Speaks to an audience

Here's a shop front in a local town square.

At first I think, I cannot imagine a situation where I would use this shop. The signage We Buy Gold for Cash  suggests to me, this is a pawnbroker. Locally, we have several.

These days the name Pawnbroker has disappeared (due to an association with illegal trading in stolen goods). But pawnbrokers - offering loans to people who leave items of personal property as collateral - are still needed by those who manage their finances between goods and cash.

But the circumstances where I'd actually use a pawnbroker's? To pawn my mother's gold and alexandrite ring? Life would be pretty exceptional. I'd need a life/death moment, something out of a novel, where I had to give up the things of value to me in exchange for hard cash. (In a novel, it might come with a moral judgement made by the characters, the writer, or the reader.)

But this shop also offers flights where tickets probably amount to several thousand pounds.

And while you're booking the flight, you can transfer cash. Clearly, this shop - or rather this business service offering small-scale financial management - seems to assist in flowing money or assets around the world. More specifically, as Google helps inform me, all the banks listed in the window are Pakistan-based banks.

Thinking about this financial services centre - instead of walking past it and ignoring it, as I normally do - begins to tell me something about the ethnic community - my neighbours - who share this local town.

Here is a service centre for people, probably with extended family links to Pakistan, who travel perhaps at short notice between the two locations. For this group of people, goods are part of a routine trading; money conversion is normal and objects of value can be a means to an end.

So I'm looking at a centre which makes sense. It caters for a fluid, mobile population, much more global than me with my local mind-set, and much more accommodating than me when it comes to holding finances in different forms and moving funds between countries.

The one thing that stands out for me then, is that I'm not looking at Urdu, Punjabi, or Sindhi (I wouldn't be able to tell the visual difference): I'm looking at English, in a no-nonsense style, like Helvetica, writ large, written for English-speakers.

It leaves me thinking, I should be wiser about my local town. Perhaps I should even start talking to the neighbours.