hi

Live in the UK

are an adult and have at minimum Indefinite Leave to Remain

Can scrape together about £1200 in one place for a few minutes (can be salary/your actual bank account, but better if not, as you’ll need to park it somewhere else for a month or so)

Can reasonably do mildly convoluted admin tasks (I.e., could you keep a spreadsheet that juggles a few things like “dates to cancel subscriptions”, and remember to cancel the subscriptions?)

Are confident, capable and able to do life paperwork such as opening bank accounts

Then you can usually farm a bit of pocket money with bank switching.

Bank switching is taking advantage of cash offers that UK banks offer to switch your current account to their bank. They often offer £150 cash for doing this. The definition of a “current account” is usually “has ~£1200 in it and two direct debits set up,” so if you’re willing to quickly set up a free throwaway bank account that meets these criteria, you can then switch that account around various banks to take advantage of incentives.

There’s some decent offers right now if you’re willing to do the homework (you could get up to £1500 at the moment if you’re eligible for everything), and people on Reddit write really careful hand-holding tutorials. https://www.reddit.com/r/beermoneyuk/s/DLrpVkmDOo

You can usually only max this out once a year, and then have to take a break (most banks have a cooldown period.) of course, if you have a partner or other family members, you can do theirs. You can pass the £1200 back and forth between you for this, and make double the amount.

If you only do £1000 a year, it’s about the limit of the admin most people want to do, and is tax-free.

You can mess it up - but rather than losing money, you’re more likely to accidentally fail to meet the criteria, or get into an admin snarl where you get querulous emails from bizarre institutions like the Ulster Bank of Lobsterworkers and Divinely Inspired Miners, telling you that they can’t close your bank account until you remove £0.37 from it. However, allowing reputable UK banks to hold your £1200 is a low-risk activity.

You must follow the instructions (and guides) attentively to receive the payouts.

Bank switching is a good, honourable and reliable way to raise a few hundred pounds to pay off large unexpected expenses. A big credit card bill, an air conditioner, an unexpected flight - I find it useful to know that a little bit of extra admin-headache can write off the whole expense.

If you and a partner switch to Nationwide with this June 2026 offer (obviously, it’s on you to read the instructions carefully) you will get a total of £525. That’s very helpful pocket money that could make all the difference for your household this month.

Park the idea in your brain, maybe queue this post to remind you, and pick it up again when you need to. Sometimes a serious need for quick cash is enough of a jolt to get over the bump of doing admin.

Apologizing to his tenant for circumstances that were beyond his control, local landlord Eddie Turley was reportedly forced Monday to raise the rent due to thinking of a bigger number. “You can re-sign your lease, but I have to raise it by $250 a month because I realized there was a bigger number your rent could be,” Turley informed his tenant of six years, attributing the rent increase to a need to keep up with the rising numbers he could envision.

Polish folks LARPing as Americans, some photographs of (by Maciej Margielski)

More phots here.

The book mostly is told from the POV of Pierre, a self-insert who is failed author and, I cannot stress this enough, utterly pathetic 

Quasimodo damaged his hearing as a teenager from years of bell ringing and now uses sign language whenever he can

There is a scene where Quasimodo and a fellow deaf guy have to have a conversation without using sign language because they’re in a courtroom and the jury doesn’t know sign. It goes about as well as you’d expect 

Frollo has a little brother, Jehan, who he raised after their parents died. Jehan is now a frat bro in college whose hobbies consist of getting drunk and being mean to Quasimodo. In his first scene Jehan complains about college DEI because an Italian guy got a scholarship he wanted. 

Esmeralda is accused of witchcraft because she taught her pet goat Djali how to do math

Djali may or may not be sapient. He can and does imitate human mannerisms to make fun of people on purpose. He does this while on trial. 

Yes. They tried the goat for witchcraft, too. 

Pierre writes a whole play riding on the pun of dolphin/Dauphin. Nobody likes it. 

Frollo is an alchemist and has a secret mad science lab where he writes on the walls

Jehan literally pulls a “buy my silence” and frollo gives him money to make him shut up

There’s a trio of catty girls who bully Esmeralda like it’s Mean Girls

Quasimodo and Frollo literally have Cryptid Status— Parisians circulate rumors that Quasimodo is either a familiar, a homunculus, or the result of demonic mpreg, and that Frollo is a wizard with wizard powers and/or a ghost

There is a little old woman who lives in a hole and shouts slurs at people. She has a tragic backstory. 

There is a homicidal con man/king of thieves named Clopin Troillefou (surname translation: The Fool of Fear) who deserves tumblr sexymanhood.

Pierre learns how to carry chairs with his teeth 

There’s an entire chapter dedicated to the layout of the streets of Paris in painstaking detail

There’s another chapter that is a rant about interior design 

Esmeralda and Pierre get platonically married due to Clopin’s murderous shenanigans. Pierre tries to make a move in her but ends up being more emotionally attached to Djali the goat than to her. I think that should be grounds for divorce

There is a scene where Pierre has to choose between helping Esmeralda escape or helping Djali. He picks Djali. 

Frollo hides from his own brother by laying face down in mud and playing dead. Somehow this works 

There is a Plot Significant Tiny Shoe. A Tiny Shoe Chekhov’s Gun. And Victor Hugo will not stop telling you just how Tiny this shoe is. 

There’s a soap opera style plot twist that involves a false accusation of cannibalism and the woman in the hole who shouts slurs

Quasimodo makes up a stupid little song that doesn’t even rhyme to confess his love to Esmeralda, who remains oblivious

He then attempts to demonstrate his affection via convoluted metaphors that involve props. She doesn’t get it. Boy please say what you mean

Frollo pulls the classic discord groomer tactic of threatening self-harm if Esmeralda doesn’t give in. 

Jehan rolls up to a party/rescue mission scheming session in Clopin’s secret hideout in full plate armor (how did he get that???), drunk off his ass, and acts like he owns the place. Everyone finds this so ridiculous that they just let him

Hugo goes on and on about how innocent and naive Esmeralda is but then casually reveals that Esmeralda carries a dagger on her person at all times to fend off assault. When Frollo attacks her and Quasi intervenes, she takes Quasi’s knife and almost kills Frollo (fair!) but he flees. She contains multitudes?

Frollo has a psychotic breakdown in the middle of a field surrounded by chickens and hallucinates skeletons everywhere 

For the first half of the book Esmeralda is like 70% sure Frollo is a ghost, not helped by his aforementioned Cryptid Status

Jehan eats a moldy piece of cheese off the ground 

Frollo tries to send Pierre on a suicide mission in drag. Pierre objects to the suicide part but not the drag part  

Clopin’s preferred weapon is a scythe, he’s very good at using it, and he sings when he fights. Again: sexyman potential. 

Victor Hugo has a foot fetish. I initially dismissed it as Frollo having a foot fetish until Victor Hugo included a foot fetish torture scene without any Frollo in it. So I can only conclude that the foot fetish is authorial in nature. Unfortunately the foot scenes are important to the plot. 

Frollo is canonically 36, he just aged like shit and is bald. The narrator will not stop telling you just how bald he is.

Despite being in full plate armor, Jehan gets splatted like a bug