coins

for various reasons i have recently started trying to give shop keepers the exact money that way i cut down on the amount of change i have in my pockets and it means that i am using the loose coins that i seem to have floating around the place.

there i was in my favourite coffee shop, i am sorting through the shrapnel to give the exact amount. there is a little “tsk tsk” from the lanky barista, as i must have been holding him up from doing something really important and interesting.
yet shamefacedly i have to confess that a sign of encroaching old age kicked in as i sorted through the change: i gave him a 1 pence piece instead of the 5 pence piece i meant to hand over.
ooops.

even more than that i realised i had made the mistake as soon as i did it because i was stunned at seeing my first example of the new coinage.
yes the new heraldic coins are here.

several months back the mail on sunday made a big song and dance about the designs of the new coins. at the time they didn’t know what they would look like, they just knew that britannia would no longer be on the 50 pence piece. this was a terrible thing because it would be the first time that britannia would not have featured on the country’s coinage for the first time in 300 years.
this change was seen as being a betrayal of all that is british by gordon brown and new labour.
judging by the tone of the pieces that appeared in the mail you would have thought that very fabric of life, as we know it was about to be torn asunder. look they cry we have 30 thousand people who want britannia kept; now we have 45 thousand people. it is an unstoppable tide of people who are prepared to fight this change, to defend our way of life.
take britannia off of our 50 pence pieces at your peril.
david cameron came on board to say that the conservative party would return britannia to the coinage.

i was surprised that the mail on sunday didn’t blame this change of the coinage for causing the sub-prime mortgage crash in the states, the credit crunch in the uk. i don’t think it would stretching matters to claim that the situation in georgia is down to the fact that britannia has now been taken off of the 50 pence piece.

well that is not strictly true either as there are lots of 50 pence pieces around that still feature britannia, it is just that the new ones are now out.

what is a bigger shock is that after a few weeks of making this a big cause for the mail on sunday it was quietly dropped. there was no big story to say that the new coins were nothing more than a way to integrate us closer to europe even though new labour had promised a vote on coins in europe (not that they did, but that isn’t something the mail worries about).

the lack of coverage of the coins meant that when i saw my first one i was a little awestruck that i could hold in my hand a new shiny 1 pence piece and to know that i held something that could bring down governments and make world’s collide (even if it nothing of the sort occurs). for that reason alone i was slow in giving the right change to the barista.

i am still recovering from the fact that the new labour have managed to slip the coins in under the radar. keep watching the skies as disaster is only around the corner. well according to the mail on sunday and they wouldn’t lie.
would they?