Julia is on duty providing water and encouragement at the Robin Hood Marathon. And that was how I ended up with my alarm set for 6.30 this morning. I don’t even get up at that time when I have to go to work. To add to my misery, some of the roads were already closed by 7.30 and I got lost in the road system returning from dropping her off. This involved driving along a road reserved for buses and taxis (it’s not a good system around the railway station at the best of times) and I am now waiting to see if I get a ticket in the post later in the week. The council can’t organise bin collections, road signs or recycling properly but they do have  top class system of cameras which they use for fining motorists.

I believe my words may have more dramatic impact if I leave it there rather than dwell on the evils of local government.

The bet thing I can say is that it is probably better than local anarchy as a way of running the city.

First job of the morning after returning home was to set up my laptop on my normal computer table. I have already been productive. The current set-up, with my PC mouse and keyboard plugged into the USB ports of my laptop, is hardly sophisticated, but it is much easier to use. The only problem is that the screen now appears minute compared to the normal screen. I’m not sure what I can do about that. It isn’t really that mush smaller than the other, so I may just stand it on a couple of books to raise it to a better level.In fact I just did that, and it is much better once it is raised into my eyeline.

The coin is a shilling of Charles I. The equivalent coin of Charles III will be made by machine and will be a lot less interesting and impressive. The hammered coins of Charles I were produced by putting a silver blank between two dies and hitting the top one with a hammer. There were experiments with machinery, starting in 1561, but milled coins (as they were called) were slower and harder to make and it was 1662 (just after the restoration of Charles II) before all coins were milled. The Newark Siege coin I showed a few weeks ago doesn’t look quite so bad when you look at the standard coinage of the time, does it?