Fun fact: the 20p and 50p coins are Reuleaux heptagons[0]. This means that they have a constant diameter even though they're not circular, which means that they can be accurately sorted by vending machines.
There are also coins called the Sovereign and Britannia, which are both legal tender, although not in general circulation. Both are minted from 24 carat gold. The Sovereign has a face value of 1 pound and I think the Britannia has a face value of 5. There actual value, on gold markets, is hundreds of pounds, and for a Britannia is over a thousand. Because they are legal tender, and could theoretically be used to buy a bottle of milk, they are exempt from VAT and capital gains tax, when buying or selling.
There's also enduring slang for some some values of cash, that doesn't necessarily have an accompanying bank note. A Pony for 25 pounds and a Ton for 100 is still fairly widely understood, but mostly heard these days in Guy Ritchie movies,.
> [sovereigns] are exempt from VAT and capital gains tax
This is a weird corner of UK tax law. If you buy gold bars and sell them at a profit you have to pay tax on the gains. If you buy and sell the equivalent weight of sovereigns there is no tax to pay, because they're just currency. Buying and selling gold coins in general (like Krugerrands that were not produced by the Royal Mint) attracts tax. Then there are coins which used to be legal tender but are no longer (pre-1837 sovereigns) which have a separate exemption from tax, unless they're a "set" of such coins where there is a different limit.
Absolutely - loads of companies (including the Royal Mint) sell them online. Prices seem to vary depending on whether the issue is collectable or not. If you're not fussed about buying something collectable but just want the best price, the mark-ups seem to be around 5% over the price of gold. Note that as well as not having to pay capital gains tax on profits, you don't pay any VAT [like a sales tax] on the sale either. This is very unusual - almost no other non-essential item is zero-rated for VAT.
Note that legal tender != can buy milk with. Legal tender is only about payment of debt. A shop selling you something doesn’t have to accept any specific form of payment, as they don’t let you build up a tab which needs repaying.
I think it was the popularity of Only Fools and Horses that gave rise to a pseudo-Cockney slang common in my time as an undergrad. Degrees were ranked:
'A reference to the libel case involving the novelist Jeffrey Archer. The term is slang for the sum of £2,000, a reference to the amount that Archer allegedly offered as a bribe which was the basis of the case.'
https://inews.co.uk/light-relief/offbeat/the-most-confusing-...
Cockney rhyming slang. The custom is that you take a two-word phrase whose second word rhymes with the target word, and then you just use the first word.
So "Plates of meat" == "feet", but you just say "me plates are cold". Scousers don't do that.
[Edit] There was a cafe off Haymarket in London, called "My Old China". That was another kind of plate; a "china" is a "china plate", which rhymes with "mate". So it's "my old mate".
Translation - more rhyming slang, although not necessarily 'cockney'
Lady Godiva - 'fiver' (£5)
Ayton Senna - 'tenner' (£10) - obviously a more modern idiom.
I have not come accross a Commodore before so am going to guess because of where it sits in the list as £15
Score - £20 (as in three-score-years-and-10 and all that)
Pony - £25 - some latin root in there - that is an old one.
I don't think they are dying out, in that paying a pony is still £25 with cash or with a card.
Funny, mine is "fivek". I bought that machine the first week it was available, I'd been waiting and waiting for a large hires screen so the name fell right out.
Nugget is realtively newish. Never heard of a Red until now, or a bill, a £100 was sometimes called a ton. Monkey comes from Indian currency, I think the 500 rupee had a monkey on it. Never heard of a Bag. A common one in my time was a Jackson for a £5, as in Jackson 5.
Some minor corrections: the sovereign is 22 carat gold, the gold Britannia (24 carat) has a face value £100, and the silver Britannia has a face value of £2.
Just to add some more niche currency slang. A few of the Hibs casuals[0] that used to come into the pub I worked at sometimes referred to pounds as “sheets” - “it set me back fifty sheets” = “it cost me 50 pounds”. I don’t know how common it is, I only heard it around these guys.
[0] - Hibs = Hibernian Football Club in Edinburgh, casuals = hooligan supporters (who were alright with me so long as they thought I supported a nothing-team like Montrose and didn’t know I actually supported Aberdeen :D)
It goes into the underlying mindset behind this seemingly bizarre system. Basically:
- the penny was always the fundamental unit. every denomination was defined in terms of the penny, not the pound or the shilling. It wasn't like the modern system where the fundamental unit is the pound (or dollar) and pennies (or cents) are defined as hundredths.
- the system was evolved, not designed
- different multiples and fractions of the penny went in and out of fashion at various times, so at any given time the system wasn't quite complicated as you might think, even though in retrospect it can be hard to keep track of every denomination from every period
- the shilling (12 pence) and the pound (240 pence) stuck around and became important denominations because those are highly-composite numbers and so have lots of ways of splitting them up
And this isn't stated explicitly in the video but it seems the system lost its value due to inflation, not any desire for metrication. Nobody gave a damn about pennies by the late 60s. You could very well make a new version of "old money" with modern coinage, just inflated by a factor of 100. A neo-shilling = 12 dollars, etc. Could be a fun cyberpunk worldbuilding detail.
It’s actually not unheard of that people with Scottish banknotes sometimes encounter difficulty when using them elsewhere. Small shop owners might not know that they can be accepted. It’s not so much of an issue these days since everywhere is pretty much cashless.
It really can vary. I remember having trouble spending Royal Bank of Scotland notes in England at the start of one trip, and after landing in Frankfurt airport for a transfer I was able to spend them without any problems in a shop which accepted EUR, GBP and USD. Also funny, here in Czech Republic I saw a money exchange place listing rates for both GBP and “SCP”, the latter having little Scottish flag beside it and a worse rate :D
I am not complaining - I don’t have reason to, I earn the local currency - I’m just amused they even exchanged Scottish notes at all, and even more so that explicitly stated that they would.
For small shop owners it’s a vicious cycle. They don’t want to take in Scottish notes because many customers won’t want them as change. Customers don’t want them as change because a lot of shop owners won’t take them.
As per the article, they’re not legal tender so no one is required to take them as payment.
That's not what legal tender means. Legal tender is what must be accepted in settlement of a debt. Buying something in a shop does not involve any debt and the shopkeeper can accept or not any form of payment they like including legal tender.
As with Northern Irish bank notes, which have a similar place in English society to the Scottish ones. The pub I went to got very confused when I presented a £10 note issued by the Bank of Ireland, which I guess would be confusing if you had no knowledge of it.
I think the phrase "legal tender" has a lot to answer for here. It's a really well known phrase, and you'll hear shop owners say they can't accept these notes because they're not "legal tender", but the actual definition of it is only applicable when settling debt in specific circumstances.
I think the Northern Irish notes have a worse and more obscure place in England than the Scottish ones, up until last year there were 4 different issuing banks in Northern Ireland: Bank of Ireland, Danske Bank, Ulster Bank and First Trust Bank [who now no longer issue].
It's quite entertaining to handover a Danish-Irish-UK pound sterling note in the UK, like somehow the viking era never ended.
Not to mention the infamous Northern bank, which Danske Bank replaced. I don't think I've ever seen a note replacement scheme happen as quickly as the one that replaced all of the green Northern bank notes for purple ones after the Northern bank robbery, which I believe is still the largest amount of money stolen from a bank at once in UK history, right?
Indeed it was. Albeit it was a moot robbery as you say, given that every note taken was known to the bank, and the whole class was obsoleted within weeks
The BoI notes also felt cheaper to me than the English ones, so maybe they look counterfeit to the untrained eye. Maybe it's good as they function as a sort of local scrip and serve there purpose of recirculating money locally, etc., but they will be converted on the other side of the sea.
A few years back, I had some older English (pre-plastic?) notes. I had to take them to a bank to exchange for "proper" notes because stores wouldn't accept them.
tbf, the actual definition of "legal tender" gives shops even more right to reject banknotes of a design they're unfamiliar with, which is why they also often refuse to accept £50 notes which are legal tender...
Maybe about 10 years ago I was trying to pay for something in a London store with a Scottish banknote and the clerk didn't want to take it. (Their manager came over and said it was fine but, yeah, it happens.)
Though last time I was in London, I dumped a few coins from my currency stash for a museum entrance donation and I didn't otherwise touch my cash at all. And don't think I touched my Euros at all when in Dublin for the same trip.
Having not used cash for three years, and seeing more places not accept cash this is less of an issue.
I’ve had Scottish bank notes declined in the past though.
The local Fish & Chip shops only accept cash, so it does help me to avoid eating unhealthy food, although if there was a way to find it when they’re using fresh oil they’d probably be far more tasty.
A thruppny bit (three-penny piece) was my favourite coin. It was a brassy colour, different from every other coin - not coppery, and not silvery. It was quite heavy - it felt like wealth. It had twelve sides - the only sterling coin that had sides, until the introduction of the 50p bit, with decimalisation.
The other thing I liked about it was that three is such a crazy denomination for a currency token, like a three-dollar bill; three old pennies were heavier and bigger, but the old pennies were ridiculously large and heavy.
I also liked florins and half-crowns. A florin was a two-shilling piece, and a half-crown was two-and-a-half shillings. These were coins that actually contained silver.
A crown was five shillings, but not generally used as currency, it was issued as a memorial, like a medal. At one time I owned a Churchill Crown, issued to commemorate Churchill's death. They were big, heavy coins. That's why a half-crown was two-and-a-half shillings.
Good Omens had one of the most eye-opening introductions to old british currency on the level of monoids and endofunctors. Since then I'm avoiding both.
“1 mite = 1/8 penny,
1 farthing = 1/4 penny,
2 farthings = 1 halfpenny (pronounced more like “haypenny”),
2 halfpence = 1 penny (or a ‘copper'),
2 pence = 1 tuppence or a half-groat,
3 pence = 1 thruppence,
4 pence = 1 groat,
6 pence = 1 sixpence (a ‘tanner'),
12 pence = 1 shilling (a bob),
2 shillings = 1 florin ( a ‘two bob bit'),
2 shillings and 6 pence = 1 half crown,
5 shillings = 1 Crown“
What's the problem ;)
Joking-aside, it's amazing to me that anyone ever got fluent with this. My dad and grandparents never complain about the pre-decimalisation period so I guess you just get used to it.
I think I'll stick to learning the category theory mentioned by op over this.
It's no more complicated than measurements and weights in the imperial system.
We're a weird country. We decimalised our currency, our weights and measures in shops and science, but we can't let go of imperial measures. Amongst the general population, people are far more comfortable talking about miles and miles per hour, than kilometers. Land sizes are still measured in acres and hectares. If you ask anyone their height, you'll probably get an answer in feet and inches, but ask their weight and they're more likely to tell you in kilograms rather than pounds and stone.
Some years ago I was a carpenter in the UK. From what I can see this has changed little since then... If I were laying out for sheet materials...mdf or plasterboard came in metric sizes 2400x1200mm so joists or studs went at 400mm centres. If I were laying out for plywood it came in 8x4ft sheets so I would use 16 inch centres.
If I were measuring a space to cut something to fit I would use inches or feet and inches, 23 an 1/8, for instance.
I might need a small hole about 1/8 of an inch, open my drill box and select a 3mm.
If I were ordering timber I might ask for a 3 metre length of 4x2. As in 4x2 inches! If 3m were too long you might prefer an 8ft length. The yardman would walk you straight to the 2.4m pile without hesitation. Of course timber lengths are in 300mm increments to align with the feet of old. When you got your despatch note it would say something like 2400x100x50. Or perhaps they used regularised timber and it would have been machined down to 97×47 which may or may not be mentioned on the ticket. It would still be called 4x2 whatever!
Thing is, none of this caused us any trouble whatsoever. Well.. apprentices who learnt cm at school (which was NEVER used in construction) had a fun few weeks at the beginning.
I had engineers use all the same terms to me verbally, but never in their written work which were always in mm
A lot of those things are not actively measured but are more experiential or used as an approximation. Height in feet is about how tall someone is, not their exact height. A mile to the pub is about how long it will take to walk, not the exact distance. Younger Brits will tend to use these terms in conversation but revert to metric more when something actually needs to be measured.
I don't recognize the 'vibiness' of imperial length and distance measurements at all. Perhaps this is a pareidolic interpretation which came to you when you noticed people using both sets of measurement types?
> A mile to the pub is about how long it will take to walk, not the exact distance. Younger Brits will tend to use these terms in conversation but revert to metric more when something actually needs to be measured.
Doesn't this get confusing when all traffic and road signs, car instruments, etc. are in miles and miles per hour?
People who are into running/cycling use "K" a lot, personally I think it's because once someone starts talking in km, if you use miles your stats will look bad by comparison. I know trackers/apps probably had this as default from the start because Europe=metric but so did a lot of satnavs and it didn't change our language in the same way.
It's rare to need kilometres in engineering, but I know from a friend that works at Network Rail that everything is done in kilometres, except final conversions on many older railway lines where the mileposts still measure miles.
Those small blue signs at the side of motorways, and the white emergency location posts, both use kilometres.
Yeah, the thing with imperial units and engineering is that once you get anywhere near mass, weight, force, energy, and all the related units for same, it can get very confusing and error prone. So are we talking pounds-mass, pounds-force, or slugs? (The latter being something that probably no one who didn't take engineering/physics/etc. classes has ever heard of.)
What's amazing is how we mix the two. Case in point, my wife and I are both runners, she measures her pace in minutes per mile, I use minutes per km. When we exchange stats we have to do the conversion. She does it as her running club uses the mile convention. This is despite the fact that we're doing 10 km races. So you're running a 10 km and talking about a '7 minute mile'?!
Distances on road signs are still in miles and speed limits are still in mph, so familiarity with miles reflects their official status, not just British weirdness/quaintness.
And also, unlike the weirdness of pre-decimal currency or some of our more obscure weights and measures units, the miles we talk about are rough approximations that aren't supposed to be subdivided or converted into anything precise (or anything more precise than "about half a mile") so there's no particular advantage to using an SI unit
I still find it easier to assess my body weight in stones and pounds (14 pounds, one stone). I'm currently about 13 stone 7lb. I have no idea what my weight is in kilos.
I think they didn't. It is a mix of colloquialisms of different origins (one farthing is "one fourth-ing" said too many times) but some might have been localized versions, etc or just used in specific situations.
So I'm pretty sure most people knew some of those but not all of them.
But if you think about it penny/nickel/dime etc is also confusing. Less confusing but still. Just tell me I'm 15 cents short or something like that.
I'm not sure there's a whole paragraph in this article without an error, omission or oversight.
Mite doesn't have a standard definition. My unabridged Oxford dictionary says it was just a very small amount of money, and people gave it various definitions.
Copper means any copper coin, it's never been specific to a one penny coin. Currently it means the copper-coloured coins, 1p or 2p.
Groats as coins worth four pence were last issued in 1662, and according to the OED later 4 pence coins were called fourpence or fourpenny bits/pieces, including in casual speech.
Most of the words are straightforward fractions or multiples of a penny, with optional slurred pronunciations:
¼ penny = farthing
½ penny = halfpenny or ha'penny
1 penny, usually abbreviated as 1d
2 pence = tuppence
3 pence = thruppence, thre'penny bit
4 pence = fourpence piece, fourpenny bit
6 pence = sixpence (slang: tanner)
12 pence = 1 shilling (slang: bob)
2 shillings = 1 florin (slang: two bob bit)
2s 6d = half crown
5 shillings = 1 crown
20 shillings = 4 crowns = 1 pound
21 shillings = 1 guinea
As I understand it, normally prices and other quantities were spoken in pounds, shillings and pence unless they fitted a coin exactly. Something cost "6 shillings", not "1 crown 1 shilling" or "3 florins" etc.
Just like the USA, where a movie ticket presumably once cost a nickel, then a dime, but then 15 cents. (Although none of the old words above are in standard usage in Britain.)
They all sound pretty standard to me, with the exception of "mite". I think at one point most people would absolutely have known all of them, but there were hundreds or thousands of other regional variations that would have been less known.
I know lots of old people who are absolutely fluent with almost all these terms (excluding 'mite' and 'groat'), could reckon with them quickly and accurately, and who (when I was younger) would quickly and accurately translate decimalized amounts into shillings and pence.
Grew up in the 1960s, pre-decimal. In primary school, we learned to do arithmetic in pounds, shillings, and pence (but no longer farthings) and also learned imperial units. The coins in circulation at the time were 1/2d, 1d, 3d, 6d, 1/- (1s), 2/-, and 2/6d. There was also a 10/- banknote. Some prices were in guineas (21/-).
They stopped minting groats (4d) after 1856 (except in Maundy money), half-farthings after 1870, and farthings after 1956. Farthings and silver thrupnies (3d) were still around but not in circulation.
The florin (2/-, or a tenth of a pound) was introduced during the first attempt at decimalization in 1849.
Crowns (5/-) were never in circulation, but were minted for special events such as coronations. They still are, but their face value is now £5.
Decimalization began in 1968 with the introduction of 5p and 10p coins (same size and value as 1/- and 2/- coins) followed by the 50p coin (10/-) in 1969. It was completed in 1971 with the introduction of the 1/2p, 1p, and 2p coins.
From secondary school onwards, it was decimal money and metric/SI units, which simplified calculations a bit.
Ireland decimalized at the same time as UK, and Australia and New Zealand a few years earlier (at the rate of two dollars to one pound).
Eh, it's not that complicated. It is just pounds, shillings, and pence. The rest are mostly just terms for coins that existed at various times, roughly equivalent to nickel, dime, quarter. Some of them are even slang terms (quid, bob) similar to buck or two bits.
As mentioned here, you will often see historical prices quoted as £x ys zd ... which might lead to the question "why is a penny abbreviated to d"?
In fact, the £ sign is a stylized letter L, and the system is really Lsd: libra (meaning, amongst other things, pound in Latin), solidus, denarius. This is the Carolingian monetary system and, as the name suggests, goes back to the Holy Roman Empire - as early as the 8th century.
That includes the L 1 = 20 s = 240 d ratio that made its way to pre-decimalization British currency.
People can accustom themselves to all kinds of unpleasantness and even grow fond of it, but the truth is that it is mental overload which might cause unnecessary errors.
If a Crown was an hour, a mite would be 7min and 30sec.
You could call 24 Crown and a Drown and 360 of those would be a Yawn.
Throw in 5 or 6 extra Drown every Yawn, and you'd add a Drown to the 4th, 6th, 7th, and 11th Shawn of the Yawn, but subtract two Drown from the second Yawn, if you're electing a president, and then only subtract one, cuz Merica!
I assume that is how people that are only familiar with metric view the imperial measurement system. 1/64, 1/32, 1/16, 1/8, 3/16, 1/4, 5/16, 3/8, 7/16, 1/2, 9/16, 5/8, 11/16, etc. for inches. 1 inch = 1/12 foot, 2 inches = 1/6 foot, etc. I use all of these so often on woodworking that it is super easy for me. I presume that same was for money in the pre-digital age.
> it's amazing to me that anyone ever got fluent with this.
Twelve (pence to the shilling) is actually quite a convenient way of denominating money. Twelve has more divisors than ten, which makes a lot of calculations easier. It wasn't so hard to learn the basics - 12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound; a child could do it. But working out 17.5% VAT on a transaction in decimal coinage isn't so much fun.
The first time I visited England when I was 19 the people I was visiting showed me all this, and consequently a lot of my cash was turned into "shrapnel".
Later I wanted to buy some vodka, and someone wanted chocolate milk, so imagine the look on the cashier's face as I pay for ONLY vodka and chocolate milk with spare change.
We had a get together with our international team this past summer, and I was shocked to learn from a Scottish colleague that some banks are authorized to print their own currency notes. I thought "That can't be right". Though this is historically what many banks throughout the world used to do. It just seemed totally crazy that a private corporation could distribute nationally accepted currency. What a weird, wild world we live in...
> Scottish banknotes are a funny thing because they're not issued by a central bank, and they're not technically legal tender ANYWHERE in the UK. Three retail banks (Bank of Scotland, Clydesdale Bank, and Royal Bank of Scotland) are permitted to print notes, and they're classified as promissory notes rather than legal tender. Go to the ATM of any of those banks, and you'll get their notes.
My favorite money has always been the guinea because it set the profit for middlemen. You would pay the auctioneer in guineas (21 shillings) and they would pay the seller of the item in pounds (20 shillings), giving the auctioneer a 4.75% commission.
A dollar is 10 shilling, or half a pound, and I believe the name goes back much further than the US dollar, to the time when various European precious metal coinages would have been recognized and converted.
The Australian dollar, and perhaps others, was set equal to half a British pound at the point when they obtained their own currency.
The South African rand was indeed also introduced as half a pound in 1961 (technically half a South African pound, but that had been equal to the pound sterling except 1931-1933)
This makes sense given the close history of language between the two and that pre-Euro, Ireland's currency was the Irish Pound or Punt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_pound
I'm a Brit who's lived in Finland (with the Euro) for 10+ years - I occasionally say quid instead of euro. Mostly when referring to an approximate amount - such and such cost a few quid, rather than a few euro.
A note on the guinea. IIRC, it was originally intended to be a gold one pound coin. However, the value of gold went up just when it was issued so it was revalued higher by adding the extra shilling. I imagine the extra prestige associated with it was mostly about it being gold.
I've variously heard it was a 5% commission for the groom, jockey, or auctioneer. If a horse won a 100 guinea prize, the owner conventionally got 100 pounds and someone else got 100 shillings in commission.
I don't know about this aspect, but horse sales typically involved this type of commission. The buyer would pay in guineas (or £1.05 times the nominal purchase price) and the seller would receive that number of pounds, with the extra going to the auctioneer.
I'm not sure if this system persists now, but it definitely lasted long past decimalization.
Before the Great War (WWI), Great Britain was rich, Great Britain completely dominated the financial world, Great Britain's Pound Sterling was the world's reserve currency ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency ), and the Pound Sterling was no more decimal than Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria was Japanese.
When you are the 900 pound gorilla, not only can you get away with all sorts of unique complexity - mites, farthings, groats, shillings, florins, crowns, pounds, guineas, etc. - but being quite conversant with your complexity is a point of pride for many foreigners, who wish to be seen as educated and sophisticated.
WWI might reasonably be described as a "no matter how hard it is, no matter how long it takes" suicide pact by Europe's greatest nations and nobles, to destroy their own positions and prestige in the world. They were quite successful in that.
Great Britain's post-WWI economic policy might be described as "keep saying 'Great', but don't think nor try too hard". Combine that with interest payments on their huge war debts, and the writing was on the wall.
Then came WWII. Before the U.S.A. stepped in to pay for things, national bankruptcy was at least as much a threat to "Great" Britain as the Nazi armies were. More than a year before that war ended, on 22 July 1944, Britain formally signed the Bretton Woods Agreement ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_System ) - which explicitly made the U.S. Dollar the world's reserve currency.
Post-WWII, "Great"-no-longer Britain's economic situation was grim. Rationing of food, for the general population, did not end until 4 July 1954.
Still, the funny old Pound Sterling currency system hung on. I mostly credit human memory. Brits born in 1895 would have adult memories of pre-WWI British Greatness, yet be only 70 years old in 1965.
Finally, 15 February 1971 was Decimal Day - when the cool old farthing/groat/shilling/etc. British Pound was converted to the dull, conformist "100 pence to the pound" modern system.
> WWI might reasonably be described as a "no matter how hard it is, no matter how long it takes" suicide pact by Europe's greatest nations and nobles, to destroy their own positions and prestige in the world.
You’re quite right about the Great War being a suicide pact, but I think it was far more democratic than you give it credit for. Previous wars between kings and/or aristocrats would have ended far sooner, but with the industry, finance and media landscape of the early 20th century the belligerents’ hands were tied by their own populaces. It was a complete and utter catastrophe, one whose aftershocks still reverberate.
Quite true about how democratic it was, and the diminished powers of the emperors, kings, and aristocrats...though I know enough older European history to have doubts about "would have ended far sooner". Their power wasn't so diminished because they'd proven so competent in the past.
Hmm...reading your comment again, I sense that similar reflections were behind Churchill's famous quote about democracy.
Nice summary. Tradition dies hard, especially in these isles - my old nan maintained that decimalisation was the greatest con ever perpetrated on the British people!
Judging from the date on the exchange rates quoted, the UK was still (just) in the EU when it was written. Regardless, the rest of the content is still current either way you interpret it.
It's correct to say visitors shouldn't deal with £50 notes if they can possibly help it, because they will generally struggle to pay for anything with them though..
Anything over a $20 bill has been hard to use in many/most stores for a very long time in the US (which seemingly at one point decided to freeze currency denominations in amber--see also penny--which I assume is permanent at this point as less and less cash gets used). But $100 bills at least were in pretty common use overseas. I still tend to carry some as backup cash.
£50 notes were popular for criminal transactions, and also they were widely forged; I don't know whether that's still the case, but I'm very reluctant to accept a £50 note. If a shopkeeper checks it and decides it's a forgery, they have to take it off me for nothing, and I'm down fifty nicker.
> Luckily for those who enjoy travelling to the UK, the pound sterling has been weak in recent years, dipping as low as $1.07 in late 2022. Even still, dollars buy a lot more than they used to in the UK, so it's a great time to be travelling and shopping at British businesses.
Dont delay, book your coronation fortnite holiday straight away and upload your hot pics to youtube!
This is your chance to be part of history, captured in 8K definition by the BBC, as you line the route waving your Union flags, doffing your top hat to his majesty as he drives past you or taking a curtsey if dressed up as the fairer sex, which some men like Grayson Perry have been known to do. We'll take dictators, we'll take Jimmy Saville, we dont care as long as you spend lots of money when over here!
Take part in street parties, tell us where you are from and get to rub shoulders with cockney geezer's that sound like they are straight out of a Mary Poppins adaption, Cor Blimey Guvnor, steady on, or something like Guy Ritchie's Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
There's a Ronnie Pickering in every town, and if he's not driving you around the bend, you'll find him in the nearest pub.
Take in a football match, there is a Gordon Parmar Hill aka The Wealdstone Raider in every club waiting to oblige you in conversation and vocabulary a five year could understand, great for those people who want to practice their English skills on the cheap.
Or maybe you'd like to hunt some of the world famous Haggis in the wee hills of Scotland, its the only endangered species in the world not on the endangered species list, which some think is not offally fair game.
Find out who your Scottish relatives were and kit yourself out in the family tartan whilst tasting a wee dram of whiskey from the thousands on offer?
Everyone has Scottish descendants, even Donald Trump!
Either way, the country is broke, and we are selling the crown jewels, so come to the UK and give us your money, its all hands on deck.
Decimalisation was just a dignified slight of hand way to cover up a hyper inflationary currency collapse from the oldest currency in the world.
Ignore the news that everything costs so much here especially food and heating, we are all doing fine, I'm hoping to have defrosted and come out of hibernation and be able to move in time for the coronation but at least I'm putting Stephen Hawkins speak and spell to good use communicating with the world.
Remember Global Warming lowers your heating bills, so jump on a plane, and jet into the UK for a fortnight long holiday, taking in the best of British.
If you fancy an unusual souvenir, we have bridges for sale, telephone boxes, and post boxes. They'll make the perfect metals investment to hand down to your kids, whilst reminding yourself of what a good time you had when you come to witness a country going mad, putting aside their differences, and showing respect to the Crown.
This once in a lifetime event hinges on you attending in person, so all the press will be gushing their Levity, not drawing attention to the Age of Empires, we've all moved on from that, although Charles has been watching too much Dr Who and is stuck in a time vortex from another world.
So dont delay, there will be dignitaries and politicians from around the world in attendance, it will be the best walking talking Madam Tussaud's show you'll ever see. You'll be bumping into more stars than you can see at the London Planetarium, more stars than the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where you can actually take part in time itself!
But all these rare events only happen during the week before and week after the crowning of a monarch, something many countries got rid of because they thought best.
And if you are really lucky, you'll find many people selling their souvenir quids and shillings that they have had tucked away safely down the back of their sofa. The money is worthless, but your kids or grand kids, could melt them down in years to come for the precious metal content, or keep them as a souvenir before cryptocurrency's took over the world.
Remember London is the only Govt backed crypto currency laundromat in the world!
So come and invade for two weeks only, the Empire that gave you English before the Americans bastardised it, and take part in the world's biggest fancy dress party!
[0] https://wikiless.org/wiki/Reuleaux_polygon?lang=en