Tag Archives: rare coin

Plans and Reflections

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Dead tree in the lake

It was much the same today as it was yesterday. Temperatures were up a bit, and by the time I went out the streets were already emptying out. Not that it was too hot to be out, just that it was warm and not particularly attractive for outdoor activity. I was in the shop for about an hour and a half (it’s hard to break old habits) and nobody else came in. They had bought in a rare token this morning, an early 19th Century silver shilling designed by an entrepreneur to be taken into use by pubs.

At that time we had a shortage of small silver coins and private enterprise stepped in to fill the gap. However, with only one more example to be found on the internet (sold in auction 12 years ago) it’s clear that the idea did not take off. And that – 2 examples to be found in 12 years – is the definition of a “rare coin”.

I was going through junk boxes looking for things suitable for being the basis of a new group of articles, but they have been gone through so well that there was little of merit to pick out.

Tree cutting on the island.

The groceries just arrived and to be fair to TESCO I got everything I ordered this week. They were also on time. When it works, it’s a brilliant system, but it does show just how fragile our food supply can be, even in what we think of as a prosperous and well-organised country.

I once spent three days in Tanzania. We had butter rationing at breakfast, the electricity used to go off in the afternoon and the hotel doorman/security guard was armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. The roads were amazing. In just one journey we had the front passenger door of the car flt open as we went round a bend and had to avoid a lorry that was coming backwards downhill, having insufficient power to get up the hill and not enough brakes to hold it when it stopped. We managed to avoid further trouble by travelling with the manager in charge of the office – part of his contract specified he got a new car every three years. After three years the lack of proper spares and care meant it needed replacing.

It was an interesting insight into the daily struggles people had, and the hierarchy of struggle (even an unreliable car was beyond the dreams of most people).

I had some photos with reflections, so I thought I’d use them.

Reflected sunrise, Nottingham

Day 74

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On reaching home (after a journey featuring many red lights – I am definitely paying for my satisfaction at so many greens last week) – I started on pizza. Or, to be accurate, I started slicing vegetables for the topping – all the hard work had been done by the supermarket, who had provided the bases in a convenient, though ecologically disastrous, plastic bag.

Green peppers, spring onions, tomatoes, mushrooms and bacon – the theme being “oddments I found in the fridge”. I then made a green salad consisting of ten sorts of vegetable-based food source. Rocket (arugula), spinach, coriander (cilantro), pumpkin seeds, olives, tomatoes, spring onions, celery, cucumber and pomegranate seeds. I’m fairly sure that even the most desperate counter would not include sesame oil and lime juice, though I did add some. Still not sure if flour in the pizza base counts, though I’ve already covered it by eating sandwiches if it does. If you can count oatmeal in porridge, wheat flour in bread should count.

When Julia eventually returned home, after yet another unsatisfactory staff meeting, I popped the pizza in the oven and we had hot, nutritious food. If only all our meals were this good, fresh and timely. I would add “additive free” but sadly the tomato sauce was from a jar and the pizza bases were baked by a factory, so this probably isn’t true.

We had two excited men in the shop. They had a 1921 Gorge V penny which, according to eBay, is worth £41,000. That merely, of course, means that some idiot/con man/money launderer has put a penny up for sale at £41,000. It hasn’t sold and it isn’t worth that, but that’s not what people see when they read the story. We must have had a dozen calls this week on the same theme.

They wouldn’t believe the shop owner that it wasn’t valuable, and they wouldn’t leave, so to get rid of them he went through a bag of pennies and gave them one with the identical date. At that point you could see it dawning on them that people just don’t give you a coin if it really is worth £41,000. I suppose you could say that the penny dropped . . .

(I have included a link to the dictionary as I’m not sure if that is an American expression or not).

Coins in the picture are half-pennies of Elizabeth II. They were the first pre-decimal coins I found when looking for George V pennies. They aren’t rare either, so I thought it would do.

A Very Annoying Woman

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It’s tempting to say today was more of the same…more of the same…

Tedium echoes down the empty hallways of my life…

In fact there was slightly more pressure than a normal day because I have a leisurely breakfast with Julia on Saturdays and generally get to work with minutes to spare, rather than the normal hour I get when dropping her off at work and going to work from there.

We had more parcels than usual today, and quite a few phone calls, including one from a woman who said she had “done the research on the internet” because she “wasn’t stupid”.

The coin in question is the Sherlock Holmes 50p, which has just been released.We have 200 in stock and charge £3 each. She says they are very rare, and her implication was that I was lying to her in order to gain pecuniary advantage by deception (she didn’t actually use those words, but that was what her tone implied).

Unfortunately, when I checked after she put the phone down, the mintage figure of 210,000 she gave did not apply to this coin but to the famous Kew Garden 50p, the one they all want. We buy several of them every month, pay good money for them and sell them for around £100. That’s the only one that makes three figures. Most 50p coins, even in mint condition, only make £3.

The Royal Mint won’t even release the mintage figures for a year or two, so we won’t know what the figure is. Here are the figures up to 2017. They haven’t released the 2018 figures yet, and certainly not the 2019 figures.

I checked on the internet myself, and in an article comparing Kew Gardens and Sherlock Holmes they said the Kew mintage was 210,000. That’s what happens when greed and stupidity meet the Internet – false hopes, shoddy research and an outpouring of ignorance.

Just for the record, because I’m still annoyed about it, despite what she said, she didn’t really do any research worthy of the name, and she IS stupid.

After that I put some more School Attendance medals on eBay, went home, took some blurred photos of Painted Ladies in the garden and carried on with my nightly routine of napping, eating and blogging.

I did get a pointless answer on Pointless Celebrities (Burt Lancaster in Field of Dreams) then wondered why there has never been a decent film about cricket. To say it’s one of our national games, and it altered the course of one of our royal dynasties, it’s made little impact in books and films. Raffles was a cricket player, but that’s as close as we get.

If we could make a film like Field of Dreams about cricket I’m sure the nation would return to normal after all this Brexit nonsense and electing a clown as Prime Minister. Whether we stay or go, we need to return to a state of affairs where politicians at least put up some sort of pretence of being sensible and running things properly.

The Peacock is from our visit to Gigrin Farm as few years ago, as is the picture of kites. I feel a bit like that peacock, constantly attacking the mirror, though I’m constantly attacking life rather than a reflection.

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Red Kites at Gigrin Farm