Tuesday 11 November 2008

Rose tint.


In my last blog I remembered buying mars bars on the way home from school, with the money saved by walking. Actually that can only have been true for a few happy months in 1949, when sweet rationing stopped for four months. Before and after that summer, and until 1953, you could only buy sweets if you handed over little coupons from your ration book - and my mother had mine! I think they cost three pence (£1/80). I must have saved well over a thousand pence out of my bus money - about a dozen kilos of copper, which now costs about £3 a kilo. I felt quite sentimental about the old coinage, which seemed to reach back into the depths of time. Pennies from five reigns were circulating - Victoria, Edward VII, George V, George VI, Elizabeth, always with Britannia on the back. This is what they looked like. I don't understand how anyone can feel attached to today's confetti coins. Roll on the euro!

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