Robbed by a Cheque (An Extract from Tom Lanoye's 'Do It!')

In January 1991, Willy Claes, the Belgian Minister of Economic Affairs, approved ‘cheque charges': users would from then on have to pay for writing out a cheque. In his weekly column in Humo, a Flemish weekly (which invariably ended with the mantra ‘Do it!'), the writer took up arms against the banks. It was the Generale Bank that, on 1 July 1991, was the first to implement the new charges. Now, in 2007, the Generale Bank is called Fortis and cheques are no longer used for payment in Belgium. Tom Lanoye is still a writer.