A Red Admiral this morning as I left for work, a Large White when I got home, then a grasshopper by my feet. This isn’t a bad selection of wildlife for a sun-blasted patch of concrete slabs and weeds. I saw several more butterflies as I sat watching TV in the evening. What puzzles me is where grasshoppers come from. Butterflies fly in, but how does a grasshopper end up in my front garden, which is not, I feel, an attractive spot compared to the average meadow,

Grasshoppers

We bought several lots of stuff in the morning, sent five parcels off and then concluded a deal on a large collection. Normally people tell us they have a “large collection” or a “ton” of old coins or a “box of coins” and by the time they get to us they have become a “small accumulation”, a couple of kilos of coins or a handful of coins. In this case, when someone arranged to bring a large collection in o0n Thursday, it really was  a large collection. It had been put together with a plan and it filled six large boxes. At the moment there is little room to move in the shop.

At one time we actually had three customers in the shop this afternoon, which was good, as we need to take some money to  make up for what we spent. Business is still slow and hasn’t really picked up to pre-lockdown levels. We are thinking that the move to card payments that took place during lockdown may have stopped people looking through their change.

With no change to look through, interest in coin collecting declined. It’s just a theory, but it seems logical.

Global warming, war, pandemic, cost of living crisis . . .

. . . and our theory about the lack of coin collectors hinges on the declining availability of 50p coins.

Stephen Hawking 50p