Saturday, May 01, 2010

Just a little bit of money


Simon Schama has calmed his voice down a bit, but is still being over-arch in his choice of vocabulary - perhaps he thinks he’s PG Wodehouse. This week we had paw for hand, canine for tooth & thrown in the slammer instead of sent to jail.

Still, brought back waves of nostalgia by speaking about the coins of his childhood – I cannot believe I had practically forgotten about the threepenny bit.

But most of all it set me wondering – what age do you have to be to be able to remember using coins that carried anything other than the head of Elizabeth II? My guess would be not all that young, since the old florin (10p in new money) was not withdrawn until 1993.