingly difficult to develop a real appreciation of the enormous amounts of money that some people appear to give to other people in a staggeringly casual fashion. The givers don't seem to remember giving it and the givees don't seem to remember getting it.
I would like to make a modest proposal that we introduce a new unit of currency to cope with the transactions of our mnemonically-challenged financial high-fliers. The basic unit of the new currency will be the BPE (Brown Paper Envelope) and it will be worth, in mundane terms, somewhere between £10,000 and £15,000. This should be a convenient amount for the standard low-level, ahem, "re-adjustments" to planning permission, land rezoning, and the like. The BPE fits conveniently in the back pocket of the trousers and can be passed quickly and discreetly from hand to hand in poor lighting conditions without the risk of being dropped.
For really big "re-adjustments", however, we would need something larger. I propose the BPB (Brown Paper Bag), roughly equivalent to 10, 15 or 20 BPEs, which would have the additional advantage that, when emptied of cash, it could be placed over the head of the giver/givee, or, if two BPBs were in use, over the heads of both, thereby preserving the privacy that is apparently so essential to such transactions. - Yours, etc., Gerard Casey,
Ballinclea Heights, Killiney, Co Dublin.