Hymn: Money
Archdruid: Coor it's cold enough to freeze yer tuppenies.
All: Why are you pretending to be a Cockney? And failing so badly?
Archdruid: It's how they all spoke in the 70s.
All: All?
Archdruid: All.
All: Name them?
Archdruid: Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Babs Windsor...
All: You've confused the Carry On films with history again.
Archdruid: Anyone lend us half a dollar?
Burton: Got two bob.
Marston Moretaine: And a tanner.
Archdruid: Can you get him back to work? That new yurt's not gonna cure itself.
Boring Bill: Ah, the good old LSD. The Gold Standard. Remember you'd get 4 and fourpence farthing on a Friday, have a night out, fish and chips and still enough for the taxi home.
Archdruid: Bill, you weren't born till 1974.
Boring Bill: We'd beat the Germans in another war, hammer the Aussies at cricket. You could leave your house unlocked and when you came back the burglars had done some cleaning for you and picked up a pint of jellied eels from Castle's.
Archdruid: BILL YOU WEREN'T BORN
Boring Bill: The telly stopped at 9 o 'clock. Then we'd all stand to salute the National Anthem. And you couldn't go to bed till the white dot had completely disappeared.
Archdruid: Someone carry him off.
Jacob Ree Smugg of Smugg Hall: Surely it is not enough merely to go back to 1971. A forward-looking England would be one where trade was conducted in groats and crowns. The handsome young squire of, for instance, a Somerset village would scatter largesse from his jalopy to the deserving starving poor, before attending the local magistrate's sessions to arrange a witch ducking for the local crone. Illnesses were taken on the chin. Especially fossy jaw.
Boring Bill: And now we're free from Europe we can go back to the good old pounds shillings and pence! Up yours, Delors!
Archdruid: Here, Bill. Lend us two guineas, a sov and three and six?
Boring Bill: Wot?
Archdruid: So let us go forth into the world, regretting we don't still have ha'pennies.
All: We don't even use cash.
Hymn: Price Tag
The other bonus of decimalisation was that the old Long Division in schools was vastly simplified when doing sums that involved £sp. All that remembering £1-240 pence, or 20 Shillings and all of those pence to a shilling. Suddenly, everything was based on units of 10, so much easier to divide.
ReplyDelete... as long as you only want to divide by 2, 5, 10, 20 or 50. A proper Pound could be divided exactly by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 60, 80, 120.
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