Tag Archives: Cowper

Tales from a Cold Room

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It was the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire meeting on Monday night. Twelve middle-aged men huddled in our outdoor coats, listening to a wild-eyes enthusiast talking about the Morgan Dollar. Thanks to a combination of cold, facts and hunger I gradually retreated into a small ball and started losing the will to live.

To sum up the talk the Morgan Dollar, an American icon, was designed by George Morgan, an Englishman, and minted from 1878-1904 and again in 1921. It is a big coin and was produced in the early days of mass-production in five American Mints. This meant that the dies used for striking the coins wore out, were accidentally damaged, were re-cut or repaired and were used in different combinations. Coin collectors have been cataloguing varieties of dollar, caused by these imperfections, which are known as VAMS (from Van Allen and Mallis, the two leaders of the hobby). It is a hobby for people with an eye for detail and (let’s call a spade a spade) too much time on their hands. Normal collectors are a bit strange, I admit, but this is taking collecting one step beyond.

Still, it’s nice to see an enthusiast at work, even if it would have been more relaxing to have had less detail. Detail is for the real enthusiast. Dabblers like me need a bit more explanation and would have liked to have heard more about his hunt for coins rather than the hundreds of facts he threw at us.

All this, of course, reminds me that there is just one more meeting until I give my talk on medallions and the history of the 20th Century. There is a lot to sort out before then, including how to use the Open Office Presentation software, and whether it’s going to work on the screen in the meeting room. Once that is done I can concentrate on avoiding the faults I am so keen to mention when reviewing the talks given by others.

However, as the poet Cowper reminds us in the Olney Hymns, God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform. I will be talking about that, because one of the medallions in the collection relates to Cowper and Olney. I’mm hoping that by some sort of magic a random collection of medals and facts becomes a wonder of numismatic entertainment.

Royal Wedding Medallion 1947 Reverse

Royal Wedding Medallion 1947 Reverse

Day 64

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Here I am, firmly in the territory of the insomniac, and wondering what to say. I have decided to finish with the numbered titles because, as Tootlepedal said, it does tend to make you more aware of the passing time. However, I confess that tonight, I will be glad just to slap a number on it and go to bed.

I had a disturbed night lat night, a strange dream and, after returning from work, an evening of intermittent napping in my chair. As a result, I wasn’t tired at bedtime.

This evening I did some research on poetry magazines, took my methotrexate (ten tiny tablets once a week) and began to catalogue my medallion collection.

The irony of methotrexate, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is that they are very fiddly tablets, not much bigger than the head of a dress-making pin. I take them for arthritis, which even with the drugs, still makes my fingers inconveniently stiff. You would have thought that tablets to treat a condition that causes such a loss of manual dexterity would be big, rather than tiny. Normally they make things, like print and keys, bigger for us old folk.

The medallion collection is intended to be 100 in number, with one for every year from 1900 to 2000, which is actually 101. I decided on that because there are always such arguments about when centuries begin and end. The 20th century actually started on January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000. However, we all celebrated the new millennium on December 31, 1999. I could do the right thing, start it at the year 1901 and argue with people about it for years to come. Or I can start it in 1900 and explain to the few people who notice, that I want a quiet life more than I want to be 100% accurate.

The medal for 1900 commemorates the centenary of the death of poet William Cowper. I now know a lot more about him than I did this afternoon, which shows how useful numismatics is as a hobby. I now know, for instance, that I have been pronouncing his name wrong. It’s pronounced Cooper.