Old pence

Our governments are now proposing to spend their way out of recession; for that read "borrow their way". Borrowing means creating money, which means a mixture of growth and inflation. In the past the inflation has always got out of hand, followed by higher interest and taxes - and a new recession. It's been going on all my life. From 1947 to 1952, my father used to give me a silver sixpence every morning to pay for the buses to school and back. They cost five pence, so I made a penny a day. It was two and a half ("tuppence ha'penny") if I walked home - enough to pay for a mars bar and an evening paper, which I bought if there was a good murder trial. Those were good old copper pennies, about 3 cm. in diameter. If I had kept them all, I would now have more than a thousand, the metal of which would be worth many times their face value (£1/240). And the price of a mars bar now? It's multiplied by factor of 50 or 60. Should we worry? Well yes, if the whole purpose of the operation was to enable us to keep on increasing our ecological footprint.