Funny money for the Lakes?

Pretty pounds?

A new currency, exclusive to the Lake District, is set to hit the tills on the 1st of May.

£2 million worth has been printed, and it can be ‘purchased’ for the equivalent amount in sterling. The idea behind the scheme is for visitors to the area to use the money within the Lakes, whilst enjoying their time in the area. Only local businesses will accept it, so it’s use will support local communities.

The Lake District National Park Authority is certainly banking on the Lake District lolly being a boon for the area – they’ve invested £30,000 in the project.

The bank notes are colourful, featuring attractive designs of local luminaries such as Beatrix Potter, Alfred Wainwright and living legend Joss Naylor, along with the distinctive scenery of the area – by which I mean mountains and lakes, not sheep and rain.

It’s likely to be a hit with collectors, keen to swell their bulging bank-note stashes. It seems to have been broadly welcomed by local businesses too, with an impressive list of shops, restaurants and cafes signed-up and ready to accept the wonga in Windermere and the bread in Bowness, along with many other locations.

The man behind the Lake District Currency project is called Ken Royall. I’m presuming all the new notes are in pristine condition. Royall mint.

Yes, I did write this entire article so I could use that.

This post first appeared as the second piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 27th of April 2018. The only change to the title when it was printed was expanding "Lakes" to "Lake District".

Whoops. Busy catching up on other stuff this last week, so didn't get round to posting this immediately after it was published. Sorry!

Took me a while to come up with that 'Royall mint' joke. I'm still not convinced it was worth it...

(CD A-Z: Music of the Millennium 2 - I'm into the 'various artists' zone now...)

Comments

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog