1975, when my life was saucier

THE ghost of John Noakes haunts me.

I was rooting about in the shed for something that would help me in some task or other that I, or someone close to me, for some reason, considered worth doing, when I found a brown disc.

A coin, but so neglected and discoloured it was impossible to tell what kind.

Probably not a gold sovereign or a silver Roman denarius – unless it had worked its way up from the earth and forced its way through the flagstones in the years since I assembled the shed following the great B&Q sale of 2001.

On the other hand, I’ve heard tales of old coins being found in bags of compost and sheltering bags of compost is, apparently, the shed’s main purpose in life.

So it might have been a Victorian penny, an Edward VII shilling, even a 1966 World Cup commemorative Nobby Stiles from Shoot magazine.

Maybe not valuable, but interesting. Who knew? Well, Noakesy knew. You see, apart from the strange fact that foil milk bottle tops could be exchanged for guide dogs and coat hangers turned into candlebearing fire-risk Christmas

I’m sophisticated now. I couldn’t find any bottles of HP

decorations, the lesson I learned from years of watching Blue Peter was coins could be cleaned by dunking them in brown sauce.

For a spell in the late ’60s my father couldn’t understand why the HP he deployed to destroy the flavour of my mother’s cooking didn’t last as long as it used to.

It was because I had saucers filled with it all round the house, soaking old ha’pennies back to their coppery origins.

I’m more sophisticated now, so I couldn’t find any HP in the house, but there was some Worcestershire sauce. It’s brown – it’s probably the Waitrose version of HP.

So I dunked and rubbed the coin and – lo! – a 2p piece emerged from 1975. The year I sat my Highers and went camping, eating macaroni cheese garnished with midges by Loch Lomond.

I wallowed in nostalgia and sauce-scented fingers. Then my wife pointed out the dollop of Worcestershire I’d so cavalierly sploshed into a saucer was worth much more than 2p.

In fact, the whole bottle probably contained a silver doubloon’s worth.

But then, there’s more to life than money. There’s sauce, too.