Sound as a pound

Bloody crap counterfeit £1 - it isn't even round.

Have you spent all your old one pound coins yet? No? Best go on a spending spree in PoundUniverse, then – you’ve got six months left...

Launched last week, the new, 12-sided, one pound coins are out there, somewhere... even if they haven’t migrated this far North-West yet.

Packed with hard-to-forge features such as micro lettering (roughly the size of the print used for apologies in the Daily Mail) and an image that works like a hologram, this bi-metallic invader will have seem off the dull old round pound before Halloween get all pumpkin-y in your face.

It has some undisclosed hidden security features as well – too secret to mention. I can exclusively reveal that, if you play it backwards at 33rpm (which you obviously would, if you were trying to copy it) it emits a distress signal that can only be heard by specially trained sharks. If you’re a wannabe forger, stay out of the water.

Your out of date quids will only be of value after mid-October if you book an appointment with Phillip Hammond and sing him all of Simply Red’s Greatest Hits, unaccompanied (except “Money’s Too Tight To mention” – he doesn’t like that, for some reason), and throw yourself upon his mercy.

So dig down the back of the sofa, empty that jar and prise open the piggy bank – it’s time to splash the old-school cash! As if that wasn’t bad enough, any paper £5 notes you’ve got cluttering up the place need to have been spent by the 5th of May.

I’ll be accepting donations in either denomination right up until the deadline. I’ve got an expensive floral shirt and cappuccino addiction to feed. Please give generously.

To further confuse the easily befuddled, the current paper tenner will also get plastic surgery in September. At least the £20 note is safe until 2020, and £50s are rarer than rocking horse poo anyway.

I remember a comedian (not sure which one) once telling the tale of overhearing two old ladies on a bus bemoaning the changeover to decimal coinage, and all the confusion it would cause. One said to the other something along the lines of “I wish they’d wait until all us old people have died before they muck about with the coins”.

True or not, I’m sympathetic. Somewhere in my office (the damp room behind the toilet with a 40w light bulb where dreams go to die and this column gets typed) there’s a £1 note, a tattered remnant of the last time the humble quid got a makeover.

It was that long ago, Tiffany and Enya were having number one singles and three of the little green bank notes would have got you a pint, a packet of fags and still left enough change for a bag of pork scratchings and a couple of goes on the pub Space Invaders machine.

Come to think of it, that was pretty much my standard Saturday night out. God bless inflation, eh?

In for a penny...

This post first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 7th of April, 2017.  The version used on their website was re-titled as 'All change for the pound', whilst the print edition became 'It's all change in pound land'.  

Due to impending holiday, this one was written and submitted a full week before it appeared in the paper. I actually got my hands on a new coin on Thursday, but only after asking if they had one in a Post Office whilst buying stamps - I haven't actually had one in change anywhere yet, although the rural Yorkshire Dales was probably not high on the list of places you'd expect to see them first.

On the basis that one shop's till was an old ice cream tub, we were probably lucky that they had moved on to coins from shiny stones.

Quite enjoyed my reminiscing for the cost of things in the 80s. Ah, happy days...

(CD A-Z: Still that Mike Oldfield "Incantations" CD, but as it's the 2011 deluxe remaster, I'm now on disc 2's curios, including his William Tell Overture.)