The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
A 50p costs how much?
Well, I hope you’ve all rushed out and bought yourselves a piggy bank of some sort. Not only to salt away some paltry small change in the vague hope that there might be just enough to spend on some strong drink to get you through having to listen to explanations and excuses on every subject from mythical/actual Irish borders to equally mythical/actual Scottish visas and (if the current policy on immigration is to be believed) mythical/actual people doing actual, non-mythical jobs like nursing, carpentry and fruit-picking.
No, sirree. You’ll need that little porcelain porker to house the vast number of commemorative Brexit 50p pieces that are sure to come your way now that said Brexit, to paraphrase the prime minister, has “got done”. (It’s officially tonight, by the way, so you don’t miss it, in case you want to ring a few bells or indulge in a few bongs. Like a kind of low-grade Hogmanay…)
Me, I think it’s highly apt that the Brexit 50p piece has appeared (obviously levelling up, as Mr Johnson is so fond of claiming will happen under his benevolent rule, to a higher grade coin wasn’t an option) at a time when it is claimed that fewer and fewer of us are actually using cash. Which is just as well, as it appears that the Get Ready for Brexit campaign (costing £46 million – that, by my count, is 92 million 50 pences) has resulted in nothing continuing to happen, right up to the wire. Or the border, depending on where you live. There might even be a note of irony there. Or perhaps a coin of irony. Please yourselves.
Of course, the cynics among us are already pointing out that the face value of this coin is liable to plummet over the next while, anyway. And if you are truly dedicated you could fork out up to a grand for a special edition gold effort. But as someone who has one or two previous pieces of much less precious metal secreted in a gravy tin somewhere – thank you Sir Winston Churchill and the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales – I am here to tell you they are worth beggar all. I’ve checked.
And it would seem that, generally, commemorative coins don’t have to be accepted by banks, although the Post Office (if you can find one) may just take them out of the kindness of its heart.
If you do, however, happen across a Brexit one that escaped the fiery furnace of recycling and has March 29 2019 or October 31 2019 on it, hang on like grim death as it may yet prove to be your pension. Mistakes are, literally, costly.
Better still is the Peter Rabbit release of 2016 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Beatrix Potter – worth into four figures and counting, apparently. I suppose we should be grateful, given the current currency, that it wasn’t Mickey Mouse…
Warm tributes
Many years ago, not long after I joined this august newspaper, I spent some time as the shadowy figure behind what was then known as the Fiona Column (Fiona being the coverall name for a set of “lady reporters” who went out to talk to people about “social” subjects).
It was actually my ambition to find someone called Fiona Column and interview her. Unlikely, but when the word count went up and the Fiona Column became the Fiona Page, I did think I might be in with a bit more of a realistic chance of finding an eponymous interviewee. But no.
Any road up, apart from people who were getting married, organising charity dos and collecting teapots, I was often sent to chat informally to those making some kind of a mark in Courier Country, especially if they were well known.
Back in 1988, one such was the newlyelected Lord Rector of St Andrews University – one Nicholas Parsons.
His election to this post might have come as a bit of a surprise to many, especially as other names in the frame (though not all on the ballot paper) included Glenda Jackson and Auberon Waugh, but if anyone thought it was a snigger-worthy mickey-take, how wrong they were.
He put in the time and effort during his three-year tenure and on the occasion I spoke to him, flanked as he was by two rather embarrassedlooking students, he gave me an hour of his time, was gracious and amusing and interested in everything that was going on around him. He was also immaculately dressed and immaculately well-mannered, as many of this week’s warm tributes attest.
He was obviously extremely sharp but he was also very kind and took trouble to put others at their ease.
An hour out of a career of the length and breadth that he enjoyed isn’t much to go by but reading about him this week, after his death at the age of 96, that hour seems to me to sum up exactly what he was about. I can’t remember what I wrote. But I hope I did him justice.
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I think it’s highly apt that the Brexit 50p has appeared