The Meerkats’ Book on Money. Ilinda Markov

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       You can’t dig out all the money in the world but you can try

       Master Meerkat Liam

       It helps to know the difference between Hippocrates and hypocrites…

      Master Meerkat Liam

      PREFACE

      We know, we know, you are flat broke, desperate, in between anxiety crises, your last excitement dates from the day when you took your auntie shopping for clothes pegs, so you need us, a gang of bonkers meerkats straight out from the Kalahari desert where Cape burrowing scorpions are the friendly creatures.

      It will get your knickers in a knot over the crazy things people do over money. Big money, fast money, heaps of money! You don’t need to be academic to figure out that rich people have always had it good: good life, good food, envious love affairs, expensive youthfulness.

      From the old movie scenes with Mr Fat Purse lighting a cigar with a burning dollar bill, to the hipster rave: drinking vodka from an ice sculpture, it’s all about a show-off of money. Even if you are a non-smoker and vodka gives you a headache, you still need money to pay the bills breeding like mice in a kitchen drawer. Money might not always buy love and happiness but buys things that make one happy. Like paying those bills and paving the road to financial freedom. The literary legend Charles Bukowski labelled once as slavery a life like “…leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight the traffic…”just to make ends meet. Financial independence is beneficial for the health, the self-esteem, and last but not least to one’s posture; given our trademark role of watch guards, we, the meerkats, are particular about postures. Have you seen Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watch? Full of purpose and protection. That’s what we are telling you that money worries can give you ulcer, back pain, heart palpitations, depression, anxiety and what not.

      The privileges for the rich date well back in the obscurity of history. If you were rich and lived at the time of ancient Egypt for example you were entitled to be mummified, plus given a copy of the Book of the Dead, which was more than forty feet long, so you knew your way in the afterlife. If you were a pharaoh, you’d order a pyramid to be built with chambers full of gold and goods that would keep you fed and happy during your time as dead. Some ancient tribes, though, like the Chinchorro people who lived in what is now northern Chile around seven thousand years ago were more democratic: mummification was for everyone, rich or poor.

      If an average person thinks of sex every eight seconds, (sex is banned in our gang, it’s only the alpha couple’s business) it’s also believed that people think of money every two seconds. Thoughts last more than two seconds, so one is thinking continuously of money. That doesn’t help much making it. There are no free lunches or other nano wishes that circle in the head along with fantasies of Gatsby parties, overnight bitcoin hits, mammoth gold nuggets finds or windfalls of cash, that classic and infallible lubricant of people’s relationships. The reality is that money is a feral thing, that’s why we know its nature better while you never stop wondering how it is so that many are doing better in life, and with all the wealth to grab out there your purse is parched with continuous draughts. You ask yourself what kind of an app you might need to spruce up your life and find the river of money.

      All you need is us, devious Kalahari gangsters in possession of good knowledge of foraging the desert where the sky is full of birds of prey, we are talking here hawks and eagles and from behind the bushes hyenas strike and Cape cobras are lurking in the sand.

      Perhaps you are arrogant enough to still ask what meerkats have to do with money, after all among ancient coins there’s none with my snout on it. A lot of bulls and lions and other brutes but not meerkats. Meerkats appear though in modern South African and Rwanda gold coins: 24 karat gold is used for showing our gang in our trademark watchful stance, stretched high on our back legs to observe all and sundry on the desert’s horizon. 24 karat gold! That tells you something, dude. Who will put your portrait in 24 karat gold? No offence meant. Besides we are not cats as you might think reading that meerkat is the Afrikaans version of Marsh Cat. Marshes in the Kalahari? Ridiculously ignorant! Suricats as sometimes we are called sounds better.

      So let’s start!

      To prepare for our money foraging you have to BYO three, long discarded, memories.

      The first goes back to the moment when you got your first pocket money. Remember the joy, the thrill of that special event when somebody put ceremonially a couple of coins in your little hand entrusting them to you, making a statement that you were big enough to have money, big enough to buy things, treasures like a soggy strawberry cream doughnut, Superman books with ripped pages and smudges of dirty fingers, or perhaps your dream was to stock up on chewing gum enough to master the art of blowing the best and biggest bubble gum balloons. Is important to bring that moment with you not because you have changed over the years and learnt to buy wiser but because I want you to relive the feeling that ripped through your juvenile heart and there are no emoticons for the thrill of the first bite into cold greasy chips bought by you alone lifting yourself on your toes in front of a market stall. The euphoria of receiving that first money and making use of it became a symbol of abundance that kept growing bigger than your best bubble gum balloon.

      There’s a chance you have put that money into your first Piggy bank bought for you by the same old auntie who didn’t believe in giving money away but in passing on money attitude. So your second memory should be of the joy you felt when you rattle that Piggy bank and the music the coins produced: the music of money! Rattling that ceramic curly-tailed porker you feel important, you feel the bud of power and you wonder whether it’s always so easy to have a bank, your own bank full of money, the association between money and bacon in the back of your mind for life without knowing that pigg is the name of orange coloured clay used in the Middle Ages for pots to store money from where the name piggy bank originated. You don’t care! You love your little pig with a slit on its back or on one of its robust sides and you think that one of the purposes in your infant life is to feed it and make it happy gobbling coins in wait of the big moment when the piglet is so full that you have to break it. That’s how you start your career of a bank breaker.

      Next, bring along another precious memory.

      It’s about the first thing you bought for someone special with your own money earned by frothing cappuccinos in McDonald’s. It was for your always tired and moody mum. A shiny, long and purple scarf. She didn’t know what to do with until proudly tying it around a shade lamp in the lounge for everyone to see.

      Bring that memory with you because it was the first sign and proof of your benevolent, romantic affair with money. You were young but cast money for an Oscar-winning support role in the movie of your life; you cast money for the back vocal to your own ode to joy. It was another triumphant moment of abundance and celebration of life.

      These milestone moments of your money initiation charged with excitement and exuberant feelings will be a promising lay-out for your money digging.

      First let’s complete the introduction. Only one of us comes with you to be your guide and that’s Liam, a young meerkat in his prime known to have a good nose for a free tucker. He is so clever, he can outsmart that cheating bird the drongo. For the record he chose to call you, Elizabeth and you come with so much luggage that you can’t fly commercial. Just kidding.

      Or maybe not.

      LIAM

      Unless you are Francis Assisi and live in a cave, or a Buddhist monk with a bowl in hands waiting for the villagers to ladle out rice, you have to live your life regulated by outer forces and pay for your necessities. You pay for electricity, water, food, warmth or cold, for clothes and cars, you pay for entertainment, education and culture and sometimes for sex. Every time you get out of the house it costs you an arm, if you sit in the house it also costs you and nothing comes cheap.

      Expenses are the very proof that we exist.

      Everybody knows this, Elizabeth, but you! Everybody loves money, Elizabeth, but you. What a shame! Even the ancient Roman loved money or shall I say especially, how especially the ancient Romans loved their gold and