….pick it up and all day long you’ll have good luck!

I was rummaging around in my cupboard the other day looking for my tiara for my Audrey Hepburn shot and I came across a pile of old pennies from our pre-decimalisation days. There are about a dozen of them in total and I have no idea how I came to own them, I can’t remember actually collecting them or being given them but nonetheless, here they are.

They were mostly (all-bar-one) really old, from around the turn of the 20th century. Only one didn’t have Queen Victoria’s head on the face and that had our current Queen. This 1881 one was the earliest. I pulled them out of the cupboard and polished a few up today (oh for some coca-cola in the fridge, I seem to remember that it is so corrosive that it gets pennies sparkling in moments). For whatever reason I decided to find the newest post-decimalisation penny in my handbag and do a shot of ‘ancient and modern’. I like the mix of old and new.

We were looking at how worn they are and wondering just how many hands they’d passed through. How many times they’d been tossed in the air with the cry of heads or tails to make a decision. How many times they’d been slotted into a toilet door to provide the owner relief! How many times they’d fallen out of a pocket and been found days later by someone else. How many times they’d been retrieved from the back of a sofa. How many times they’d been used to get a screw out of something. How many times they’d been used to enter Kew Gardens, which until about twenty years ago still only cost a single penny to get in. How many lives they’d touched in any way at all.

One thing I do know is that I’m glad for decimalisation – the one on the left, even without taking into account inflation – was always worth two of the big one and it’s so much lighter. The dozen or so old ones weigh as much as a dozen two pound coins in our modern currency.

When we were in the USA earlier this year, our expression ‘going to spend a penny’ was the source of great amusement for our hosts! It stems back to the days when public toilets had a slot machine in the door that you had to put a penny into to be able to use the toilet. The expression is still widely in use here.

On the subject of the States, the coins in the USA are very difficult to get to grips with for us poor foreigners. They don’t tell you what their value is. They say ‘one dime’ or whatever but how much in one dime worth? Is it a cent? Is it more? It totally baffled us when we were over there, to the extent that I ended up holding out a handful of change to an assistant in a pharmacy and saying ‘can you take the right change from here’.

I’m hoping for a good week after picking up my handful of pennies from the past. (That demonstrates my superstitious nature to a Tee.)