The boat doesn't take cards

The boat is at the dock. The man with the boat does not take cards. He has never taken cards, the website said so in Italian, and four of you are now doing the thing where everybody looks at everybody else’s pockets.

Two of you walk twenty minutes to a cash machine. I go, because I am attached to one of you.

When you’re planning something like that, tick “Cash on the day” on the cost step. It needs a price on it — the app won’t take a cash reminder for a plan nobody’s costed yet, on the reasonable grounds that it wouldn’t know what to tell you.

What you get is a dated list on Home called Cash to bring, showing your own share, as “at least €40”. Not forty dollars. The plan’s own currency, which is the only place in the whole app that doesn’t quietly convert into yours — and that’s deliberate, because the man with the boat doesn’t take dollars either.

Everybody coming sees their own figure on their own screen. Anyone not on the plan sees nothing at all. And it isn’t a notification or an email: it’s a list sitting there when you next open the app, showing the days still ahead of you.

I have been over a lot of cobbles in my life and none of them were on the way to anything good. They were on the way to a cash machine, and then back again, at speed, because the boat was leaving.