100 YEARS OLD AND STILL TAKES CARE OF HIS PENNIES...

IAM growing increasingly concerned about where my pounds have gone. It is now three weeks since the new pound coins were released and the nearest I have come to owning one was being allowed to view a coin shown to me by a friend.

I am assured that some half a billion new pound coins have been issued, so where have mine got to? The current UK population is around 65.4 million. So half a billion coins works out at 7.65 each. Of course, one cannot expect to be given exactly 7.65 coins. That would be silly and I assumed that I would be given the choice between seven and eight coins, accompanied by 65p in loose change in the case of the former or a request for 35p change if the latter was preferred. Indeed, I have been waiting by the front door for the past three weeks with 35p in my hand to enable a quick transaction, but there has been no sign of an emissary from the Royal Mint or, in the event of Royal Mail being used, a postman.

The old pound coins will, of course, be phased out until all old coins have been replaced by new ones. Yet there were last year 1.67 billion pound coins in circulation which works out at 25.54 each. That’s 25 pound coins, one 50p and two 2p coins.

I don’t know who’s been running this show, but I just had a rummage in my pockets for pound coins and can’t find more than three of them. Even looking in the pockets of old coats and jackets and down the back of the sofa has failed to reveal any more.

I’m doing no better with the other coins either. There are 479 million £2 coins in circulation, 1,053 million 50p coins, 3,004 million 20p, 1,713 million 10p, 4,075 million 5-pences, 6,714 million twopences and 11,430 million pennies. To give me my fair share, I should have at seven two pound coins, 16 50-pence, 45 20-pences, 26 10-pences, 62 5-pences, 102 twopences and 174 pennies. That adds up to over £65 in loose change which, by my calculations, would weigh around 2.4 kilograms, or over 5lb. How can all that money have gone missing? I’m ready to take care of the pennies but nobody’s looking after my pounds.

Perhaps I am being too critical. It must be a terrible chore for some poor postman or Royal Mint official to have to lug around all those coins to be shared among the population. The new £1 coins alone, even though their weight has gone down from 9.5gm to 8.75gm each, weigh about 14,600 tonnes. That’s equal to about 2,000 large-sized African elephants, which I feel sure would make a pretty huge dent in the average postbag.

Bearing all that in mind, I don’t want to be unreasonable about this or to impose too huge a strain on the Royal Mail, the Royal Mint or any other of Her Majesty’s servants, so I’d like to inform the Chancellor (for I assume he’s the one who is in charge of this sort of thing) that I’ll be ready to have my share of the coins transferred to my bank account electronically.

And that will solve it, apart from the little matter of the £73,198million in banknotes in circulation of which my share is £1,119. I look forward to your prompt remittance.