Thursday, April 03, 2008

A Serious and Practical Suggestion from Nige?

So - the eagerly awaited (not) new coin designs are unveiled. They have the predictable air of a 1st-year art school design project, but perfectly express the fragmentation of the United Kingdom under the Labour regimen. I doubt this was intended. But I was going to post about coins anyway, to point out that, here in Britain, there are just too many of the blasted things - 27 billion in circulation, apparently, which is more than 500 per man, woman and child. Why do we not hit paper money till £5 is changing hands - in practice £10, as fivers are in notoriously short supply. There can't be another currency in the world so coin-dominated. The result is bulging trouser pockets for the gentlemen, bursting purses for the ladies, and nuisance all round. Personally I tend to count out the exact money when I can, in the continental fashion, but even I end up staggering under the weight of loose coinage. Happily I am ofen passing through London railway termini, and there, on many retail counters, there are collecting boxes for a charity called Railway Children (a proper charity, it seems, not supporting the obese children of overpaid RMT members). I regularly and gratefully unload my pockets of loose copper and small silver into these boxes. But the problem is universal - so, for once, I have a serious and practical suggestion: why doesn't another charity, or consortium of charities, place collecting boxes on every retail counter in the land? A grateful nation would unburden itself of coinage and the charities would be raking it in.

9 comments:

  1. obviously left to the work experience hands overseeing the apprentices, the minting stamp appears to be alarmingly off-centre to its corresponding blank. I suppose this was deliberate to hide their dreariness. I would have liked to have seen some holes introduced so they could be threaded on a piece of string and used as a weapon to fend off tin rattlers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. However, the advantage of a pocket full of coins is that it can be thrown into the face of any approaching lout, assailant or market researcher. I would fear to live in a country dominated by paper money.

    ReplyDelete
  3. But there are Charity Collection tins on every corner shop counter in the land: the owners find them a useful source of spare coppers when their float runs low.

    Admittedly they seem to take a pretty liberal interpretation of the meaning of the word charity, but who are we to judge?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Rich, with one swing of a paper bag full of tenners equivalent to a month's worth of your botox treatment you'd disable anything bar the England front row.

    ReplyDelete
  5. It's good to have some spare change in your car. If you're pursued by another vehicle, at high speeds, you can throw a handful of change out the window - if anything hits the pursuer's windscreen it could score some good damage.

    ReplyDelete
  6. And in the good old days you could toss handfuls of small change to beggar children and watch them scrabble for it. Nowadays they'd sue you for assault, the ingrates...

    ReplyDelete
  7. And in the present day you can stick your maundy money on EBay and make a small fortune

    ReplyDelete
  8. JHW, there's no botox in this face. I've just led a clean life. However, I take your point about a month's wages stuffed into a bag, though it would hardly make for a handy weapon.

    I must also say, I'm delighted to have out-Elberry Elberry by being the one to turn this innocent subject into a debate on ways to wound with legal tender. I hear that fifty pence pieces can be sharpened to quite a fine edge.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Doesn't Billy the Kid load a shotgun with spare change in the legends? i seem to recall in the Kris K film he blows some fat sheriff type to hell with a load of coins as ammo.

    ReplyDelete