An interesting newspaper article, on our subject...

  [And by the way, it's the 400th entry on this blog since its creation!!!!]

 

What do you do when you find cash in the street?

When I found a fiver in a supermarket, I bought a steak – but coming across a whole wad of notes was a different matter

ming across a whole wad of notes was a different matter

Sarah Ditum, theguardian.com, Friday 15 June 2012 

                             

'Most people seem, like me, to operate a sliding scale of virtue depending on the value of the find.' 

For someone who likes to think of herself as not that materialistic, I can spot dropped cash like a peckish dog can spot a half-chewed and slightly trodden-on piece of pasty.

First of all I clocked the purple – regal and cross-hatched in a forgery-proof way that litter never is. My chest pattered excitedly: a lovely free twenty drifting on the floor. A dropped twenty with no other person in sight is morally uncomplicated, as far as I'm concerned. It's mine.

But when I picked it up, I realised with some heaviness that this wasn't just twenty. It was a whole wad of notes, enough to be someone's pension just withdrawn from the post office down the road or a week's housekeeping. Enough to call up the burden of good citizenry rather than the thrill of a windfall.

And being a good citizen is a pain. Yes, you get the virtuous glow of knowing you've done the right thing. But also, you get the trundling out of your way to the police station, the waiting, the form-filling; and then even more waiting to find out whether the rightful owner came back to claim it – with the not-very-honourable fear that your cash find could have just wisped its way out of the lost property office.

Last year, a Surrey police officer was tried on the charge of stealing £75 that had been handed in to him by a member of the public. When the finder inquired after the cash six weeks later (the interval at which lost property can be claimed by the finder), the station found that there was no record of incident.

A second search of the officer's locker discovered the correct sum tucked behind the mirror, but in different denominations to the original find. (He was acquitted after the jury failed to reach a verdict.) It's hard to know how often misplaced items are returned to the rightful owner, because my local force (Avon and Somerset) says that it doesn't do a "stock check" on lost property.

Which presumably does little to counter the cynicism I found from some people when I asked what they'd do with a find like mine.

 Most people seemed, like me, to operate a sliding scale of virtue depending on the value of the find‚ from handing in any notes, to handing in any find of more than one note, to considering anything under 50 quid fair game.

One person pointed me to his story of finding 200 quid's worth of lire in Italy, deciding the police were too corrupt to be trusted with it, and using it to get tremendously drunk every night for the rest of the trip. Another said: "Are you still banging on about this? I'd have spent it on cakes and crisps already. And LOVED it."

Other people had stories of tracking down the owner, only to have the envelope snatched off them and the door slammed in their face. The teller of that story ruefully concluded that they'd have been better off blowing it on food and booze.

It seemed to be a theme: most people's first thought once they've taken possession of some stray money is to eat it or drink it as soon as possible. When I found a lonely fiver on a supermarket floor, I immediately swapped it for a steak, perhaps with the reasoning that no one could take it away once I'd got it in my belly.

But there were also stories of cash reclaimed through the police and generosity rewarded, with grateful owners popping round later to slip a portion of their rescued trove back to the finder. Some said they'd kept found money but donated it to charity; others that they couldn't bear to keep even the smallest amount.

Sometimes that was driven by compassion for the loser, sometimes by something else. "I found £1 in a closed swimming pool cubicle and didn't keep it in case someone came looking," said one person. 

"Which doesn't say good things, ie it's fear of getting caught and not morality that drove that choice."

I reported my find from fear as well – fear of not living up to my own idea of myself as a "good person", fear of feeling guilty, fear of hearing gossip at the post office about poor so-and-so who dropped her cash for the week and nobody handed it in, and you can't trust anyone these days.

After all, even if you don't have faith that the police will do right (though they do in the vast majority of instances), that still doesn't justify you in taking someone else's money – however enticingly purple and pleasingly textured the notes are. Does it?