Guru

With the banks getting all jumpy about lending money to one another on account of money lenders being a risky prospect, it occurred to Guru that things have gone badly wrong since the days of the pay packet.

The pay packet, for those of a younger disposition, was a little brown envelope – often with enticing plastic window feature – handed out to workers at the end of every week of high-performance work.

Guru's first pay packet contained the princely sum of £4.80, which, at the time, seemed like a king's ransom. Admittedly, a ransom that would possibly buy the king of Mali, but a welcome cash injection nonetheless.

Of course, nowadays pay goes straight into the bank.

But can this be right? Straight into the hands of the very people who make a living out of lending money to unsuspecting fools, who now, when it comes to the crunch, are unwilling to lend 'their' – ie, your – money to each other.

Jesus – that beardy icon of the Christian religion – drove the money lenders from the temple on account of them being the lowest form of life and not being fit to hold a candle. While not condoning such brutalist tactics, it seems the 'cross one' had a point – although he was brought to book by the beancounting Romans whose policy of 'lend me your ears' rather than 'give me the shirt off your back' seemed, at the time, a more sensible proposition, despite the threat of rudimentary lughole surgery.

The Jesus point was that having your own wad was important.

So, siding with the financial genius that was the messiah, Guru feels that it's time to bring back the pay packet.

Apart from generating jobs for people with the skills to build small brown envelopes, Yours Truly feels that this would inspire the country by giving the population a tangible sense of their true worth (be it £4.80 or £200,000 a week), thereby encouraging low-paid Bulgarians to return to their homeland to take up important jobs in a big house just outside the capital.