Pennies for our thoughts!

THERE’S talk of axing our piddling metric penny as, apparently, it’s of no further monetary use. I can’t say I’ll mourn its loss for we of the long teeth and greying hair brigade can tell a very different story of the old imperial penny we knew and cherished way back in our young day.

For a start it was not the smallest coin in existence – that honour belonged to the farthing. You got four of them to a penny and, although you’d not get much for it, you could have spent it too!

We’d have happily paid someone a penny for their thoughts and it also had the power to open a locked door, if you needed a pee that is.

But as a child in the old St Ann’s, it had real spending power and we kids would run our little legs off to earn just one and even a couple of miles for threepence!

Yet sometimes we’d feel dutybound to give it to our mam for it could buy a much-needed measure of gas or electricity. Without the proverbial penny to her name for the meters, mam could only cook in the coal-fuelled fireside oven and, once electricity came our way, without a penny for the meter, the radio was useless and we could only sit in silence and darkness but for the flickering firelight.

But giving that coin up after running an errand wasn’t easy for it would buy us kids a massive colour-changing gobstopper, big enough to allow my special friends to have a suck and which you got back in time to chew on the caraway seed at the very end of the very last delicious lick.

This large mucky-looking coin could buy a bus ticket from one end of the city to the other; get a bottle of milk in school, a packet of broken biscuits or a bag of

Smiths crisps on the way home, but you had to be careful and not eat the blue one!

Our dad told us how when people died, they had their eyes weighted down with pennies as it was believed to help the dead on their way by paying the “ferry keeper”. But the best penny of all was the one that we got in the very toe of our Christmas stocking, which Dad had specially shined up in brown sauce to look like new.

Back then, even empty bottles were of value and could be returned to the shop for a penny rebate on them.

A hoarder by nature, I still have a couple of hundred of those old pennies with several crowned heads on them and I still keep them...lest I forget just how important they once were.

I won’t bother to keep their jumped-up worthless pretenders!

Sophie, 27, from Littlehampton, contacted Samaritans while struggling with depression:

“Last year I went through a dark patch where I couldn’t see a way out from under the black cloud that followed me around everywhere.

“I was ashamed.

I felt weak and helpless so I reached out to Samaritans. I just wanted the pain I was feeling to stop. It was a pretty dark time, and I couldn’t see any way out – I felt overwhelmed with every emotion and yet felt nothing at all.

“I emailed Samaritans to start with, and when things got worse I phoned. Just having someone listen to me in my hour of need was lifesaving.

“I am in a better frame of mind now because I run regularly – I love the buzz that I get. When the endorphins are pumping through your body, you feel unstoppable, and that you can achieve anything if you put your mind to it. I still get days or periods when I feel low, but I know that it is temporary. During these times I try to be kind to myself, reach out to family and friends for support or take some time out to rest.

“The help I got from Samaritans gave me my life back and I will be forever thankful. I’m training to be a listening volunteer with my local branch, and if I can do for one person what they did for me then I will be over the moon.”